Kathleen Turner on Acting

Conversations about Film, Television, and Theater

Kathleen Turner, Dustin Morrow

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781510735484
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Arte dramático americano

Few actors have had a career as dynamic as that Kathleen Turner's; success has followed her from the television screen to major blockbusters, from indie films to the theater stage. Over her forty-year career, Turner has developed an instinctual knowledge of what it takes to be a successful actor, and, in her conversations with esteemed film professor Dustin Morrow, she shares these lessons with the world. With her iconic wit on full display, Turner dazzles readers with her shrewd insights on the craft of acting and charming anecdotes from her own storied career. Touching on each of her roles, she expounds on the lessons she's learned and describes her journey of discovery in the world of acting. An epic and intense one-on-one master class in acting from the best teacher imaginable, Kathleen Turner on Acting is a must for acting and directing students of every age, established actors and directors, filmmakers, theater pros, and artists of every stripe.

USING THE VOICE

DUSTIN MORROW I won’t lie, one of the small pleasures of having these long conversations has just been listening to your voice.

KATHLEEN TURNER Gee, I haven’t heard that before!

D.M. If smoke had sound . . .

K.T. Okay, let’s talk about it.

D.M. Has it always been deep?

K.T. Always. Always. When I was a child they made me sing with the boys section in choir at church!

D.M. I imagine that when many people hear your name, the first thing they think of is your voice. Do you think the voice is hard to think objectively about, especially for a developing actor, since your voice is something you have carried with you for every second of your life? Is it something that you really have to learn to listen to?

K.T. Oh yeah, definitely. The first realization you have to come to when you begin to work on your voice is that what you hear in your head is not what anyone else hears. All you really have to do to understand that is record yourself and listen to your playback. You realize very quickly that the difference between what you hear and what everyone else hears is significant, and you must take that into account in thinking about how you want to be heard. The way you think you sound, and the way you actually sound, are very, very different.

D.M. That’s something we all forget about until we do hear ourselves in a recording. Many people, listening to a recording, can’t stand the sound of their own voice. Me included.

K.T. What’s wrong with your voice? You have a lovely voice.

D.M. Thanks. I guess the slightly nasal Midwestern flatness of it bothers me. But I don’t hear it or notice it unless I’m listening to a recording of myself.

K.T. Of course. Nobody does. Imagine the hell of walking around and disliking the sound of your own voice all the time.

D.M. What else do actors need to think about with regard to the voice?

K.T. Secondly, you must realize that the entire oral cavity—the back of your mouth, the throat, up past the sinuses, is all muscle that is expandable and retractable. There are literally exercises that you can do to stretch the muscles in your mouth.

To begin with, a simple stretch anyone can do, is to take a really huge yawn, open up and you feel how the back of your mouth lifts up, widens, in both directions—up and down and side to side. Memorize how that stretch feels and work it, work it, work it. As you would build any muscle, you will work that stretch so that when you want it, you can just go to it without actually having to work up a genuine yawn. Warm ups are important, warming up your voice is essential.

D.M. What are the things that you will do to warm up?

K.T. Begin with the vowel sounds, place them in the very front of your mouth, place them in the middle of your mouth, then place them at the back of your mouth. Work the consonants, especially the T’s, the D’s, the F’s, and work the softer letters like the M’s, the S’s, and the V’s. You don’t want to allow much air to escape as you work the letters, so you want to be sure, for example, that your teeth are well-done so that you don’t have leakage through the teeth that you don’t want. I found, at one point, during the onset of the rheumatoid arthritis that my jaw was so affected that I was losing air through my teeth. My teeth were no longer meeting and matching and I had to have some of my back teeth ground down because my bite had changed significantly.

D.M. I imagine most actors just want good matching teeth for cosmetic reasons.

K.T. Yes, but even more important than what they look like is what the teeth do to the voice. There are plenty of great actors with questionable looking teeth, but their teeth aren’t messed up in such a way as they are letting air escape and screw up the voice. Also, if you have an underbite or an overbite, you need to learn how to compensate for it as your voice is concerned. You may need to do something with your jaw that most actors don’t have to do.

You also want to treat all of your oral and nasal cavities well, and use saline solutions several times a day, whether you feel you need them or not. They hydrate all of the tissue around your nose and throat. When that tissue dries out, that’s when you start to force a voice, force a sound, and you literally risk tearing or damaging some of the tissue around your throat. Ideally you should never, ever feel your voice in your throat unless you mean to scream or summon a really guttural sound because the tissues in the throat are so fragile. You can inflame or tear them very, very easily. One scream is not worth not being able to talk, so if for example in a play you have a scene where your character is in terror, say, or in anger, you have to be careful to place that scream well or decide how much it’s going to cost you.

So some nights you might modulate it, or maybe on Sunday matinee you will give it your all because you’ve got a day to recover from it before the next performance. It’s not that you want to pull back on your performance, but you do have to choose how much to use as it will affect how you do the play the next day.

It’s the same thing in film in that you can easily blow out your voice there as well. Although film doesn’t make the same demands on the voice because of all of the microphone placement possibilities, the potential is still there to mess up your voice.

D.M. Actors could probably learn a great deal from singers.

K.T. Yes, and vice versa. One interesting thing is that I have talked to so many singers who say that singing is a lot easier to do, to sing eight shows a week, than to speak in eight shows a week. That’s because singing requires a very specific placement of the voice, and you have so many more choices in speech than you do in singing in terms of placement. There’s much more variability. You tend to make more mistakes in speech so you have to learn exactly where to put the voice so that you protect it.

It’s a true discipline and it should be absolutely studied, it should be practiced and practiced and practiced and practiced. You should never, ever feel that you have it down and that you don’t have to worry about it again. That’s rubbish, because every time you go into eight shows a week you have got to protect that voice. Vocal rest is imperative, you have to think about exactly how much you talk on a working day. You don’t sit around chattering all the time because you are using up your voice. You have to think of it as a resource, but a limited resource. It’s not unending. There’s no bottomless reservoir of voice. There really is a limit to how much one could or should talk in order to maintain the quality of the voice.

D.M. I know that food and beverages will affect a voice, too.

K.T. Absolutely. I avoid acids on performance days, so no citrus juices. I don’t have orange juice or grapefruit juice or lemonade or anything like that. Those things can strip the membrane from your throat. Don’t have too much coffee as that also carries a great amount of acidic influence. At the same time, on the other hand, you don’t want to go too far toward a base. For example, you don’t want dairy before a show because it coats the vocal chords and then you have to clear them before the show and that’s no fun. You don’t want chocolate because chocolate will clog up your chords. It really is that specific. Every actor should have a list of what they can and can’t eat and drink before a performance.

D.M. Are there elements of a voice that you think are more important than others? When you start talking about things like tempo and rhythm, articulation, pronunciation, pitch . . .

K.T. Well, the important thing to remember is that all of those things are tied to each other. Each affects the other. And even more outwardly, the voice is connected to what you do with all of the muscles in your body. Many people think that they can “divy up” their bodily functions. Like, that they sit down and relax without putting pressure on their head, or on their breathing. Or that they can go for a ten-mile run and “rest their voice.” You may not be using your voice while running, but you better believe that something is happening to it. You can’t compartmentalize your system in that way. Your body, from head to toe, is like a pond—any disturbance, any action or inaction, is going to send out ripples of waves that are going to effect every other part of the system.

Now. Having said that, articulation will carry you through a lot because ideally the first thing you want as an actor is to be understood, to have the words understood. A lot of American actors struggle with that, actually. Maggie Smith saw Virginia Woolf and came backstage and said, in perfect Maggie Smith style, “Darling, I understood every word! That is so rare in America!”

So your first goal should be articulation, hitting your con­sonants. I, of course, much prefer to seek lower tones because that works for my voice. Because higher frequencies carry better than lower, more stretched frequencies, I have some additional work to do with my voice. Lower tones are a longer, lower frequency than higher, a soprano will have a much tighter sound wave than a base. So I may have to add volume to that base that a soprano will carry automatically because of the length of the sound wave.

So I have to think of that. It’s all about learning the limitations and possibilities of your individual voice, and tracking how it changes. My voice has always been low, but now it’s even lower than it was when I started out as an actor. It’s a science. It’s cool. Getting to know your voice and what you can do with it is one of the joys of acting.

D.M. How often do you take stock of, really reassess your voice?

K.T. With each new job. I do it again for each new role, because I have to do it in the context of what needs to be highlighted for every play and every film. One thing that’s fun about film is that you can sink down into almost nothing, you can get very small and quiet with your voice and it will ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• The Conversations
• Directing Yourself
• Working with Directors
• Collaborating with Other Artists
• In the Beginning . . .
• Lessons Learned from Working in Television
• Choosing Roles
• Body Heat
• The Man with Two Brains
• Romancing the Stone
• Crimes of Passion
• Prizzi’s Honor
• Peggy Sue Got Married
• The Accidental Tourist
• The War of the Roses
• Serial Mom
• The Virgin Suicides
• The Perfect Family
• Working with Edgy Material
• Acting in Film
• The Stage Versus the Screen
• Acting in the Theater
• The Intimacy of the Theater
• Camille
• Reading Reviews
• The Graduate
• Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
• Indiscretions
• Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
• High
• Red Hot Patriot
• Mother Courage and Her Children
• The Year of Magical Thinking
• The Life of an Actor
• Fame, Aging and Vanity
• Using the Voice
• Advice for Developing Actors
• Studying Acting
• The Process of Auditioning
• Dealing with Rejection
• Working in the Industry
• Teaching Acting
• Acting and Daily Life
• Looking Ahead and Moving Forward
• A Closer Look at the Film Performances
• Selected Stage Credits
• Selected Film Credits
• Selected Television and Radio Credits
• About the Authors
• Sources
• Acknowledgments