Brando_ Songs My Mother Taught Me - Marlon Brando [77]
A lot of actors are credited with great performances that really weren’t extraordinary because the audience simply was moved by a well-written story and the situation facing a character. As I’ve already said, Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront is a good example of this. I was moved by The Elephant Man, in which John Hurt portrayed a man in Victorian England who was afflicted by a horrible, disfiguring disease and was heckled and ridiculed by strangers. But as the story evolved, his humanity was revealed and he became every member of the audience who ever maintained dignity in the face of hardship or abuse. When I saw the picture, I cried because I was touched. John Hurt is a very good actor, and has proved it in several parts, including Caligula in the television production of I, Claudius, in which he was brilliant. But his role in The Elephant Man was one of those actor-proof parts and he just couldn’t miss.
Still, the reverse is often true: sometimes actors are given a nearly impossible challenge because a story is poorly written or not realistic, and when they do a good job, they don’t get the credit they deserve. I’ve seen many great performances go unrecognized because audiences don’t realize how difficult they were.
Of course, different actors apply different techniques to attain their goals. Laurence Olivier is an example. After the sun set on the British Empire, England began to lose touch with Shakespeare and the great traditions of the British theater that were the legacy of the greatest writer the world has ever known. But almost single-handedly Olivier revived the classical British theater and helped to stabilize English culture. His contributions were unequaled, though of course he had the help of the wonderful repertory actors at the Old Vic. While I believe that Larry did his best acting toward the end of his life, when I think of him as an actor, I perceive him mostly as an architect. He designed his parts beautifully, but they were like sketches engraved with an etching tool on a sheet of copper. He said every line the same way every time. He hated the thought of improvising and said, “I’m an ‘outside-in’ actor, not an ‘inside-out actor.’ ” Everything he did had to be structured in advance, and he always stuck to the blueprint. He was uncomfortable with me and other actors influenced by Stella Adler and the Russian school of acting, and probably felt a much deeper kinship with performers whose roots were more traditional. This kind of acting can be effective on the stage because audiences are far away, but it becomes absurd in movies, in which audiences can see actors’ expressions magnified hundreds of times in close-ups.
Larry shared one characteristic with other British actors I’ve known who wouldn’t “play down.” In The Entertainer, for example, he played a decrepit Cockney vaudeville song-and-dance man, Archie Rice, but he refused to talk in a Cockney accent, even though the part called for it. He wouldn’t use an accent beneath his own station in life; he simply spoke in perfect English.
I’ve heard it said that I should have devoted my life to the classical theater as Olivier did. If I had wanted to be a great actor, I agree that I should have played Hamlet, but I never had that goal or interest. For the reader who has gotten this far in the book, I hope that by now it is apparent that I have never had the actor’s bug. I took acting seriously because it was my job; I almost always worked hard at it, but it was simply a way to make a living.
Still, even if I had chosen to go on the classical stage, it would have been a mistake. I revere Shakespeare, the English language and English