THE MADNESS IN DUSTIN’S METHOD
The Method: How The Twentieth Century Learned To Act Isaac Butler Bloomsbury £30 ★★★★
You must remember this. Back in the mid-1970s, Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman were making Marathon Man. To create his role of a Nazi war criminal, Larry put on a baldie wig and a Cherman aggsunt. But Dustin thought dressing up wasn’t enough. In order to better portray the exhaustion of his character, he supposedly didn’t sleep for three nights in a row. Larry burst out laughing when he heard. ‘My dear boy,’ he said, ‘why don’t you try acting?’
The answer is that Dustin was a Method actor. Devised by the Russian theatre director Konstantin Stanislavski, the Method says actors should find whatever character they are playing within themselves. Whereas for classical players such as Olivier, acting is the art of pretending to be someone else, Method actors aim to find emotional parallels for the part they’re playing in their own lives.
The Method has certainly made for some powerful performances. Once seen, Hoffman’s slimeball turn in Midnight Cowboy is never forgotten. And as Isaac Butler argues in his history of the movement, Marlon Brando’s sweaty mumble in A Streetcare Named Desire is one of the hingepoints of 20th Century art. There is acting before it, and acting after it, and they are not the same.
But for every classic, there’s a clunker. Gene Hackman is surely right to remember how ‘pitiful’ it was when he was an acting student and ‘everyone was imitating Brando’. Indeed, there is nothing more embarrassing than Hackman’s own Brando imitation, in French Connection II, when his character tries to rid himself of a heroin addiction by alternating silent moping with violent braggadocio.
Nor is the Method always good for a performer’s private life. Peter Sellers used to identify so closely with his roles that he went on inhabiting them long after a shoot had ended.
Three of his four marriages broke up due to his inability to separate work from life. And as Butler confesses, he himself abandoned acting because he ‘hated the [way] the nastiness of the character bled into my own personality’.
Dustin Hoffman, on the other hand, revelled in the licence he believed the Method gave him for misbehaving. Making Kramer Vs Kramer, he got into character by taunting his co-star, Meryl Streep, about the recent death of her partner, John Cazale. During one scene he surprised her with a slap across the face – so that ‘her pained response would feel sufficiently real’. Nasty work if you can get it.
Butler tells this story fascinatingly well. He might have found room to wonder whether Alfred Hitchcock, who would bully and humiliate actors if he thought it would get a better performance out of them, was a kind of Method director. But he makes up for it by pointing out that when, say, Robert De Niro spent months learning how to box for Raging Bull (he became so good that he actually chipped the teeth of Jake LaMotta, the fighter he was playing), that ISN’T Method acting. It is properly practised pretending.
Larry Olivier would have applauded.