No need for false modesty for the actor who does not sing, for he dances, how he dances, and he plays, he can play! He hardly needs touch Cyd, they are bound by powers beyond those our tactile senses can understand. See his skepticism, see how their lips never meet, see the dimples form at the corners of his mouth, how he leads, how she follows each step, action, reaction, stimulus, response. Now his hand flat on the small of her back, now the twirling of her dress, now the smile that cracks her lips, he shows us that he is won. We are lost in the part of his hair.
The actor wears uncertainty, his lips part but form no words, his soft grey suit hugs his athletic shoulders and hides his lithe, dancer’s build. The band strikes up and he hammers out the chords, smoke in his face—are the others in the cantina skeptical, curious, or taken in by the performance? A quick run up the scale, his jaw firm, his eyes quiet, he looks into the distance, ignoring the rapt audience. He plays against the swelling strings, alternating octaves and sevenths. The locals are dead-eyed, they know not what they are hearing in the swift counterpoint. He works from the ends of the keyboard inward, no key off-limits, none too distant, and he bends his body over the keys, as if to find leverage for the final strains. The actor plays, he plays!
He can tell you about love, assuming you are hearing everything he says for the first time. He does not sing, and it’s a waste of his speaking voice, the one that makes you feel like a confidant and a student at once, but he will respond to the task with aplomb. The Latin from Staten Island? Never! He is a grandchild of Stanislavksy, he is the pupil, watching always the eyes of his screenmates, he is “Romantic,” and no smile or glance is wasted—let Lana, or Lena, smile instead. His method is to translate all acting into life, as he can best comprehend it in terms of how he is to live. Fakery does not bother him, but he must attend to his task in dead-set earnest, even in moments which require levity. His humor is borne of gravitas, and he will explain it to you the best he can.
One of the greatest, possibly. Don Juan in Hell, for certain.
Or is it Don Quixote? Does he represent the fantasy behind the fantasy, and do we remember him in his twilight only? The actor would be the first to say: better to be remembered at all. Every step in this life carries with it the risk of not being remembered, in word or in deed, and we must see that the risk does not paralyze us, fix us to a spot. At the very least, let no one else tell us how we are to be remembered, because that nearly ensures we will not be at all. To live up to another’s concept of your own memory: what a mistake.
Who are “we,” anyway, the other nosotros, who find fellowship in a savvy, knowing smile? Why, we are all the actor, who fought bulls and swept up fair-skinned starlets in the controlled madness of his confident stride and curious, furtive glances.
He found Kabuki, so that we did not have to. Stereotypes were a plaything to him, a costume to be put on and taken off, sure, but also a game which could be won or lost. How does a personality so great compress itself into a character so common, so relatable? Well, you do it every day, and so do I, but he does not! It is impossible, you see, and thus not worthy of the actor’s attention. He reminds us: things that are very very great can be very very bad. He says:
As a lion, I felt pretty good, but as a woman, it was difficult. The truth in his words is staggering, leaves us perplexed and inspired in equal measure. The demands of the craft, the craft of life, that is, are as great as we are willing to take on. There is always the easy out, after all, lest we delude ourselves that our individual lives are so important and vital on their own. The rumors and the inspirational posters are wrong: they are not. But the actor, the actor! An actor never plays, the result, he says, knowing that we do that all the time. Play the result. Assume what is likely to happen, in some cases is almost certain to happen, and play that. The highest and lowest points of your life were playing the result. You didn’t give a dance lesson to Rita Moreno, but you would have, and it would have seemed completely natural. She wasn’t any better or worse than the other starlets—or actually, perhaps she was? Yes, she was a dancer, always. But the actor cannot play the result. You play, he says, the continuity, you orchestrate the scene, find the highs and lows. It seems like an illusion when the actor describes it, a fiction, but it is one thing to see it on the screen, and another to live it, as he surely did. We live it to, we nosotros, and there are no guarantees in our orchestration either.
He says, I don’t know what is going to happen when I walk off the set, which is of course true, or a truism, anyway. He says, but I know me, and I know how I will react, which seems less true, or at least less broadly applicable. To we, that is. He says, an evil man does not know he is an evil man, but we protest: we want at least some of our evil men to know. Either because we tell them and they believe it, or they are hit with a bolt of realization, or they know from birth, or because they are we, in fact. The actor consoles, effortlessly, he finds comfort in a patent fact, patent because he says so, and he says so because he lived it.
