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In both film and theater, there are two kinds of roles: personality and character. Your personality is who you are mentally, physically, emotional-ly, and spiritually. Almost all the roles in film are personality roles in which you play yourself as if you were actually the character called for by the script.

Jimmy Stewart, for one, was a personality actor who always played himself in someone else’s shoes. Most stars are personality actors and do not try to trans-form themselves into someone else. In most film roles, actors let their individ-ual selves filter through the role to exploit their respective personalities. Milos Forman, who directed great films such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus, was once asked what it means to be professional in films; his answer was that what is important are the talent and the personality.

In a Character role, you play the fictional personality of someone else.

Character roles are traditional in the theater, and we read about the great actors of the past who transformed themselves into the famous roles of characters who were completely different from themselves. When you play a character role, you have to hide your personality so that you are perceived as someone who is dif-ferent from you both physically, psychologically, and mentally. The great Michael Chekhov, a character actor in both stage and film, transformed himself so completely in many roles that the real Chekhov disappeared.

Film is a personality medium, but character roles have been created by some film actors like Chekhov and others. In the 1949 film Kind Hearts and Coronets, Alec Guinness plays the eight character roles of the people his main character has to eliminate to gain a royal title. Each character is completely dif-ferent from the others and is not just Guinness in a difdif-ferent costume. Paul Muni transforms himself as Zola in the film The Life of Emile Zola. More recently, there was Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot; Tom Hanks in Forest Gump; Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie, Little Big Man, and Midnight Cowboy;

Leonardo DiCaprio in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape; Billy Bob Thornton in Swingblade and U-Turn; Gary Oldman in Hannibal; Judy Dench in Shakespeare in Love; all create wonderful film character roles in which they are not recognizable as their own personalities. Jon Voight is such a great character Personality and Character 19

actor that no matter what his role, he always seems to be someone other that Jon Voight. His Howard Cosell in Ali is virtually unrecognizable as Voight.

There are a number of leading men and women who have done or could do character roles: Anne Bancroft, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Meryl Streep, Helen Bonham Carter, Cicely Tyson, Jodie Foster, Marlon Brando, Samuel L. Jackson, Robert Duvall, Tim Roth, and a few others. They have the ability to filter the assumed character through themselves and make it believable. There are many women actors who could do character parts brilliantly, but such parts are hardly ever written for them.

You make use of your personality. That’s why some have lasted such a long time. They have something you can use.

Howard Hawks

A few of the prominent personality actors who have lasted a long time are Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Robert De Niro, Susan Sarandon, John Wayne, Danny Glover, James Caan, Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman, Paul Newman, Henry Fonda, Jane Fonda, Harrison Ford, Sidney Poitier, Kirk Douglas, Bette Davis, Robert Redford, and Kathy Bates.

A leading actor who fits a role playing his or her own personality is more efficient for film than hiring an actor who doesn’t look the part and having him transform himself into the character. We still have character actors in film, but they are mostly personality actors who themselves are interesting or unusual characters. The Academy Award for best supporting actor was originally created for the character actor, the type of actor who would never be a leading man but who did an excellent job in a lesser part. Character actors for film, both men and women, usually differ from leading actors by a wide range of traits and charac-teristics that are physical: fat, thin, bald, specific accent, tall, short, unusual facial features, odd physical build, unusual voice. Each is usually cast for his or her respective characteristic physical traits, but the true character actors trans-form themselves into a character having any one or more of such specific traits.

The Academy categories for men and women, as distinct from the categories Leading Men and Leading Women, are Character Men and Character Women.

There are good reasons why character-transformation roles are not common in film acting. Most important is that it takes a long time for an actor to create a great character. It took Dustin Hoffman nine months to work on his character Dorothy for the movie Tootsie. Eddie Murphy creates a whole family in The Nutty Professor. He plays the Mother, Father, Grandmother, Uncle, and Brother.

When I saw the picture, I thought each was a different actor until my daughter told me he was playing all the parts. The time spent creating a character for film costs a lot of money that producers are unwilling to spend. It is cheaper and eas-ier to hire personality actors that fit the role. There are exceptions, like the two

above, because where would you find ready-made personality actors like Dustin Hoffman or Eddie Murphy? They don’t exist and have to be created. The time it takes for character transformation costs lots of money, so only leading actors with marquee value get a chance to do it. To the accountants, the expense of cre-ating a transformed character other than a star would not be cost-effective.

Film is all about personality. Robert Duvall has been around for years and his character work is exceptional, but we still see the Robert Duvall personality with an accent and changed mannerisms. James Woods was brilliant in The Ghost of Mississippi, but he was still James Woods, the person. Character act-ing takes a skill many actors do not have, and producers are wary about hiract-ing an actor who tries to get too far away from his type.

The stage is more suitable for creating character roles. A thirty-five-year-old actor may have the chance to play a twenty-year-old young adult or a man of sixty-five. During the relatively long stage rehearsal, he discovers the charac-ter’s traits that are different from his personal characteristics and has the time to blend these into his performance. The actor may have a month of rehearsal to find the different ways the character reacts, and how to bring these traits closer to himself. Immersion into a character is a challenge; it is also part of the satisfaction and fun of working on the stage.

In the film On Golden Pond, Katharine Hepburn and Henry Fonda are per-fect as a sixty-nine- and seventy-nine-year-old married couple. They are such skillful actors that we believe they have been married forever. They play them-selves, even though Fonda has made a few subtle character choices, like being a little hard of hearing and a little senile, but he is the same Henry Fonda we have loved through many films. Had this role been available when Fonda was a young actor, I doubt he would have been cast as Norman and then aged to eighty with makeup. Using age makeup to make a young actor look old on film can sometimes be effective, but it is expensive because of the time it takes. In Citizen Kane, Joseph Cotten played the part of Kane’s friend both as a young man and an old man. In this film, it was necessary to make up Cotten as an old man to cover the time span. The makeup was pretty good, but even though the transformation is not very great, there is no doubt it is the young Cotten play-ing an old man. On film, we are aware of Joseph Cotten’s makeup job, but on the stage he would have looked like a genuine old man. Undetectable age makeup can be created for film, but it is more demanding and time-consuming for both the actor and the makeup artist, which costs more. For the stage, actors are expected to do their own makeup.

It is physically demanding to rehearse a play and then perform the lead role night after night. I don’t think Henry Fonda, or any man at his age, could have made it through rehearsals and a run of the play. To get the play rehearsed and performed, it is more practical to cast a younger actor for the role of an eighty-year-old.

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Dialogue

Film is mainly visual, and a film script usually contains about one-tenth the dialogue of a stage play. Compare a stage play to most screenplays. You can immediately see the difference. A leading actor might have a hundred lines in an entire movie. In a play, he may have a hundred lines in four pages.

Dialogue is the essence of a play, and actors tell the story through the play-wright’s words and instructions. The story is advanced in words. The audience comes to hear what the playwright has written. In a good film, the story advances through the subtext created by the actors’ emotions.

I try to avoid talk at all cost. You lose that spontaneity when you realize somebody’s thinking the hell out of their part.

James Bridges

Monologues

Monologues are rarely used on film because the camera can take the audience into a character’s mind through flashbacks and voice-overs and in close-ups that reveal what is going on inside the character. Film can present scenes that enact what in a play would be offstage action and have to be explained in words. The monologue is a device for the audience to understand what can only be communicated by words of explanation, such as the back story or a character’s thoughts and feelings. A monologue in a film is most often a misguided attempt by an inept writer or director to solve a dramatic problem.

There are exceptions.

In the film On Golden Pond, Hepburn sends Henry Fonda out to pick strawberries. We see shots of Fonda wandering around the woods. He can’t find his way. He turns and runs in the opposite direction. He is out of shape. He sits on a log to catch his breath. We can see that he is confused, lost, and frightened.

In this scene, the camera shows us Fonda’s experience, but in the stage play, it has to be explained later in a monologue or expository dialogue.

On stage, monologues can be used for exposition, back story, or for under-standing a character’s thoughts. In modern theater, they also need some rea-sonable motivation. In a film, a monologue needs a strong dramatic motivation.

Katharine Hepburn has a monologue in the film version of On Golden Pond.

She delivers her monologue to a doll her character has had since she was a lit-tle girl. She is alone in the cottage.

(She takes her doll, Elmer, down from the mantel and hugs him to her.)

HEPBURN

Oh, Elmer, isn’t he awful?

Elmer, Elmer, Elmer.

(She stands for a moment, lost in thought. The sound of a motorboat on the lake interrupts her. She turns and walks to the window. She waves to it and sits on the steps.)

HEPBURN (to Elmer)

They say the lake is dying, but I don’t believe it. They say all those houses along Koochakiyi Shores are killing Golden Pond.

See, Elmer, no more yellow tents in the trees, no more bell calling the girls to sup-per. I left you in this win-dow, Elmer, sitting on the sill, so you could look out at Camp Koochakiyi, when I was eight and nine and ten.

And I’d stand on the bank, across the cove at sunset, and I’d wave. And you always waved back, didn’t you Elmer?

This monologue allows Hepburn to reminisce about her life as a child on the lake and what she shared with her imaginary playmate, Elmer. The mono-logue gives the audience insight into Ethel’s character, thoughts, and feelings.

You might say that it is not a monologue because she is talking to someone: her doll. But the doll is really not a participant and serves the same purpose for her as did Wilson, the basketball, for Tom Hanks’ character in the movie Cast Away. The basketball and Elmer are pretty good excuses to allow the actors to speak monologues when there is no other live person to talk to.

What I’m looking for instead of actors is behaviors, somebody who will bring me more.

Robert Altman

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