Character Actors' Hard Life

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 201, 26 August 1939, Page 7

Character Actors' Hard Life

CHANCE rules the lives of , many of the stars, and their tenure of fame, it seems, is comparatively brief. Snow White will probably not be seen again in films. Shirley Temple cannot always be ten. Character actor* have more hope. They nre incessantly working, ami all the time have to play something besides themselves. Akiin Tamiroff, for example, played a Cossack in "Kscape from Yesterday." He is a Russia rj, l»lit that did not make the portrayal of a Cossack any ensier, because there is not much Cowmrk in his background. He set out to he nn oil engineer but. instead became one of the pillars of the Moscow Art Theatre. Those Muscovite players acted mostly on a dnrkened stage in long, sepulchral with everybody sitting in gloom, faces resting on their" hands, littering despondent speeches in a whisper. Many people thought they were marvellous. So did Tamiroff; but when he got to Hollywood he found film acting was something very different. and lie had to ellmb roofs, bellow and grimace in closeBJW. riimiroff thinks it is easier to act in Shakespeare and Chekov than in ft picture. Those are static in print, but a film script is always being changed. At two weeks' notice he was given a part In "The Buccaneer." a Napoleonic gunner turned pirate. He memorised the ipeeches and worked off 401b until he *n* as thin as a whippet. Then just before the cameras turned, he found he had to study new lines and pad out to the girth of Falstaff! Before that he had been given a deaf WUte role, and he mastered the deaf •nd dumb language, only to find he had to study it all over again in English, 'or three months he scraped on a fiddle, practising two hours a night, to the pief of neighbours, and he suffered quite

A Tittle himself, to fit himself for a violinist role. Then the director decided to give the music distinction hv having it introduced by a qualified musician. In "The (Jeneral Died at Dawn," Akim Tarniroff had the title role and studied the art of chop-stick manipulation by dining four night* a week at a Chinese restaurant. He does not like Chinese food, or even Russian food, for tliat matter, but pood, old-fashioned plain stuff. It was all trouble lost, since in the film he was given a knife and fork. Hi« latest is that of a "bullwhacker" in Cecil B. de Mille's "Union Pacific." A bullwhacker is a "terror with the bullwhip." a "tough egg" who can snap off your cigarette ash with the greatest of ease. ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ /"HVIXfr Henry Fonda his longest cinema role to date —he did not have a single day off during filming, appearing in almost every scene —Darryl F. Zan tick's "Young Air. Lincoln ' presents a picture of Lincoln, not as the (ireat Emancipator, President in the critical Civil War days, but of the witty, romantic young lawyer known to everybody in the backwoods town of Springfield, Illinois, who wrestled with the boys, told funny stories, and was in love. A highlight, of the story is the famous "moonlight murder" trial, which offered young Lincoln his first real test, in which he won a. mother's undying devotion by hi* gnllant and brilliant defence of her two accused sons.