Maureen Stapleton on Acting
"Memory. Empathy. A weird sort of courage that lets you think you can get up and do it. That you should be allowed to do it. You can’t teach that."
Maureen Stapleton
Lenox, Massachusetts, 1991
I really hate to talk about acting. You keep asking all these questions about acting. How I did this. How I did that. I know some of them are from Tennessee [Williams]. I know because he would ask me these questions, hoping it would help him write, when what he needed to do was write! Just fucking write! That’s the secret. That’s the plan. Just write! Just act! God, he could put things off.
Who the fuck knows anything? You ask me how I did the scene in Airport. Well, I mean, it’s on the page. It’s in the face of Van Heflin. I grew up loving Van Heflin in the movies, and there he was, across from me, acting with me. He was older; he was frail. Something was wrong with him. I don’t know. He was lovely, but he was weak somehow, afraid. I get that. He was playing a sad man, and I loved him. I loved the man and I loved Van Heflin. How hard is that? You just love the man and you love Van Heflin. Then the man you love causes a fucking plane to explode, and you feel responsible, because maybe you didn’t love him enough to keep him from being a drunk failure who could only provide for you by blowing up a plane and getting insurance money. That’s sad! That’s life. And the director [George Seaton] was a nice man, and he set everything up, and he let us do it. How hard is that? Where did it come from? I don’t know. I think I remembered my mother digging for coins so that I could go to the movies, and so when my character—a dive waitress—digs into her tips to give her sad husband some money, it just pierced my heart, you know? Why is that hard to get? I felt something sweet, a memory, and I passed it on to Van. I had a memory. Is that the Method? I don’t know.
I could never teach acting, because I don’t know how you can do that. You work at it. You do a scene, and people tell you if it flies or it dies. Memory. Empathy. A weird sort of courage that lets you think you can get up and do it. That you should be allowed to do it. You can’t teach that. You just keep doing it. You look for encouragement. But the character is in the words, and the emotions are in your memory. If I’ve turned things down or if I’ve been bad in things—and I’ve been bad in things—it’s because I couldn’t reach a memory of mine that matched the memory of the woman I was supposed to be playing. So then it was mimicry, and mimicry is bullshit.
Enough with the acting!