Method acting facts for kids

Kids Encyclopedia Facts

Method acting, also called the Method, is a special way actors prepare for their roles. It helps them give honest and strong performances. Actors try to deeply understand and feel what their character is thinking and feeling inside.

This acting style is based on ideas from a Russian actor and director named Konstantin Stanislavski. He wrote books like An Actor Prepares, Building a Character, and Creating a Role that explained his "system" for acting.

Three important teachers helped develop the Method in the United States:

Lee Strasberg focused on the character's thoughts and feelings.
Stella Adler looked at how society and groups affect a character.
Sanford Meisner emphasized how characters behave and react.

These teachers first worked together at the Group Theatre and later at the Actors Studio in New York.

How Method Acting Started
How Method Acting Works
How Method Acting Affects Actors
See also

How Method Acting Started

The "Method" grew from Konstantin Stanislavski's "system" of acting. In the early 1900s, Stanislavski put together his ideas for training actors, preparing for roles, and rehearsing plays. His "system" combined several ideas:

The Meiningen company focused on the director's vision and teamwork.
The Maly Theatre focused on making characters feel real.
André Antoine and others made stage settings look very natural.

A drawing of Stanislavski's "system," showing how he thought actors could "experience" a role (1935).

Stanislavski's system helps actors truly "experience" a role, rather than just pretending. Actors use their conscious thoughts and will to bring out deeper feelings and natural behaviors. During rehearsals, an actor looks for reasons why their character acts a certain way. They also figure out what the character wants to achieve in each moment.

Later, Stanislavski added more physical exercises to his system, called the "Method of Physical Action". Instead of just talking about the play, actors would act out scenes and improvise. Stanislavski believed that "the best analysis of a play is to take action in the given circumstances."

Another important person who influenced the Method was Yevgeny Vakhtangov. He was a student of Stanislavski. Vakhtangov's "object exercises" helped actors train and keep their skills sharp. Lee Strasberg learned from Vakhtangov that actors could "motivate" their character's actions by using their own imagined or remembered experiences. This is different from Stanislavski's idea of asking, "How would I behave, feel, or react in the character's situation?"

In the United States

When Stanislavski's students from the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT) visited the United States in the 1920s, they changed acting in the Western world. Richard Boleslawski, one of Stanislavski's students, gave talks about the "system." These talks were later published as a book. This led Boleslawski and Maria Ouspenskaya, another student, to move to the US and start the American Laboratory Theatre.

However, the version of Stanislavski's work they brought was from the 1910s. It wasn't the full, later version of his "system." The first part of Stanislavski's book, which was about the psychological side of acting, was published in the US as An Actor Prepares in 1936. Many American actors learned from Boleslawski and Ouspenskaya. The acting styles developed by their students, like Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, and Sanford Meisner, are often called "the Method."

Stella Adler was an acting teacher whose students included famous actors like Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro. She had a different idea from Strasberg after she studied with Stanislavski. Adler believed actors should imagine the scene's "given circumstances" (the facts about the character's situation) to create real emotions. She also used "as ifs," where actors imagine situations that affect them personally to help them understand the character's feelings.

Some famous people had strong opinions about Method acting. Director Alfred Hitchcock found it difficult to work with Method actors like Montgomery Clift and Paul Newman. Actress Lillian Gish joked, "It's ridiculous. How would you portray death if you had to experience it first?" Actor Charles Laughton said, "Method actors give you a photograph," while "real actors give you an oil painting."

During the filming of Marathon Man (1976), actor Laurence Olivier supposedly told Dustin Hoffman to "try acting... It's so much easier." This was after Hoffman stayed up all night to match his character's tired state. Hoffman later explained that he had been out all night for personal reasons, and Olivier was just joking.

Many well-known American actors in the late 20th century studied with Lee Strasberg, including Paul Newman, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and Jack Nicholson.

In India

In Indian cinema, a form of Method acting also developed. Dilip Kumar, a Hindi cinema actor who started in the 1940s, was a pioneer of this style. He became one of India's biggest movie stars in the 1950s and 1960s. Kumar's approach came before Hollywood Method actors like Marlon Brando. He inspired many Indian actors, including Amitabh Bachchan and Naseeruddin Shah. Filmmaker Satyajit Ray called Kumar "the ultimate method actor."

In South India, actors like Sathyan, Sivaji Ganeshan, Mammootty, Mohanlal, and Kamal Haasan also used Method acting.

Method acting is being talked about more in India today, especially with the rise of online streaming platforms. These platforms show many new web series, giving space to a new generation of Method actors like Rajkumar Rao and Vicky Kaushal.

Henry Irving's 'Dual Consciousness'

The English actor Henry Irving, who died in 1905, used techniques that were similar to Method acting. Bram Stoker, who wrote Dracula, described Irving's methods in his 1907 book, Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving. Stoker worked closely with Irving at the Lyceum Theatre in London.

Irving believed that an actor must understand a character deeply to make the performance sincere. He said, "If you do not pass a character through your own mind it can never be sincere." He also thought that all actors in a play should work together, putting the overall goal of the play first.

Irving believed that a good actor needs a "double consciousness." This means the actor can fully feel the emotions of the character while also being aware of their acting technique. He felt that actors who combine strong personal feelings with great skill have a greater impact on their audience.

It's thought that Bram Stoker used Irving's ideas to help him make Dracula feel more real.

How Method Acting Works

Method acting uses several techniques, many of which came from Stanislavski. These include:

Substitution: Replacing a character's experience with a similar one from the actor's own life.
"As if": Imagining "as if" a fictional situation were real to create a strong emotional response.
Sense memory: Recalling the physical sensations of a past experience (like the smell of rain or the feeling of cold) to bring out emotions.
Affective memory: Recalling the emotions from a past experience that had a big impact on the actor.
Animal work: Studying animals to learn about physical movement and behavior.

Sometimes, Method actors even get help from psychologists to develop their roles.

Lee Strasberg's approach often involved actors using their own life experiences to connect with their characters. This technique, which Stanislavski called "emotion memory," involves remembering feelings from past experiences that caused strong emotions. Actors let these feelings come naturally without forcing them.

Stanislavski was also very interested in Perezhivanie, which means "re-living" emotional experiences. He believed actors needed to go beyond just copying emotions. He encouraged them to explore their own feelings deeply and truly experience what the character was going through.

However, Stanislavski later moved away from using emotion memory as a main tool. He started to focus more on physical actions as a way to reach emotions. He believed that doing things physically could lead to emotional expression.

A common misunderstanding about Method acting is that actors stay in character all the time, even when they are not filming or on stage. While some actors like Daniel Day-Lewis do this, it is not a required part of the Method. Stanislavski tried this early in his career but stopped because it didn't work well. Lee Strasberg also did not teach this as part of his Method.

While Strasberg focused on memory recall, Stella Adler's approach centered on finding the truth in the script itself. She believed actors should explore the character's inner emotions, experiences, and the situations given in the story. Her teachings are continued by people like Larry Moss.

Larry Moss wrote a book called The Intent to Live. In it, he explains Adler's techniques. He talks about "given circumstances," which are the facts about the character from the script. He also talks about "interpretation," which are the things about the character that are not in the script, but the actor assumes are true.

According to Moss, actors need to know three things about their character to give a truthful performance:

Objectives: What the character wants to achieve in a scene. The "super objective" is the character's main wish or dream throughout the whole story.
Obstacles: What stands in the way of the character reaching their objectives.
Intentions: The actions the character takes to overcome obstacles and achieve their goals.

Moss believes that if an actor understands these things, they can create a realistic performance. He stresses that the actor doesn't become the character, but rather the character's truth lives through the actor's understanding of it within themselves.

How Method Acting Affects Actors

People have studied how Method acting might affect an actor's mind and body. Sometimes, Method actors explore past emotional experiences, both happy and sad. This can lead to emotional tiredness, especially if they bring up old, unresolved feelings just for a role. However, some research suggests that actors might be better at controlling their emotions. This could be because they constantly need to bring up and manage different feelings.

Emotional tiredness can happen when actors pretend to feel something they don't, which is called "surface acting." Method acting, when done correctly, is more like "deep acting." This means changing your thoughts and feelings, not just your actions. Deep acting usually helps avoid too much tiredness. Surface acting, on the other hand, can lead to a bad mood and more emotional exhaustion. This bad mood can cause fear, worry, feelings of shame, and not enough sleep.

If actors bring up strong, unresolved emotions or past traumas, it can lead to more emotional ups and downs, and increased feelings of worry, fear, or shame. Not getting enough sleep can also make it harder to think clearly and can even cause some people to have temporary problems that seem like serious mental health issues.

However, Method acting and acting in general can also have many good effects. Studies show that actors are often very good at understanding other people's thoughts and feelings. They also tend to be more empathetic, meaning they can understand and share the feelings of others. It's been suggested that children who learn acting methods can better understand their own emotions and the emotions of others. Actors have also been found to have better memory skills. One study showed that when non-actors learned acting memory techniques, their memory improved a lot.