Actorviews (1923)

312 Actorviews night school, but she does not talk readily of its ways and means. She has no glib maxims on acting, no frothy formulas. I once heard her say, when we were at a play together where a player had been applauded on his exit, “It’s an actor’s own fault when the audience applauds him!” But I don’t think I ever have heard her say that acting is so or such. “Do characters come to you in flashes, or bit by bit?” I asked. And she just looked at me out of her large violet-blue eyes, a little pleadingly, perhaps, to say this was a dull and heavy price to pay for a cup of tea. But I persisted. “How was it with Becky Sharp?” “ Becky jumped at me out of the pages of the book. But many characters,” she went on slowly (for her), “have to be made . . . when the author hasn’t been vivid ... as Ibsen is vivid ... I was rereading him last Summer . . . ‘Rosmersholm,’ ‘Hedda Gabler* and ‘The Pillars of Society’ ... oh, it was bracing !” “You were rather ‘off’ Mr. Ibsen last time we talked,” I rather pusillanimously reminded. “Possibly. It was no doubt the insolence of immaturity.” “He has become important to you again?” “Much more important than ever. I see things in ‘Rosmersholm’ that makes me feel I must have been blind. And in ‘The Pillars’ ! That little bit of a tiny part of Lona Hessel ! She’s very short, but the most beautiful role in all literature; she seems to me to be the last word in purest womanhood. . . . Yes, Ibsen was much more interesting to me last Summer. But that, you see, was because I was older! . . . Youth!” she derided “Fiddlesticks!” “Tell me,” I said, very seriously, “of your first remembered thrill in the theater.”