Surviving as a Child Actor
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taken up by such giants of the acting classroom as Lee Strasberg, Jack Garfein and Uta Hagen, is the belief that being true to yourself – your own emotions, instincts and ideas, must be central to a great piece of acting. I began to understand that my success as a young actor had been largely because I was being myself and not anticipating or second-guessing what the casting directors and directors wanted me to be. It had not occurred to me before that acting was not pretending or faking emotions on stage – rather it was having the courage to discover them and live them truthfully on stage or in front of the camera. As soon as my main objective switched from ‘Be yourself’ to ‘Book the job’, my desirability and much more importantly my sense of self-worth, shifted dramatically in the wrong direction.
The most important thing that the parent of any young
