Character Building and What Makes a Truly Great Actor

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Character building and what makes a truly great actor What makes an actor truly great? The actor's job is to bring a scripted character to life. RADA's Dee Cannon outlines 10 questions that must be addressed in order to create a fully-realised three-dimensional person Dee Cannon and Lyn Gardner The Guardian, Saturday 9 May 2009 Retrieved from http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/may/09/character-building-great-actor on 21, March 2013 Acting technique is paramount to anyone wanting to be a serious actor. It's quite easy to imitate a character or even an emotion, but where's the depth in that? How can you sustain or repeat again what you might have found intuitively? Do you even know what you did or how you did it? The technique, however, will help you find a character, which in turn informs how you approach the text/script/written word. How do you bring the dialogue alive? How do you know what choices to make? The goal of a trained actor is to become a fully realised three-dimensional character, with a rich backstory. I must believe the character you play is truthful and not a cliche, a caricature, a thin external representation of someone who barely resembles a human being. I must believe what you say is real and that you're not reciting, spouting or commenting. In order to help you understand, I will lay out the backbone of what I teach at RADA and around the world to professional and student actors alike. This is based around Stanislavski's acting technique and his seven questions which, over the years, I have adapted into 10 key acting questions every actor should answer in order to be a fully rounded and connected actor. 1. Who am I? 2. Where am I? 3. When is it? 4. Where have I just come from? 5. What do I want? 6. Why do I want it? 7. Why do I want it now? 8. What will happen if I don't get it now? 9.

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