Skip to main content

How to become an outstanding actor: tips from Kenneth Rea, teacher to the stars

The mentor to some of Britain’s top performers believes the best acting comes from a childhood sense of playfulness – and is fraught with danger

There’s a famous yarn about Laurence Olivier leaving the stage in anguish after a barnstorming performance. Don’t you know you were brilliant, asked a colleague. Of course, said Olivier – “but I don’t know why”.

Defining the core of outstanding performance and learning how to pass it on – it’s a slippery quest to which New Zealand-born acting teacher Kenneth Rea has devoted more than 40 years. “In the 1980s some people began to become exceptionally successful,” says Rea, speaking from the studio in his London garden, “and what fascinated me was, what were those people doing that the rest were not? What is this secret quality, and can I find the crucial exercises that will produce that?” He learned from revelatory teachers in Japan and China, and gradually distilled it down to seven key qualities. “There’s no easy recipe for how to become an outstanding actor – but this is the nearest they can get.”

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3m85rwv
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One giant leap: meet the new generation of male ballet stars

Beauty, strength and bags of energy: BBC Four’s Men at the Barre documentary gets up close and personal with the Royal Ballet dancers on the rise ‘It’s a golden era of male ballet dancers.” So says Emma Cahusac, the commissioning editor behind a new documentary, Men at the Barre, part of BBC Four’s dance season. It’s not just hyperbole. The young men rising up at the Royal Ballet are some of the most exciting in dance right now: principals Matthew Ball and Marcelino Sambé, first soloists Cesar Corrales and William Bracewell, and first artist Joseph Sissens all feature in Men at the Barre. With the majority of them British or UK-trained, it’s a giant leap from the grumblings of a decade ago about the lack of local dancers making it to the top. I spoke to Ball, Corrales and Sambé by phone, all staying resolutely positive during this enforced break from their intensive dancing lives, but all desperate to get back to work with colleagues they’re certain are something special. “I see so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...
Post a Comment
Read more