Why James Stewart Quit Acting – The Great Acting Blog

“I’ve always been skeptical of people who say they lose themselves in a part. Someone once came up to Spencer Tracy and asked, “aren’t you tired of always playing Tracy?” Tracy replied, “What am I supposed to do, play Bogart?” You have to develop a style that suits you and pursue it, not just develop a bag of tricks”. – James Stewart.

I once read somewhere that James Stewart quit acting because he no longer liked himself on screen. This makes a lot of sense to me.

It’s always a shock when I first see myself on screen, because my performance rarely conforms to the idea of the performance I had in my head. Nor does it resemble how I felt while I was giving it. If we’re dealing with the moment honestly, then our performances never will be how we expected them to be – all sorts of bits and pieces emerge which we had not intended or were not even conscious of. Infact – it couldn’t be how we expected it to be – unless we impose our ideal preparation on the moment rather than dealing with the moment as it unfolds, and the truth is lost. However, once the first shock wears off, we begin to see our work for what it is.

Acceptance then, is the first step in creative development – accept that what we see infront of us is the actual performance we gave, and not that thing hanging around inside our mind’s eye. If we get all weird about our work, then it will be very hard to progress because it means we cannot truthfully reflect upon what we’ve done. We will either repress it and pretend that our performance was an ideal, or freak out because our performance was not the ideal we saw in our head. I say forget the ideal we saw in our head, it is a red herring, we should compare what we have done to the needs of the scene instead, to do that is useful.

However, we should also compare our performance to our definition of what great acting is in general. Again, this will lead to effective artistic progress – if, for example, you think you need superb diction in order to be a great actor but you mumble, then you know what you need to do. I thought it strange that James Stewart quit for the reason he did – surely a man who put together such an outstanding filmography would possess the capacity to fix something he didn’t like about his work? Stewart must have seen something in his work which not only compared unfavourably with his notion of great acting in general, but that that something must have been beyond his power to put right. He gave his last onscreen performance at the age of 78, so we might infer that whatever it was, it might have something to do with his age. Either way, it convinced him he was no longer capable of attaining at least a level of performance that was to his own satisfaction.

As James Stewart says, you’ve got to develop you’re own style and pursue it – I take this to mean developing your own aesthetic as an actor. It’s about being an individual creative artist rather than an employee. It also happens to be more pleasurable, meaningful, and fulfilling to work for your own satisfaction rather than trying to please others, which is usually just a prison anyway. Define the ideal actor you want to become, your ideal work, and prune anyone or anything which seeks to block that pursuit, and if it’s you yourself blocking it, well, then, you know what to do.

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