Not long ago, I read a very fine biography called Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century by Nancy Schoenberger. I picked it up not only because I am a huge fan of Richard Burton but also because of my growing interest in Taylor, who was surely one of the most remarkable people of the 20th Century. It was Taylor who, upon hearing that her great friend Montgomery Clift had just been in a car accident a few blocks away, literally ran to the scene. She got there in time to pull one of Clift’s dislodged teeth from his throat just before he choked on it. Pretty amazing.
Clift’s importance in the larger story of Taylor and Burton’s whirlwind romance is minor. He is only mentioned in one or two parts. And yet his unexpected appearance in the book fascinated me, especially when Schoenberger reveals the mutual disdain that Clift and Burton felt for each other. Jealously over Taylor’s affections surely had something to do with this, despite the fact that Clift was gay and by all accounts his relationship with Taylor was platonic. But even deeper than this personal rancor lay an artistic rivalry between the two men regarding their respective abilities as actors.
Clift was one of the first and greatest alumni of “the method” studios taught by Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg, which emphasized acting as a physical interpretation of deep psychological impulses. The actor seems to transform into the character from the “inside out”. (Think Robert De Niro in Raging Bull or…well…any other De Niro movie.)
Burton, in contrast, was a product of the great Shakespearean tradition of acting, in which emotion is conveyed primarily through the text itself. That is, through the actor’s voice as he delivers the script. (Think Patrick Stewart in the “We draw the line Hee-yah” speech in First Contact.)
The fact that both Clift and Burton were geniuses in their respective styles of acting in no way reduced their mutual dislike of each other. Most of the animus came from Clift, apparently, who dismissed Burton as an old-school style of actor, a “reciter” with a good voice but no real emotional depth. Burton, for his part, had a reluctant admiration for Clift’s artistic gifts but also regarded him as a prima donna and a bit of a jerk.
Neither man, of course, could see beyond his dislike of the other to comprehend the many qualities they shared in common—talent, good looks, intelligence, and love of literature. (Not to mention a fatal fondness for booze; both of them died indirectly from alcoholism, although it took Burton thirty years longer.)
Clift’s dismissal of Burton, along with his entire tradition of Shakespearean acting, seems particularly callow, in retrospect. Over the past decade, there has been a gradual re-evaluation of the so-called disparities between American vs. English styles of acting. Many actors now discount the depth of the contrast between British and American traditions. British actors (the good ones, at least) do use their entire bodies to express emotion. And many American actors have truly epic control of their voices (James Earl Jones, anyone?).
Moreover, if a competition between the two styles ever existed, it does no longer: the Brits won. Michael Caine, Ian McClellan, Patrick Stewart, Judi Dench, Derek Jacobi, Helen Mirren, Ian Holm, Sean Bean, Liam Neeson, Daniel Day-Lewis, Clive Owen, and Colin Firth—all are from the U.K. or Ireland, and most were trained in one of England’s great Shakespearean acting schools.
Even more surprising is the popularity of English (or English-trained) actors with the current generation of young movie-goers, who have made non-leading-man types like Jude Law, Benedict Cumberbatch, Idris Elba, Tom Hiddleston, Eddie Redmayne into bona-fide movie stars. And the latest generation of fine young actresses is even more tilted toward the Brits: Keira Knightley, Emma Watson, Emily Blunt.
If anything, Clift’s labeling of Burton as a “reciter” was really a critique of an older, already discredited style of acting that prevailed in throughout the 19th and early 20th Century. In this tradition, a foppishly dressed actor would appear on a candle-lit stage and intone great “word music” to a rapt audience simmering in their evening gowns and tuxedos. This “speaking-as-acting” tradition was long-lived and extremely limited. And yet it could still achieve amazing artistic heights, as evidenced by its greatest practitioners: John Gielgud, Ralph Richardson, and Rex Harrison.
By the 1950s, much greater actors had already displaced these old war-horses with a more physical and psychologically complete style, beginning with radical new interpretations of Shakespeare. Laurence Olivier trained a new generation of British actors including Burton, Peter O’Toole, and Anthony Hopkins, whose performances were as psychologically introspective and “full-body” as anything happening in New York.
It is true, of course, that British actors still receive a much higher degree of training in diction and vocal control than their American counterparts (which might explain why British actors like Hugh Laurie and Idris Elba can simulate an American or any other accent with such near-perfection). But they also perform the same “inside-out” exploration of character that the Method school emphasized. As Ian McClellan has said many times, a good actor—even a Shakespearean actor—must start with the meaning of the words before he need worry about how they sound. In fact, as he succinctly states it, once you figure out the meaning, the sound will take care of itself.
What I’m trying to say is that there has been a blurring of the distinction between the English and American styles of acting, to the point where the basic premise of method acting is almost a given on both sides of the Atlantic. This premise is simply this: in order to render a character convincingly and with a high level artistry, the actor must discover the psychological truth of that character, usually through an exploration of his (the actor’s) own history and emotional makeup. As Colin Firth once told an interviewer, “If you are playing someone that is obsessed with collecting stamps…or climbing Mount Everest…I don’t have to have those particular passions in me. In order to be able to play that part, I [just] have to find [some kind of] passion in me.”
So if there is no longer a major difference between the acting styles of England and America, why are U.K actors so heavily represented in our new A-list? Besides those I list above, there swarms a huge roster of great character actors who were trained in England: Tom Wilkinson, Brian Cox, Timothy Spall, Alan Cumming, Ralph Fiennes, Jim Broadbent, Brenda Blethyn, Michael Gambon, Simon Callow, Pete Postlethwaite, and on and on.
Why do the Brits dominate?
My guess is that the cross-fertilization that occurred between New York and London in the 1950s was simply lop-sided in their favor; they got more out of it than we did. While the Brits still have this great, ancient tradition of classical acting, with kids learning and performing Shakespeare at a very young age, they have overlaid it with the artistry of method acting, which was born in America and evangelized by actors like Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Clift.
Obviously, America still has great actors. But the greatest of these belong to a generation that is now departing: De Niro, Meryl Streep, Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, Glenn Close, Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson, and Gene Hackman. Even the fine actors of my generation like William Hurt, Tom Hanks, Richard Gere, Kevin Kline, David Strathairn, Sean Penn, and George Clooney are making fewer movies these days. We still have some great young actors like Leonardo DiCaprio, Sam Rockwell, Ryan Gosling, and Joaquin Phoenix, but the list is pretty thin, if you ask me.
What new, young yanks will fill the gap?
(Author’s Note: this post originally appeared on my old blog, Bakhtin’s Cigarettes.)
Ash Clifton, Writer 