Actors Never Finish School

Performers keep going back to their acting teachers long after they’ve become stars

TV GUIDE MARCH 21, 1981

By Ellen Torgerson Shaw

At one point in his life Robert Urich-now comfortably secure as the amiable and tough Dan Tana in Vega$-was out of work, shaky about his acting skills and unhappy. His series, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, had lasted, he says, “less time than it takes to say the title-all of 12 minuets.”

Then he was up for another series –S.W.A.T. “But the network said no.” Urich recalls. Urich decided to ask his acting teacher Milton Katselas, for advice. “Go talk to the network and convince them they want you.”

Stunned, Urich told Katselas that no one tells the network anything-and certainly not whom they should cast.

Katselas was adamant. So Urich went to his agent. “He knew someone low on the totem pole, “Urich says, and-ultimately-one meeting led to another until Ulrich was meeting with the network Big Boys.

“Look, he told them, “I’ve been studying [acting] for more than three years, I’m a better actor now than I was before. “They listened. They were convinced. He got the job in S.W.A.T. And continued studying with Katselas. The teacher made Urich not only a stronger actor but a stronger man- a man willing to put his ego and his career on the line-and Ulrich trusted him as one would a wise father or a worshipped older brother. (Ulrich had pursued acting in class for some ten years before he hooked up with Katselas. But he credits Katselas as the liberator of his talent.)

It’s only one example-characteristic, however, -of just how important formal acting school can be to actors in television, the movies and theater.

Acting schools. Vocational schools for men and women who believe that one day they will charm millions-and, incidentally, make millions. Henry Winkler went to Yale School of Drama. Patrick Duffy was graduated from the University of Washington’s drama school. Steve Mc Queen studied with Lee Strasberg. Sally Field and Bea Arthur attended Actors Studio. Jack Klugman, Dennis Weaver, Paul Newman, Brenda Vaccaro, Valerie Harper, Cheryl Ladd, John Ritter. All of them spent hours, months, and years in classes given by top-rated teachers.

Acting classes are scheduled nearly around the clock and on Saturdays so that working actors can at least make an evening class. Good actors never stop learning; even though they might already have achieved distinction in, say a TV series. Sarah Purcell, a host of Real People and a pupil of actress-teacher Nina Foch, still goes to Foch’s Saturday-afternoon class “when I’m in town.” On occasion, actors will run to their teacher and scream for help if a part isn’t working out.

Indeed, some actor’s can’t function in front of the camera without their drama coaches behind it. Marylyn Monroe was a classic case. Her acting teacher, Paula Miller (then Mrs. Lee Strasberg), literally held her hand before the cameras rolled- and after the scene was shot. Last year, Raquel Welch took her acting teacher wit her to Montana for the filming of a three-hour TV-movie, “the Legend of Walks Far Woman” (which has still to find a broadcast berth).

In the past 50 years, a certain cachet has developed around actors who can tell the world that they have studied under the masters: Lee Strasberg. Stella Adler. Uta Hagen. Sanford Meisner. Herbert Berghof. The late Harold Clurman. They are all New Yorkers, and actors concerned about their dramatic competence travel or live in the East to be near their gurus (although Strasberg and Adler have also established workshops in Los Angeles).

On the W est. Coast, Foch, Katselas, Charles Nelson Reilly, Estelle Harman and dozen of lesser lights have their own acting schools. Not that it’s easy to study with the acknowledged luminaries among acting teachers. Being accepted by them is not unlike securing a White house Fellowship or making it into Harvard Medical Scholl. Actors rejected by well known teachers find their own level or answer every cattle call printed in the Hollywood trade papers.

Famous teachers charge accordingly. Stella Adler gets $ 375 for a three-times-a-week class (Acting Technique I) lasting 15 weeks. She often has as many as 400 people listening to her lecture. Her conservatory offers 16 other courses on acting at varying prices.

Most acting teachers base their work on a trilogy of books-how to books-, really-written by Konstatin Stanislavski, cofounder of the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898. and regarded by most actors as a deity.

Basing his teachings on Stanislavski, Lee a Strasberg probably has become much of a celebrity as some of his pupils. Is there anyone alive who hasn’t heard of “The Method”? Strasberg selected a couple of paragraphs in Stanislavski and made them the basis for many actors’ grasp upon their characters. It’s a simple matter- an actor reaches into his mind for a buried memory to stir his present emotions to a boil, where he can rage, cry, laugh or have a nervous breakdown, whatever the script calls for. Marlon Brando is a practitioner of this art. For years, actor’s influenced by Brando’s sensual, passionate, venerable approach to his art went around acting they way that they “felt,” using their “sense memory.” It made many other actors uncomfortable.

Uta Hagen, a Broadway actress who also appeared on TV and in films, once played opposite Anthony Quinn in the role Brando made famous in “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

Quinn was using method techniques. He “felt” –based on his emotional recollection of some previous personal experience-was what he “acted” on stage. That made for many a perilous evening for Uta Hagen, whose role called for her to struggle violently with him every night as he tried to rape her.

“I told him after every performance, ‘I put more makeup on my body than my face,’ because it was so black and blue by him. And he would say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry but I felt it.’

Then I would see him on stage, coming at me- the thumbs were up, the hands were ready. So after having asked him kindly, over and over and over, and his always responding kindly with, ‘I’m sorry, but I felt it, “one day he comes towards me…his thumbs were out…… and I’d really had it.” When Quinn seized her, she screamed, “Ow ow ow ow!”

Right in the middle of the scene. “He stopped and let me go and lost his lines and as we came off the stage he said, ‘You’re not suppose to say that there,’ and I said, “I’m sorry, but I felt it.’ He never hurt me again.”

Of course, not all who go to school become Broadway stars like Anthony Quinn and Uta Hagen. Some “acting schools” are little more than classes in overcoming teen-age-bashfulness, offered by the neighborhood YMCA-or opportunities for one-time high-school thespians to brush up for an appearance in local-theater productions. But for professional actors- or would be professional actors-any formal instruction can be beneficial.

So what, exactly do actors really do in acting school? Does one get a chance to try Iago?

Can one pick a conversation from Ibsen-say, Nora’s little chat with her husband before she slams the door on him and becomes Betty Friedan? Can one be a flame? A pair of golden slippers? A dancing princess? A Wedgwood plate?

John Ritter, the comic cut up in Three’s Company, attending acting classes at USC under Nina Foch’s benevolent attention. According to him she watched him being funny, making jokes-“I always went for the big laughs,” he says- being the comedian in her classes. Finally, Foch said, “I know you’re funny, you know you’re funny. Why don’t you notlet us know you’re funny-don’t go for laughs.”

And she gave him an acting exercise that he performed in front of the class. “I was supposed to be in the hospital; the action was supposed to be to get the nurse to come into the room. I had a pain in my eye. I’m trying to fight the pain. I plead for the nurse to come. She comes, but she is not authorized to give me anything. I pleeeaaadd with her…..” Ritter reduces his mated to tears. A new high for him. Now he’s always taking classes of one sort or another (body movement, for example). Practice, practice, practice. Limber up the old voice. The old face. The old speech. The old technique.

On Saturday afternoons in Los Angeles, Nina Foch conducts a “scenes” class. Preoccupied-looking students, bearing props for their scenes, straggle in. Foch enters, takes a seat in the front row, facing a make shift stage. One after another, anxious men and women, mostly young, act out scenes from little-, or well-known plays, while Foch criticizes and comments. Helpfully. Gently. Kindly.

A thin girl, looking like a teen-ager, recites Frankie’s famous speech from “The Member of the Wedding.” To a viewer, she seems self-conscious, strained, and uncomfortable. The piece-about belonging- expresses all those fragile, juvenile yearnings to be loved, to belong to someone, not to be lonely anymore. When Julie Harris, the original Frankie in the Broadway production, spoke it, people sobbed. It is perhaps as difficult to do as any of Kate’s speeches in “Taming of the Shrew.”

Carefully, Foch points out that Frankie is many people in one, crying out with all

Those selves. “There’s the boy in her, the girl, the adolescent, the old woman, the human being-and all of the adult people she is imitating, “she says. The actress listens so hard, she quivers. She nods, drinking in the advice. Next Saturday, having worked on it all week, she will repeat the scene. “They always get better, not worse, “says Foci.”

Foch, like any decent coach, is personally interested in her pupils, intent on drawing from them their sweet melodies, but she often may have a problem building up an actor’s ego, as do many such mentors.

It’s amazing how many students come into my shop like pianos that have been tampered with, the lid shut down; they’ve been muted; they’ve been told not to ….” Says acting teacher Milton Katselas.

For Jessica Walter, a guest star in numberless contemporary series and a semi-regular in Trapper John, M.D. (Trapper’s on again-off again wife) attending Katselas’s classes is to “to feel like an artist again. You can do that only if you go out on a limb. One can become robot-like, cranking it out on TV.”

Miss Walter is happy brushing up her technique, in part because she feels she is allowed to fail. “Professionally, you can’t risk failure in front of the camera; I can do thing in class that I would never get hired for. I can do Juliet. No one would hire me for Juliet.”

As many actors do, and have done for centuries, Jessica Walter has her own method. While doing the Ethel Barrymore role in the “The Royal Family,” a slightly disguised play about the famous theater family, she found she couldn’t quite handle the character. “I didn’t know where to begin. The woman was the essence of theatricality [whereas Walter herself is shy]. I knew that was required but not how to get it. Then I found out that, at the first entrance, my character had just come from a boxing lesson. So I took boxing lessons and worked on the physicality of it. Every night I had a 15-minute sparring sessions before I entered.”

Another actor, a long time TV, film and Broadway worthy, says he tried several acting classes. “Most of it was a distortion of Stanislavski methods. They were more group therapy sessions. If you’re going to have group-therapy, you should have a person equipped to deal with neuroses. These fragile little egos walk in and audition for Actors Studio. Strasberg makes them scream and cry. You can’t play with the human psyche like that.”