Don't Aim for Fame

The Words of Wisdom this week are Don't Aim for Fame. This may seem strange in a business in which people may become extremely famous, in a world that worships celebrity as never before. But fame - don't aim for it.

For one thing dreaming of success doesn't help you to attain it. You may be sure that the medal winners at the 2012 Olympics are not daydreaming of standing on the podium. Thry are too busy visualising their next hard session on the track. We have all heard angry X Factor parents complain to Simon Cowell "You've destroyed her dream," but that's all it was - a dream - and dreams disappear when you wake up to reality. Focus on the work, not the reward.

Of course, if you do well and are successful, particularly in the performing arts or sport, this tends towards your being known to a lot of people, but I can assure you that this is not a blessing but a curse. It's the penalty you have to pay for being successful.

Think what it's like: you can't go anywhere you want without people recognising you and bothering you. Any new person you meet may just want to be part of the glitter of your fame and that's why they're smarming up to you. If anything happens in your life the paparazzi will be on your doorstep and you won't be able to step out of your house without being mobbed. If you're in a soap, people will confuse you with the character you play and give you unwanted advice about what should happen next in the plot. You will have to put up with the same jokes and catchphrases repeated again and again and again.

Some members of the public believe they are licensed to be as rude to you as they like: "It's us that put them there" they reason. Wherever you are in the world, someone will come up to you and ask you for an autograph, a donation, an opinion or a favour. And if your fame depends on public taste, it can disappear like turning off a tap. Some people will hate you.

Worse still is to use your family for publicity. Talk about your marriage, or your home, or your child's illness and you will have made it public property and created public interest. When your marriage goes wrong there will be no hiding from the attention of the red-top tabloids.

Many people who seek for fame have a narcissistic tendency and confuse the love of an audience with the love of a person. If they are successful this tendency is reinforced. See the rage of a TV personality when his or her show is axed. It's not just the loss of money or opportunities for achievement: they feel it as a cruel withdrawal of love. Hell hath no fury like a celebrity scorned. Do you want to be at the mercy of the uncaring audience?

The lives of celebrities are governed by fear: the fear of loss of celebrity. Don't Aim for Fame.

Storytelling is important

The Words of Wisdom this week are Storytelling is Important. Storytelling includes the production of tales, myths, books and, importantly for us, plays and films. Anything with a narrative.

The human mind has a very strong tendency to perceive pattern, even where none really exists: we see the stars forming constellations, we see a face in the froth on a cup of coffee, we make a choice of lottery numbers although the machinery is designed to make every number equally likely to appear. It's the way we organise our thoughts and also our actions. Pattern.

Events in a real or imaginary life are thus turned into a narrative that makes them have meaning for us. That is story. And the remarkable fact is that every single culture on Earth has story as part of its inheritance, story told or acted out, often at great cost. It must, therefore. be of great value to a society to have this, because otherwise cultures not spending so much on story would take over from those burdened by its cost and the energy involved in producing it.

So what is the advantage of having story? It is surely because story enables us to transmit values, morals and customs and to handle change. Without it and its continual renewal, our society would fall apart and decay. That's why plays and films (and music incidentally) are important and a life devoted to them is not a waste of time.

Finally, there are two other phenomena which appear in every culture on Earth, despite their great cost, and which therefore must be of great adaptive value to us. They are religion and sport. Every culture has religion, of one sort or another, and every culture has sport. We'll try and explain this in a future post. Meanwhile, Storytelling is Important.

Turn off your mobile phone

The Words of Wisdom this week are very simple: Turn off your mobile phone. There are a few things which are important in an actor's life: one is auditioning. An actor is being auditioned by an important director for a major part; they are getting on rather well - then his phone rings. The spell is broken. What the ringing phone tells the director is that the actor has left his phone on because he considers that there are other more important things in his life than this audition. The director feels offended and the actor doesn't get the part.

Worse still would be for the actor to actually answer the call. Believe me, it has happened!

As well as in an audition, the same rule applies when rehearsing or taking a class. It's simple good manners to give your full attention to the task in hand and, in the age where we all have 24 hour connectivity, it's a good principle to make your phone your servant, not your master. Use it when you want to use it, not when it wants to use you. Turn off your mobile phone.

Don't smoke!

The Words of Wisdom this week are very simple.

Don't smoke!

As an actor one of your main assets is your voice. The easiest way to damage it is by smoking. Don't smoke!

You'll know about the health factors: lung cancer and other cancers, heart disease, emphysema, chronic bronchitis - all nasty diseases that you would want to avoid. Don't smoke!

Ever seen a smoker trying to run? Breathing more deeply they dislodge the tar buried in their lungs. It rises into their throat and they suffer a coughing fit as they try to clear it and have to stop. Don't smoke!

And then there are the wicked tobacco companies, making money out of a drug more addictive than heroin. Why put money in their pockets? Don't smoke!

Smokers have years taken off their lives. A recent study of 180 people aged 100 and over found that one, yes just one of them, smoked. About 20 had smoked in the past but had given it up. The remainder had never smoed in their whole life. So if you want to live long and healthily: don't smoke!

And, if you are afflicted by this addiction Allen Carr's Easy Way to Stop Smoking is recommended.

But, best of all: don't smoke!

Accents: exaggerate when learning, underplay when performing.

An actor should never stop exercising his or her voice. Apart from working on the tone of the voice, developing projection and maintaining clear diction, there is the whole area of dialects and accents to consider. (The meanings of these two words overlap, but generally a dialect is a different version of a mother tongue, depending on the country or area someone comes from, while an accent either refers to someone using a foreign language or the voice of a particular person.) Although actors are usually cast for parts which use their own accent, this is not always the case and, in any case, the more you learn about voice and speech the better.

The main way in which accents vary is in the actual sounds made in pronouncing the vowels and consonants: for example, whether the 'r' is rolled in a word like 'worse', whether the 'a' is long or short in 'path' whether the 't' is pronounced in 'brighten.' But there are many other important differences: how much stress or emphasis there is on individual syllables (French speakers, for example, speak with very little stress), what is the characteristic pitch, how much of a musical intonation is present, what is the typical tone (often throaty in city dwellers) what is the pace (often slow in country people) how precisely do people speak.

The throatiness factor is an interesting one. The cockney accent, from London, and the Bronx accent from New York, share this and, presumably, people in those places have for generations closed their throats when speaking, to protect themselves from the polluted air of the big city. However, there is a new kind of throatiness heard from fashionable Californians - sample 'The Hills' to hear it - and I have no idea why this should have happened, but then there is no accounting for fashion, is there.

There is endless fascination in how people speak and many subtleties. For example, doctors and lawyers speak slightly differently from each other, no doubt because of their different roles in life. Neither do builders speak like sales staff. There is also a lot of fun to be had in 'doing' voices and developing characters who speak in different ways. I was lucky enough to have been brought up in the golden age of radio comedy, listening to classic shows such as 'Take it from Here', 'The Goon Show' and 'Hancock's Half Hour.' I found that when I got into school the next day I could imitate what I'd heard the night before and add to it as well. I found I could make people laugh and this was one of the first things that turned me on to theatre.

The best way to learn an accent is from someone who speaks with that accent or by going to the area where that accent is spoken. Failing that, listen to recordings and talk back to them (the talking back is very important.) You are using the power of imitation, which is an important part of the learning process. When a whole cast have to speak with an accent they can improvise together using it and catch it from each otherlike a disease.

One final Word of Wisdom: when learning an accent, exaggerate it: this accelerates the learning process because you are stretchiing yourself. When using an accent in performance, underplay it because accents are more subtle than you think and you don't want to fall into a 'stage' caricature version. Accents: exaggerate when learning, underplay when performing.

99% isn't good enough

I first became aware of a special significance of the number 99% when I was working as an agent. Sometimes an actor would go for an audition and the next day we'd get an exciting call from the casting director. "We really like xyz" she would say "can't make an offer yet, but it's 99%." This happened a number of times, including one case I particularly remember of a lead role in a big movie playing opposite Bob Hoskins. After a while I noticed that this '99%' never turned into 100%. No-one whose chances were described as 99% ever actually got the part. 99% wasn't even 50:50. It was either that they were very good but not exactly right for the part or that they were very good but the 'money,' the film's backers, wouldn't like them. Lesson: nothing's certain till it's certain and don't count your chickens till they're hatched.

About this time I put up a notice in my office reading '99% isn't good enough.' This was a reminder for myself as well as for anyone else. Some people thought that it was a plea for perfectionism, but it didn't say 'Only 100% is good enough.' That would be foolish. Nobody's perfect. No-one in the real world is 100%. Finally it was the songwriter Alan Blaikley who got it right. The 99% was for effort. If you're going to achieve anything worthwhile in life, aim for the maximum you can. Commit yourself to whatever you are trying to do. There is no guarantee of success, but at least if you fail you will know you didn't fail for want of trying.

So the Words of Wisdom this week are 99% isn't good enough.

Learn to speak RP

The Words of Wisdom this week are Learn to speak RP. RP (Received Pronunciation), sometimes known as Standard English, is the version of the English language taught as correct by language teachers. It is, by and large, the speech of educated people in the South East of England. There can be no doubt that, whatever dialect or accent you have grown up speaking, your casting opportunities as an actor will be greatly increased if you can also speak RP.

Now your dialect or accent is an important part of your identity and I am not in favour of people changing the way they speak with their family and friends. Old fashioned elocution teachers would say things like 'He has a dreadful Birmingham accent, we must knock that out of him.' Well, I think that's pretty rude. What's wrong with speaking with the tones of the place you come from? But in the workplace something closer to RP may be required, to prevent the speaker from being disadvantaged, so, as a public speaking coach I try to teach 'Professional English,' close enough to RP for any accent not to be a distraction.

So how did RP become dominant over every other version of British English, so highly favoured and such an important class indicator? This makes for quite an interesting story. It starts with the growth of two things in the nineteenth century, the railway system and the great public schools. The public schools, Eton, Harrow, Winchester and so on, had mostly been founded in earlier centuries, educating boys on a local scale. When the railways came, the schools started to attract pupils from further afield and grew rapidly in size and number. They became the places where the sons of the aristocracy, the gentry and the professions sent their sons to board and be educated. Now people from different parts of the country had mixed before in the armed forces and at the universities, but they were older and their accents more fixed. At the schools boys started at about the age of thirteen and, being from different parts of the country, started speaking amongst themselves in a style which was not that of any one area, but a sort of average of all of them, with the South East predominant because that was where the capital was. RP was born. Now of course, when these boys grew up, they tended to become important people, in the highest ranks of society, with all the top jobs, and the way they spoke was the indication of how they'd been educated, so everyone else who wanted to get on in life had a strong incentive to learn to sound the same. RP became regarded as the best sort of English.

Coming up to date, it's interesting that, generation by generation, accents have become less marked. This is surely because of the mass media: we all grow up hearing the same voices on television, so a further averaging is taking place and we tend to speak more and more alike. In some ways that's a good thing but it also means that we have lost a lot of local colour. The exceptions to the general rule are interesting too: when people want to emphasise their cultural identity they invariably choose to speak very differently from the general run.

Learn to speak RP.