RACHEL WEISZ

Acting coach revered by Glenn Close and Rachel Weisz

Harold Guskin, a revered acting coach who encouraged students like Kevin Kline, Glenn Close and Rachel Weisz to emphasise the words of the script over any analysis of their characters’ motivation, died on 10 May in Park Ridge, New Jersey. He was 76.

His wife, Sandra Jennings, said the cause was probably a pulmonary embolism.

“Actors are about feelings, imagination and improvisation,” Guskin wrote in How to Stop Acting (2003), a book that laid out his principles and techniques. “They are good at becoming other people. Their instinct is their talent. The more they trust their instinct, the more inspired and inspiring their performances become.”

Guskin, who occasionally also acted and directed, worked out of his apartment in the West Village, guiding, cajoling and pushing actors as they prepared for auditions, rehearsals or performances. His goal was to free them to bring their own personalities to their roles and trust that they would find their characters in the text before them.

“Itallstartedwiththewords,” Close said. “You say them once and you say them again and again, and each time you say them, more is revealed.”

Rachel Weisz, who first sought Guskin’s help in 2005 before filming The Constant Gardener, said he prized spontaneity. “I can hear him saying, Don’t think! Don’t think! Just do it!” she said. She added: “He’d laugh his head off at the notion of motivation. You’d be motivated by your instinct in that moment.”

Guskin was familiar with various schools of acting but felt beholden to none. He wrote that any acting theory “puts the actor in his mind, not his instinct”.

“Once the actor feels an obligation to fulfil and justify a choice,” he continued, “he is not free to go anywhere else. He can no longer explore.”

In a profile in the New Yorker in 1995, John Lahr described Guskin working with actress Kate Skinner before rehearsals were to begin for Uncle Vanya, which was opening at the Circle in the Square Theatre in Manhattan. As they discussed the point in the play where her character, Sonya, talks about her plainness, Guskin suggested that she cry. “Don’t make me do this, Harold,” Skinner said. “Just be irrational, idiotic, moronic,” he told her. “Do it. Do it. Come on.” After Skinner read Sonya’s line tears ran down her face. “That’s what you want to find,” Guskin said. “How crazy is she? It just gets you in a place where you have control over your rage.”

Harold Saul Guskin was born on 25 May 1941 in Brooklyn, and moved with his family to Asbury Park, New Jersey, as a teenager. His father, David, sold restaurant supplies, and his mother, Frances, was a housewife.

Guskin began playing the trombone in high school and played professionally while attending the Manhattan School of Music. But his passion for music faded, replaced by a fascination with theatre. He attended Broadway and off-broadway plays. He began attending acting classes. He studied drama at Rutgers University, where he received a bachelor’s degree, then earned a master’s from Indiana University, where he was an artist in residence at the Indiana Theatre Company, a touring group affiliated with the school’s graduate drama studies programme.

Kevin Kline was an undergraduate at Indiana, acting with the Vest Pocket Players, a coffee house troupe which the group asked Guskin to join.

“After an hour, it was obvious he had to be our leader,” Kline said. “It was obvious that he knew more than we did. And he had this innate wisdom.”

Feeling comfortable with Guskin’s guidance, Kline asked him how he should deliver a line from Maxwell Anderson’s play The Wingless Victory, which he was performing at the campus theatre.

“And he said, how do you want to say it?” Kline said. “I said, I know how Brando would say it or Olivier would say it. And he said, No, no, no. What does it mean to you, what does it mean to you to be a man?”

While at Indiana, Guskin also gave acting direction to Richard Jenkins, then a graduate student.“for me, he was the light bulb that went on over my head,” said Jenkins, an Emmy Award-winning character actor best known for his role in US drama Six Feet Under. “I wasn’t good, but Harold made sense to me.”

Guskin went on to teach acting in the early 1970s at Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, and then at the New York University School of the Arts. Unhappy in the academic world, he began coaching independently. In the late 1980s he joined the Public Theatre, where for three years he ran Shakespeare workshops.

“It was quite an experience to watchsallyfieldattackingthe role of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale,” he wrote in How to Stop Acting, and to watch Joel Grey as a “charming, scary Richard III seducing a weeping young woman whose husband he has killed”.

In 1989, he directed Twelfth Night for the Public at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park with Michelle Pfeiffer, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and Jeff Goldblum. New York magazine described Guskin’s rehearsals as “free-form and exciting – with each day bringing a new meaning to the play the actors have come to perform.”

Nearly two decades later, Guskin directed his only film, Down the Shore, starring Gandolfini and Famke Janssen. Written by Jennings and shot in Keansburg, New Jersey, it told the story of three longtime friends living on the Jersey Shore whose secrets unravel with the arrival of a stranger.

In addition to Jennings, Guskin is survived by his brothers, Sam, Alan and Jack.

As primary progressive aphasia gradually took away Guskin’s ability to speak and communicate, Jennings helped coach his students, filling in words he could no longer conjure and explaining his intentions. Weisz said: “Even when he was down to about 20 words, I knew what he meant to say. We had a shorthand by then, and he would say, No, no, no, when I wasn’t hitting the truth.” New York Times 2018. Distributed by NYT Syndication Service.