Surviving as a Child Actor
Page : 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12ALL
it had begun to go wrong. As it happened, I did not join the long list of child actors who simply stop acting and move on, and four years at NYU resulting in a BFA degree in acting made the problem clear to me. I had simply become mechanical or robotic. I was able to stand on the mark for hours on end, follow the director’s lead, jump through the hoops, say this and move here – but in the end I found that I knew nothing about acting. Much more frustratingly, my time at NYU made it clear to me that there was nothing in what I had learnt between the ages of 18 and 22 that I could not have been introduced to at the age of 8. Certainly I had undergone various bits of ‘coaching’ designed to make me marketable, but actual acting technique had been the missing piece of the puzzle.
Central to the acting technique or ‘method’ formalized by Stanislavski and later
