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By Root 397 0

to tiny speakers that I stuck in my ears like hearing aids. When I was acting, I turned the tape recorder on and off with a remote hand switch, listened to my voice and repeated the lines simultaneously in the same way that speeches are translated into different languages at the UN. It took a little practice, but it wasn’t hard, and because the earphones were small and hidden, audiences didn’t know the difference. Subsequently I came up with a still better system: instead of a tape recorder, I hid a microphone under my clothes over my chest, put a two-way radio in the small of my back, and taped sending and receiving antennas on my legs. From about a hundred yards offstage, Caroline Barrett, who succeeded Alice as my assistant, now reads my lines to me into a microphone. As she speaks, I hear them in my earphones and repeat them. Since she also has a two-way radio, Caroline can hear my voice, as well as the voices of the other actors in the scene, and simply follows the script line by line. When I repeat the lines simultaneously, the effect is one of spontaneity.

People often say that an actor “plays” a character well, but that’s an amateurish notion. Developing a characterization is not merely a matter of putting on makeup and a costume and stuffing Kleenex in your mouth. That’s what actors used to do, and then called it a characterization. In acting everything comes out of what you are or some aspect of who you are. Everything is a part of your experience. We all have a spectrum of emotions in us. It is a broad one, and it’s the actor’s job to reach into this assortment of emotions and experience the ones that are appropriate for his character and the story. Through practice and experience, I learned how to put myself into different moods and states of mind by thinking about things that made me laugh or be angry, sad or outraged; I developed a mental technique that allowed me to address certain parts of myself, select an emotion and send something akin to an electrical impulse from my brain to my body that enabled me to experience the emotion. If I had to feel worried, I’d think about something that worried me; if I was supposed to laugh, I thought about something that was hilarious.

Sometimes, however, I had to experience an emotion I hadn’t felt, like the reaction to dying; then I just had to imagine it. At the end of The Young Lions, I was shot fatally in the face. It was a wound, I decided, that would cause my blood to flow out of my brain, and that was how I would die. I imagined how I would be affected by blood suddenly draining out of my brain: I’d feel energy ebbing out of me, then for an instant realize that I was mortally wounded and that my life was over—all this within a few seconds. In the death scene in Mutiny on the Bounty, I wanted to appear to be in shock from having been fatally burned. I asked the crew to make a lot of ice; then I lay on top of it until my body was chilled and I was shivering and shaking and my teeth were chattering. While my body was responding physically to the cold, I also thought about how much I loved the Tahitian woman I had fallen for, what it was about her that I loved, and then about the pain, amazement and surprise of dying.

The bed scene in The Men also taught me to save my performance for the close-up, which usually comes at the end of the day. In a long shot you don’t have to worry much about getting your emotions right; the physical action is what counts. The camera is so far away that it won’t see the emotions you’re supposed to experience, though I learned that it’s always wise to check what’s behind you; in a scene with a busy background, audiences can easily lose you, so you have to do something to help them focus on you.

In a medium shot, your body language and gesticulations become more important, though you have to turn up your emotions a little. But it’s in the close-up that you really crank it up. The acting you do there is best conveyed by thinking, because if you’re thinking right, it will show. If you’re not thinking right, if you’re busy acting, you’re