20 Too Beautiful for Words

Greta Scacchi was not only the most beautiful woman I had ever met but also the most charismatic. I had learnt from interviewing numerous models who wanted to act that the two do not necessarily go together. On several occasions I ended up wondering whether the vacant girl slumped in the chair before me could possibly be the sexy young woman in the pictures she had just handed to me. Patsy Rodenburg, who taught at many drama schools in and around London, has similarly commented:

“I would sit and listen to maybe 200 actors a week. I couldn't understand why some actors did everything right yet didn't engage me or make me clear. Some actors were very impressive, they were clever and displayed intricate skills, but after watching them I forgot their work - it didn't last in my memory. Some were very beautiful but not connected enough to be sexually attractive. What was missing?” (30)

The Hood and the Harlequin (Bergerac)

One day, when Greta was still completely unknown, I sat at a cafe table in Covent Garden and watched her coming across the concourse towards me. She was wearing flat shoes, no makeup, her hair pulled back, a kit bag over her shoulder, yet, as she passed every head turned to watch her go by. Her walk was without ostentation, and in it’s quiet grace quite beautiful. On several occasions prior to this I had called ACTION  and watched her walking before the camera. As she came towards me there was no discernible difference now. She was all of a piece. She had what Doe Lang has termed “bio-rapport”.(18) She did not just have a body; she was embodied. But, beyond that, she knew exactly who she was and where she was going. Like Bob Dylan’s girl with the Egyptian ring, she acted as if she was in need of nothing.

“When you’re centred, you’re in your body as much as your head. You flow through situations, at ease, natural rather than judging yourself. Your voice is relaxed and warm and you find it easy to connect with others.”(29)

Frances McDormand 

A Man in Love

Greta Scacchi’s screen career had the fastest lift off of any actor, bar none, that I have heard of, before or since. After being talent spotted in Milan she worked briefly as a model to finance her passage through drama school; and then, at 21 she emerged and stepped straight into leading roles in TV and films, first in the UK, then across Europe, Australia, and finally the USA. Just out of drama school, she had the freshness of the ingenue, but the confidence of the seasoned player. She knew exactly who she was and where she was going, and, so did everyone who came into her orbit — long before they could pronounce her name.

When Greta looked at you you were often left wondering whether she was saying something about herself, or something about you. She looked at you as if she expected to be recognised, expected to receive a response of a certain kind; and inevitably she got just that. On the few occasions where she scored a miss she would see it as a joke or a challenge that she was sure eventually to win. She was very flirtatious, as much with women as with men, and her appeal was often instant. She never wore makeup, unless it had been applied for professional reasons by a makeup artist.The only time her clothes were striking was when she had been dressed by a professional stylist. So, off-screen she always appeared totally natural, totally unaffected. 

But Greta was not as simple as she at first appeared. On occasion she would withdraw into her interior world and would have to gather herself before stepping forward. To be herself was a little like going on stage. Caught unexpectedly she could be too shy to look you in the eye; but when she was switched on she was not shy at all, with lingering eye-contact, little touches, intimate tones of voice. Because she was so careless about her appearance it came as a real surprise to discover that her blond hair was dyed. Greta was stepping out into a long line of bottle-blonds, with Debra Harry before her and Madonna still to make her breakthrough, in Desperately Seeking Susan, a year or so on. The most famous of them all, Marilyn Monroe, demonstrated on several occasions her ability to turn her sexual charisma on and off.

Marilyn Monroe at The Actors' Studio

“Marilyn Monroe was a classmate of mine when I studied with Lee Strasberg. After class, we would all go to Child's Restaurant on 47th Broadway in Manhattan. Marilyn wore no make-up at all and would dress very simply in low heels, with a scarf covering her blonde hair. No one paid attention to her. She blended in with everyone else. Once when we were talking about this magnetism she said, "Watch!" Whatever she did, she turned it on and everyone we passed, man, woman, and child, reacted to her.”(27)   Gordon Phillips

Paula Strasberg has similarly spoken of riding the New York subway with Marilyn and no-one paying her any attention at all; while on other occasions she would be mobbed as soon as she stepped into the street. Personal development guru, Andrew Leigh, assumes this was because when Norma Jean took on her superstar mantle she began relating to the people around her (19); but I very much doubt this was the case. This is not the way that stars behave except in controlled situations. I would rather suggest that it was brought about by an internal change, from being absent to being filled with the excitement of being her superstar self.

Sally Potter has, generously, suggested that the need to feel full of themselves accounts for much of the bad behaviour indulged in by stars.(29) Most of us live in a default state of vagueness, in chronic retreat from our own skin. The star has mastered the ability to bring themselves into focus, to fill up their being in the moment, and allow it to radiate out. The twin qualities that make this possible are qualities that both Marilyn and Greta had in abundance, those of vulnerability and boldness; it is the tension between the two, brought together in the moment, that leads to great charisma.

In her interesting book, Presence, Patsy Rodenburg outlines three circles of energy. In the First Circle the focus is inward, the energy withdrawn, the breathing shallow; it is the circle in which to be if you don’t want to be noticed. The Third Circle is the opposite stream, it is the Circle of bluff and bombast; the energy is moving out but is unfocussed. Clint Eastwood once said that he could walk anywhere he wanted in New York without being stopped by simply always looking ahead and never slackening his pace; this is Third Circle mode. The Second Circle is described by Ms Rodenburg as the energy of connection.

“In Second Circle your energy is focused. It moves out toward the object of your attention, touches it and then receives energy back from it. You are living in a two-way street - you reach out and touch an energy outside your own, then receive energy back from it. You are giving to and responsive with that energy. You react and communicate freely and spontaneously within the energy you are giving and receiving. You are in the moment - the zone - and moment to moment you give and take.”(30)

But the three circles of energy can be thought of, not just in space, but also in time. The First Circle is the past; The Third Circle, the future; and The Second Circle, the present. In moments of charismatic presence energy flows from a heart-felt past, to a purpose-filled future, through a spontaneous present alive in the here-and-now. Like Terence Stamp Greta seemed to experience intense sensation and could be stopped in her tracks by the impact of light and colour. According to research carried out by Elaine N. Aron on The Highly Sensitive Person, this is more than just a fanciful notion, but describes an innate trait that applies to 15% — 20% of us.(1) Greta’s touch could feel quite electric. The very first time I took her hand I was immediately aware of this.

Charisma is the result of this flow of aliveness in the moment. In Bernie Taupin’s immortal words, it is like “a candle blowing in the wind”.

References

1. Aron, Elaine, The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You, Thorsons, London, 1996. 

27. Phillips, Gordon. Take It Personally: on the art and the process of personal acting, Applause Books, New York, 2000

30. Rodenburg,Patsy: Presence: How to use positive energy for success in every situation, Michael Joseph (Penguin Books), London, 2007

15 The Eyes Have It

As a twenty-five year old director, still finding my feet in the world of drama, I cast the veteran actor, John Welsh, for a cameo role of a man who had seen more than he was willing to tell. I thought I had detected a reticent quality in him, perhaps not common among actors. However, in rehearsal I found that was not coming across

John Welsh

the way that I had hoped. I suggested to him that he should play the scene without looking directly at the other actor in the scene. John looked at me wide-eyed and asked why on earth would he not look at the person to whom he was speaking. I tried to explain that a shy person is often quite fearful of looking another directly in the eye, or meeting the look of another. He shook his head as if he thought that I was quite mad, and then suggested that, as the scene took place in a conservatory, he could be preoccupied with repotting a plant.

I had given John a direction in the negative mode — not to do something. He had translated this into the positive mode by inventing the business of fiddling with plant pots. He had inserted an action in place of an avoidance. I settled for this even though I felt that it was missing the point. Many years later I saw just what I had been looking for repeated week after week on BBC 

television’s The Fast Show, in the Ted & Ralph sketches,

brilliantly played by Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson.

Charlie Higson, Paul Whitehouse as 
Ted and Ralph in The Fast Show

In these Ted rarely looks Ralph in the eye because he does not want to face up to the truth of what he secretly knows that he would find there. This is perhaps something that could only really come across on screen and in close-up.

Musing on my failure to get this idea across to John Welsh I came to realise that the direction I had given him cut across a long theatrical tradition. One of the primary ways that the stage director can focus audience attention is by having the actor look at the person whom he is addressing and other actors on the stage to follow the conversation with their eyes until it is their turn to speak. We accept this convention without thinking but in reality the play of looks and glances is much richer and more diverse. Though acting for film and TV, supported by camerawork and editing, tends to follow the stage convention, on screen the eyes — set free — may well carry more meaning than the words. 

Peter Egan in The Prince Regent

I again stumbled on the problem of getting actors not to eyeball each other when working on the BBC series, The Prince Regent, though this time it was for quite opposite reasons. Peter Egan, who played the Prince, was an actor I did not get on well with at all well, and early in rehearsals he objected to the way I had positioned him for a long self-referential speech. I had wanted him to turn away from his auditors and step to where I could close in on him in the foreground with his listener behind. He called this “middle-distance acting” which, he declared, he found false; so I asked him to demonstrate how he thought it should be done.

Peter took a step back and played the speech mainly looking down-right, with quick looks up to his interlocutor at the end of lines. The delivery was natural enough but what he had done without thinking was take up the stock position of the opened-out two-shot — just what I had set out to avoid. This is a position which originally came from stage convention, where two actors in dialogue, instead of facing up, would stand at ninety degrees to each other so that the audience could see their faces. Later it was adopted in film, and especially television, to allow two cameras to simultaneously shoot over-shoulder shots of the two actors without getting in each other’s picture. It was a setup which I referred to as the “cocktail party stance”, because the only people who ever stood this way in real life were guests at a cocktail party who were more interested in looking round the room than the person to whom they were speaking.

one of the many double closeups
 in Ingmar Bergman's Persona

But there was also a question of inference and meaning. To look away from someone is an act of high status because it implies that you do not care one way or the other about their opinion. The way that Peter had played the scene was more akin to a fellow making an embarrassed confession to his mate in the pub. Further, by constantly glancing to his listener for confirmation he was negating the possibility of an ironic commentary on his proposals through the unhampered facial expression of his listener, which would be unseen by him, but registered throughout by the camera holding the two actors in a double close-up.

It is an interesting discovery to make that when we are not looking at the person with whom we are speaking our eyes betray more of what is going on in our mind than when we do. This is known in Neuro-linguistic Programming as the Eye-accessing Cues”. Once you have become aware of these movements they are so obvious that it is astonishing that they were

NLP Eye Accessing Cues

not formally recognised until the nineteen seventies. Some of the more obvious cues were, of course, instinctively known to actors; such as the flirtatious look held a beat too long followed by the lowering eyes down right to access feelings. Or, the guilty sideways look right when an alibi is broken. the point is that if an actor is experiencing his role, and not just going through the motions, when he is not looking directly at the person he is addressing his eyes are by no means dead, but just the opposite.

In a masterclass for BBC Television, that was much-talked about by actors, and was later published as a book, Michael Caine said:

The eyes of the psychopath — 

Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter

 in Silence of the Lambs

“Blinking makes your character seem weak. Try it yourself: say the same line twice, first blinking and then not blinking. I practiced not blinking to excess when I first made this discovery, went around not blinking all the time and probably disconcerted a lot of people. But by not blinking you will appear strong on screen. Remember: on film that eye can be eight feet across.”(5)

However, as I think Michael began to realise, this unblinking stare is the look of the psychopath. 

Cecile Paoli

In everyday conversation our direct looks are very, very, brief. Anything longer has immediate implications. I discovered this for myself when editing a conversation between Anthony Forest and Cecile Paoli for Bergerac. In the scene Anthony Forest’s character harbours an ulterior motive which he disguises behind flirtatious banter; while Cecile’s character is charmed by him but uncertain as to what his intentions really are. A key segment had been shot in separate closeups and I soon discovered that altering the length of an exchange of looks by just one frame (1/24 of a second) on either side of the cut could completely change the implication of the scene, from a brush-off to a promise, from naive acceptance to deep suspicion.

Later on in his masterclass Michael Caine takes a different tack and talks about rationing your looks:

“One of the finest practitioners of this technique is Marion Brando. He denies the camera his eyes. Half the time he's looking down or away. Then suddenly he looks up, and you are absolutely fascinated by his eyes. (5)

I would like to suggest that it was not so much that Brando was hiding his eyes but that the camera had been set up on the assumption that he would be looking at the person to whom he was speaking, but, in fact, for much of his performance he was engaged in internal processing. It was this that gave his performances such lingering fascination.

References

5. Caine, Michael, Acting In Film: an actor’s take on movie making, Applause Theatre Books, New York, 1997