" In the Theatre an Actor Gives"

"Stars bear within themselves the same kind of heroic passions that mark the characters whom they portray. They have the power to sustain those multiple selves in the course of a movie, to sustain a persona in the course of a career, to sustain themselves in the harsh light of fame."

"Yet the mark of good acting isn’t the intentional display of such passions by actors but, instead, the radiating of those passions from the actors, even against their will…  the paradox and pathos of movie acting, as opposed to theatre acting, is that in the theatre the actor gives; in the cinema, the actor is taken from."

"…the peculiarity of an art that’s essentially involuntary, despite the fanatically willful intensity with which actors pursue their artistic labors and their place in the industry. An actor’s efforts to cope with what is essentially the camera’s soul-stealing—whether those efforts are constructive or self-indulgent or even self-destructive—get pulled into a feedback loop that amplifies the image onscreen. "

The New Yorker- The Essence of Stardom *

Richard Armitage and Sean Bean on stage

(photos from Google Images, RichardArmitagenet.com, The Mighty Bean, The Royal Shakespeare Company)

*review of book by James Harvey