What was so special about Greta Garbo?
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
I was inspired to look up the quote:
Critics raved about her face: 'Her face, early called the face of the century, had an extraordinary plasticity, a mirrorlike quality; people could see in it their own conflicts and desires.' People who worked with her noticed that her face didn't change. Robert Taylor said: 'The muscles in her face would not move, and yet her eyes would express exactly what she needed.' Clarence Brown said: 'I have seen her change from love to hate and never alter her facial expression. I would be somewhat unhappy and take the scene again. The expression still would not change. Still unhappy, I would go ahead and say "Print it." And when I looked at the print, there it was. The eyes told it all. Her face wouldn't change but on the screen would be that transition from love to hate.'
Garbo had a stand-in who was identical to her, and who was said to have 'everything that Garbo has except whatever it is Garbo has'. What Garbo had was a body that transmitted and received. It was her spine that should have been raved about: every vertebra alive and separated so that feelings flowed in and out from the centre. She responded spontaneously with emotion and warmth, and what she felt, the audience felt, yet the information transmitted by the body was perceived as emanating from the face. You can watch a marvellous actor from the back of a big theatre, his face just a microdot on the retina, and have the illusion you've seen every tiny expression. Such an actor can make a wooden Mask smile, its carved lips tremble, its painted brows narrow.
It's often my job to figure out why a performance is uninteresting and make it more interesting -- mine, or somebody else's. I have a large toolbox of tricks to apply, with varying levels of success.
Yet none of it can ever do what "Stars" do. Even when stars give performances that are mediocre by every measure I know how to apply, they'll be riveting to at least some audiences. You really can see it from the back of a theater, and I have very little idea of how it works.
Not quite none. I do know that it's not at all about the external features, like the spine or the eyes. We don't have anywhere near enough control over that. (Though it is fascinating to work with animators, who do have that level of control over their performances.)
We actors say it comes from being "truthful" in the untruthful circumstances of the theater or the studio, though in the end that doesn't really mean very much. It's just a way of trying to get people to stop doing whatever they're doing consciously and let it happen... whatever the hell it is.
Honestly, I wonder how much of it isn't the effect of publicity affecting people's expectations? If you have two people giving the same performance who look similar but the audience for one goes in with the expectations of seeing a maestro perform and the other is just watching an unknown they would feel differently because they're carrying expectations with them that skew their view of the performance.
I don't want to go too far out on a limb and say this is definitely the case; I'm not in the industry. But I was wondering about the same subject (what makes a star's performance "riveting" even in something mediocre?) and that was the best answer that I could come up with.
If you took who was a hermit in Alaska with no media exposure for their entire life and showed them 3 performances from 3 different tier actors, would they actually say that the A-lister is better than the B-lister, who is better than the C-lister?
It's also really, really hard to tell from a finished product. There is a lot going on in a film between the performance and what you see in a theater: editing, music, lights, sound. A good cinematographer can make anybody, if not a star, at least somewhat charismatic. I wish I knew how they did that -- it's spooky magic, but I've watched it happen.
I know that's not really what you meant. I'm just highlighting the challenge of defining what "it" even is.
I can say that a lot of it isn't really about "better" acting. A lot of people who are only mediocre actors, or worse, are stars. George Clooney is both a genuinely talented actor and also a star -- but the two are almost entirely orthogonal.
Exactly that. I was just watching King Kong the other day, and most of the acting reads as terrible today. Delivery's bad, physical acting's way too much, timing's extremely bad. Ed Wood level, much of the time, and that's not an exaggeration. Some of the best (to my modern-viewer perceptions) is from the side characters. Yet, presumably, the leads were at least considered OK actors, at the time. This is true for lots of older films, especially before the 70s or so when the typical style seemed to shift to something much closer to what's in use today, and requires adjusting expectations and some, if you will, immersion therapy, to get over that hurdle and start to enjoy them on their own terms.
But then again, you can go back all the way to the silent film era and find some performances that still feel real and very good, even today and without much expectation-adjusting. Some of it seems to depend on the country producing the film—so, again, it's about culture. And comedy seems nearly immune to the problem, I guess because actors in comedies in all eras are rarely even trying for "believable", and are always kind of in on the whole thing with the audience.
You also see this with oration. Old speeches that are recorded sound totally strange. Part of it's that we had entire accents and styles of speech that were once common, that are now all but gone, a century or less later. Makes one wonder exactly how alien the past might have been, really, if one went even farther back. Written language makes it seem so close, at times. And yet....
Language is constantly changing, but it's only in the past 100 or so years that we've had the technology to make audio recordings. Linguists seem to have a pretty good ability to reconstruct older pronunciations but of course they can't capture every detail with certainty. There is an original pronunciation movement[0] in Shakespearean performance that can convey a sense of it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_in_Original_Pronun...
"The mass trials are going well. There will be fewer Russians, but better ones." -- Ninotchka
[0] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/12/04/how-regi...