The Great Acting Blog: “Strive To Be Great”

A forthcoming Daniel Day-Lewis performance is always turned into a huge event by the media – we were told his turn in PT Anderson’s There Will Be Blood was the performance to define cinematic acting for all time. Then there is the psychophantic reporting about the lengths Day-Lewis went in order to “research the character”, and that he “stays in character” between takes. All of this stuff of course, has helped to create a mythology around Day-Lewis, a mystique, a narrative, and which has become self-perpetuating. When Day-Lewis quit the run of Hamlet early, claiming that the death of his own father weighed too greatly on his performances (others juicily claimed he actually saw the ghost of his father on stage), this only added to his legend. Whereas most actors would have been branded incompetent and unreliable for quitting, for Day-Lewis this was seen as an example of just how far he is willing to go to give a truthful performance. His failure is held up as his commitment to his art (quitting is a sign of commitment in our topsy-turvy modern world). On another occasion, Day-Lewis disappeared to make shoes in Italy somewhere, and again this was cited as evidence of his commitment; he’d spent so long in the blazing furnace of creation, he just needed to get away from it all, and make shoes. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect about all this however, is the fact that Day-Lewis has been able to maintain the intensity of the attention on his work for so long – the only comparable actor I can think of is Robert De Niro during the 70s and early 80s, a far better actor than Day-Lewis, but focus on his work has faded as his career has worn on.*

Whatever you may think of Day-Lewis, the sheer ambition of his acting choices is an example, and should be an inspiration. Few other actors these days strive to give something extra, something remarkable, in the way that Day-Lewis does. The great explorations of acting, the will to deliver a performance of force, the longing to express, the love of art, the desire to thrill, seems to be broadly lacking in contemporary acting. Any actor who strives to be an artist is sneered at, brand names on the CV are all that count, few take the technical and aesthetic aspects of acting seriously. That’s generally why acting and actors are less exciting than they were, less fun, and in turn, less loved.

Actors now see the audience as an appendage to their career, rather than the object of it. This has been evidenced in recent years by the spate of incidents in theatres where actors have broken out of character and told the audience to shut-up whenever their mobile phone has rung or when they eat crisps. I can’t help but feel that in the old days, actors like Donald Wolfitt or Anew Macmaster would have rendered such distractions irrelevant and quelled any noise by the sheer greatness of their performances. Infact, Harold Pinter tells the story about when he was a young actor touring Shakespeare in MacMaster’s company, they were doing Othello in some Irish village, and the 2000 strong audience were drunk and bawdy to the extent that the actors on stage couldn’t hear eachother speak, that is, until MacMaster entered, and who, by the end of the play, held the audience in rapt silence – you could hear a pin drop – but he didn’t ask or tell them to be quiet, he stunned them with his brilliance. That’s what we should be aiming for in our work.

* Day-Lewis has a much lower output than De Niro, making only 6 films in the last 15 years, while De Niro has made 44 in the same timeframe. This may go some way to explain why the intensity of attention on Day-Lewis’ work has endured.