Actors Studio

David Garfield's glossy coffee-table history of the Actors Studio is a tribute to the number of film celebrities who have studied there: ranging from those who became famous as early exponents of the method, such as Marlon Brando, to more recent alums who continue to work regularly and whose artistic achievements have been celebrated with awards, such as Susan Sarandon. Yet the method's insistence upon total immersion in the role, combined with heavy research in order to bolster the sense of lived reality within the script, seem like the polar opposite of the celebrity culture of acting that we currently endure. How did an actorly training method designed to efface the personality completely result in the nonstop glorification of the actorly personality which is modern American (and western) celebrity culture?

Although we do not normally think of The Actors Studio, and the emergence of "method acting" in New...
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