The Acting Coach Makes The Movie Star
They might be multi-millionaires now but once they were delivering mail, collecting debt and sawing wood to make ends meet. Major movie stars like Jack Nicholson, Demi Moore and Harrison Ford all had to start somewhere but clearly not every struggling actor or Los Angeles waitress ends up in Beverly Hills with their name in lights and a closet full of Oscars.
So what does it take to be one of the lucky few who move from celebrity wannabe to red carpet regular?
According to Elisa Eliot, an acting Coach in Los Angeles who has helped budding starlets land roles on major TV shows including CSI, Nip/Tuck and The Office, while looks can be important in making the cut, even the most attractive actor wont be cast if he or she doesnt have the acting ability to turn a script into a convincing performance.
And for Eliot, who learned her acting skills at Yale Universitys drama school, that means rising stars have to leave the day job behind them when they make it to the audition.
I'm always telling my students to make the stakes higher in their acting, which means committing to each moment, she says. If an actor is not totally committed to what he or she is trying to achieve then the moment wont be believable.
That doesnt mean though that a background in Stanislavski and a love of Method Acting are all you need to win the breakthrough parts. According to Eliot, its just not enough these days for an actor to have only one way of bringing a character to life. No actor can be confined to just one of the older methods in todays acting world, she advises on her website. Instead, Elisa teaches a blend of all the different acting approaches so that actors can choose the methods that work best for them.
So the right looks help, it seems, and solid acting skills certainly count for something. But theres one more ingredient that any actor with ambition needs: an objective opinion to tell them where theyre going wrong and how to improve it... before the casting director does. Even the most talented actor can struggle with the stress of an audition and nervous habits like shifting from one foot to the other can kill chances faster than a fluffed line.
For many stars in the making, that means exchanging poses in the mirror for personal training if they want to swap their uniform for an Oscar dress.
- Daniel Nord
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