Tag: actor

What would it look like for him, he wondered, when he wrapped things up?

Live & Learn24 Comments

Why?

It was a question that crossed Robin’s mind more often these days, now that he had put in roughly 35 years as a professional entertainer and more than 60 as a human being.

What did he still get out of doing what he was doing, and why did he feel the compulsion to keep doing it? He had already enjoyed nearly all of the accomplishments that one could hope for in his field, tasted the richest successes, won most of the major awards. Every stage of his career had been an adventure into the unknown, an improvisation in its own right, but there was truly no road map for where he was now. Everything came to an end at some point; it was a reality he accepted and confronted so often in his work, even as he tried to out-race it. What would it look like for him, he wondered, when he wrapped things up and told the crowd good night for the last time? How could it be anything other than devastating?

~ Dave Itzkoff, from Inside the Final Days of Robin Williams (Vanity Fair, May 8, 2018)

Notes: Dave Itzkoff traces the last few months of Williams’s life in this Vanity Fair excerpt from his Biography on Robin Williams titled “Robin” published on May 15, 2018.  In the months that preceded his death, Williams faced daunting challenges, both professionally and personally.

“Darkest Hour”: Oldman, Wow, the brightest light

Live & Learn39 Comments

The hours of makeup meant Oldman often arrived on set at 3 a.m. His average day, he estimates, was 19 hours long. By the time the rest of the cast and crew arrived, Oldman was already in character. “Joe never saw me as Gary for three months,” says the actor. “If you’re going to do a part like this, you can’t go in kicking and screaming about the makeup. You’ve got to surrender to it,” Oldman says. “Maybe day 45 you come in, you’re sleep deprived and you’re a bit grumpy. But the fruits of it were such that I could put myself in a frame of mind. Once it was all in, I was in it. I had a ball. My thinking was that if at 65, Churchill could take on Hitler, then I could sit in a makeup chair for three hours.”

– CBS News, from “Gary Oldman on becoming Winston Churchill in “Darkest Hour”

Gary Oldman, 59, won best Actor for his performance on the “Darkest Hour”, in addition to winning the honor at the Golden Globes, BAFTAs and Screen Actors Guild Awards.  If you haven’t seen the flick, it is highly recommended. He (and his make-up) are amazing…

Portraits: Gary Oldman, Winston Churchill and Oldman as Churchill (via National Post)

Tuesday Morning Wake-Up Call

Live & Learn4 Comments

“People get up, they go to work, they have their lives, but you never see the headlines say, ‘Six billion people got along rather well today.’ You’ll have the headline about the 30 people who shot each other.”

~ John Malkovich

John Gavin Malkovich, 59, was born in Christopher, Illinois.  His paternal grandparents were Croatian. He is an American actor, producer, director, and fashion designer. Over the last 30 years of his career, Malkovich has appeared in more than 70 motion pictures. For his roles in Places in the Heart and In the Line of Fire, he received Academy Award nominations. He has also appeared in critically acclaimed films such as Empire of the Sun, The Killing Fields, Dangerous Liaisons, Of Mice and Men, Being John Malkovich, and RED, and has produced numerous films, including Juno and The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

Image Source: m.antena.ro portrait of John Malkovich

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call: “Breaking Good”

Live & Learn14 Comments

breaking-bad-bryan-cranston

Bryan Cranston, 60, a self described “journeyman” working actor since his mid-20’s, didn’t find fame until his fifties thanks to the hit show “Breaking Bad”.  In a 60 Minutes interview with Steve Kroft titled “Breaking Good“, he tells Steve Kroft he’s seizing the moment.

Kroft: Do you believe there will be a time when people will say, “oh, not him anymore?”

Cranston: “I’m riding a wave right now and I recognize that. I want to do as much work as I can and do the best I can and when it’s all said and done, and they say get out of the water, you’re done, I want to be so exhausted, that I look forward to it.

“I don’t want anything left in the tank.”

Notes:

  • Don’t miss the full 60 Minutes segment here: “Breaking Good“
  • Photo of Bryan Cranston on Breaking Bad: hit fix.com

Riven with insecurities

Live & Learn23 Comments

dustin-hoffman

Hoffman, 78, often professes himself riven with insecurities and convinced that every job will be his last. “You don’t erase the first 10 years of your life, it stays with you, it’s imprinted … you didn’t work!” he says. “Selfishly, I feel, well, I just got in under the gun.” However, he has nothing to prove. With a catalogue of era-defining movies including The Graduate, Lenny, All the President’s Men, Straw Dogs and Tootsie, he’s one of the pre-eminent film stars of the last 50 years. While it’s doubtful that Kung Fu Panda 3, the film he’s promoting today in New York, will join The Graduate and Midnight Cowboy in the National Film Registry, it’s still a perfectly charming kids’ movie, enhanced by Hoffman’s infinitely expressive growl. […]

So who’s the best actor of all time? Hoffman doesn’t believe in the concept, but he believes in best performances. “The first one that comes to mind – he just got an Oscar, I heard – Mark Rylance. His Jerusalem, my God. I said: ‘What is that?’ When you see something that transforms everything that you’ve been doing for a living … I mean, you’re an actor but that goes beyond. He was doing something larger.” Equally stunning, says Hoffman, was Simon Russell Beale as Hamlet. “He was unkempt, he was heavy, he played him like a real loser, which I think Shakespeare wrote, and I thought he had an essence. Then it came to ‘To be or not to be’ and he came to the lip of the stage and he said: ‘To be …’”

Hoffman gets up, and just for me performs Russell Beale performing Hamlet. “And he held it until there wasn’t a person in the audience that was breathing and it was as if he had collected everyone to the very essence of what he was saying. ‘… or not to be.’ And I thought, ‘Woah.’ I got goosebumps. He still kept the iambic pentameter but it just got inside something that no-one else had done before. Great acting, I do love it.” And, he says, despite niggles – a torn rotator cuff, back injuries and waning ability to remember people’s names, he’ll be doing it for as long as he’s able.

~ Alex Needham, Dustin Hoffman: ‘I was an outsider. I came to New York and I was cleaning toilets’

Source: The Guardian