A friend tells me the hotel heiress and porn queen Paris Hilton is walking around LA at the moment with a copy of Ivana Chubbock’s The Power of the Actor in her unworked mitts. Presumably she’s boning up on a few tricks to get her through the unpromising-titled film she’s working on The Hottie and the Nottie in which a girl refuses to marry her long-time boyfriend until he can find the perfect match for her ugly best friend. The plot sounds faintly young Martin Amis (distaff side) but for the cast and the rest.
Chubbock is a highly regarded Hollywood acting coach – and with testimonials from the likes of Halle Berry, Beyonce, Brad Pitt et al she’s doing something right. “Aristotle defined the struggle of the individual to win as the essence of all drama more than two thousand years ago. Overcoming and winning against all the hurdles and conflicts of life is what makes dynamic people,” Chubbock writes of her ethos. “Every actor knows that discovering and understanding your personal pain is an inherent part of the acting process.”
Paris must surely start at a disadvantage since unearned riches and fame have been hers as birthright. Perhaps that’s her challenge in life: to find the personal pain that arises from not having personal pain because without personal pain you can’t be a credible fellow sufferer for acting purposes. This must count as a hurdle of sorts, a “conflict of life,” as Chubbock calls it. Princess Margaret had a similar problem but solved it by marrying a bisexual artist as solipsistic as she and ruining her health on fags and gin. By life’s end she had accumulated a lot of personal pain but then died before she could do anything with it. She liked singing. What might have been - the Royal Sparrow?
Perhaps Paris should read a Margaret bio before embarking on a course of self-created pain. For spoilt bitches philanthropy is a painless preferred option – Brooke Astor (still going at 104) did it right.
For more on the Chubb technique to capitalise on your personal pain follow this link.
5 comments:
<< Princess Margaret had a similar problem but solved it by marrying a bisexual artist as solipsistic as she and ruining her health on fags and gin. By life’s end she had accumulated a lot of personal pain but then died before she could do anything with it.>>
Which proves that it's not the pain that makes the artist, I guess. Chubbock’s 'romantic' theory might work for some 'lunar' actors, though, or for a certain type of dark parts they'd have to play. But I'd like to hear the views of a 'solar' actor like Robert Redford on this topic.
Wasn't it The New Statesman which ran a competition for unlikely book titles that was won by "My Struggle, by Martin Amis"? Junior succeeded despite an absence of hardship. Your mention of him reminded me of that comp.
Alan Bennett said something typically wry about an artist's grist and that Larkin opening line about one's begetters. He said that his parents hadn't fucked him up. However, he was as a consequence deprived of material and interesting hang-ups. Which meant of course as a writer his parents had actually "fucked him up".
Oh Susan, stop it.
You chose that word especially for me, didn't you, Arcati ? ;-)
Oh Duralex, stop it.
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