I think acting is really a man’s profession because you are constantly risking failure. Maria Callas said, “The audience is the enemy. They must be beaten into submission.” I think they can be charmed into submission also.
But every time you stand in the wings waiting to go on is like running out on a tight rope. The nightmare of suddenly losing focus and forgetting your lines hangs forever over every stage in the world. And suddenly you will not be playing your role but will simply be yourself, standing in front of hundreds of strangers with no idea of why you are there. Standing with other players on the stage who are looking at you, waiting for you to continue so they can continue, sometimes having the presence of mind to step forward and ask you a question that is in fact your next line, and if that is enough you grasp it like a falling man grasps a windowsill and you pull yourself back up and go on. This is the thrill, this is the challenge, so that when the curtain finally comes down, it is with a sense of great relief. You have reached the other side of the tightrope.
It’s all about concentration really. You can think of nothing else. Thoughts about finishing the laundry, or if you are truly in love with someone, or your mother’s telephone call, must all be rudely suppressed. The blinders must go on. You can think of nothing but the lines that you are to deliver next.
I have seen actors with many years of experience pacing up and down the hall running the lines of their next scene in a play they have had down a hundred times. Not because they are forgetful, but because the mind is a tricky thing. It can desert you without notice no matter how much training you have had, no matter how many years you have worked or how many times you have played the role.
Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton were once playing Becket in London, and to keep themselves on their toes they exchanged roles every night. One night Peter was Becket and Richard the king. And the next night they exchanged roles. One night they suddenly stopped dead in the middle of a scene. The moment stretched on. The audience became restless. Finally Burton turned to the audience and said, “It’s not that we’ve forgotten our lines. It’s just that we’ve forgotten which character we are tonight.” This must be apocryphal because someone must have been wearing a crown, but the concept is there. You must constantly corral your reluctant mind and force it to not let you down. How well can you act the role is quite secondary to simply remembering it. This is something a civilian never knows about, never understands.
Surviving a performance is like surviving a battle. Or having killed a threatening animal. You feel very much of a man for having done your masculine thing in the eyes of others.
For women I think it is more seeking adoration. And that, too, is crippling. I think being a professional actor makes you an egomaniac. You really can’t do it without concentrating exclusively upon yourself. Even being in love with someone and placing their welfare before your own, which is my definition of love, may well be impossible during the run of a play. Unless that person is in the play and it is useful for you to use those emotions in your performance. And how giving is that?
Even monsters like Elizabeth Taylor and Liza Minelli must be respected for what they can do. Moviemaking is very different than performing on stage. Admittedly, I don’t know a lot about that. But knowing where the camera is, where your lights are, repeating your brief little scene many, many times. All of that must require great concentration. You cannot think of anything else, and then having the adoration of a public who does not expect you to care for them except en masse. Who could escape only caring about themselves? Some friend of Coco Chanel’s once wrote, “She could play the role of a human being very well, but she really wasn’t one.” Though she wasn’t an actress I feel sure that playing the role of herself, which was a complete creation from humble peasant origins, took all her attention.
It’s work. It’s very hard work going on stage in any capacity. And then if you care if the public likes you or not, that makes it even harder. Somebody asked me just the other day, “When you’re standing in the wings, don’t you ever worry that you’re going to go out there and they are not going to like you?” And I had to honestly admit that that was an idea that had never occurred to me. And I must owe that to my mother, Iris the Wonderful. I was brought up with a kind of sense of noblesse oblige. That I was so special and wondrous that I owed it to others to be considerate of them because they didn’t have my advantages. Because they weren’t fabulous me. It’s an attitude based upon nothing but a mother’s love, but it works for me.
I think the theater is a good métier for someone like myself and any self-confident male because it keeps you humble. You constantly risk humiliation. You do not keep yourself out of harm’s way. You place yourself squarely in front of it. You risk failure almost every day of your life. That’s something you can be proud of, even if it isn’t exactly going into a lion’s cage.
I read something very interesting about lion tamers just last night. They always enter the cage first. The lions follow them into what has been established as the lion tamer’s territory. It is then up to him to keep the lions aware that they are in his space. He is the alpha male. Interesting. It’s not the lions’ cage. It’s the lion tamer’s cage. Perhaps the stage is the performer’s cage. There he can perform the rites necessary for his own good opinion of himself.