Acting Style
One of Massey's assets as an actress was her 'extraordinary voice... it was so listenable.' Although Massey's parts were varied, her 'cut-glass English accent, conveyed a cold and repressed character on screen'. On the stage, a number of her performances were said to be characterised by 'stillness', such as the National Theatre's production of Harold Pinter's A Kind of Alaska.
She was known for a high level of preparation and effort, with one producer saying that she had a practice of using five different coloured pens on scripts to mark out 'breaths and pauses' and the development of a scene, for example 'if a phrase early in a paragraph was going to be picked up again later, she would highlight those two bits in the same colour, so that it would remind her that that first phrase was referring to something later.'
Read more about this topic: Anna Massey
Famous quotes containing the words acting and/or style:
“We don’t want bores in the theatre. We don’t want standardised acting, standard actors with standard-shaped legs. Acting needs everybody, cripples, dwarfs and people with noses so long. Give us something that is different.”
—Dame Sybil Thorndike (1882–1976)
“I concluded that I was skilled, however poorly, at only one thing: marriage. And so I set about the business of selling myself and two children to some unsuspecting man who might think me a desirable second-hand mate, a man of good means and disposition willing to support another man’s children in some semblance of the style to which they were accustomed. My heart was not in the chase, but I was tired and there was no alternative. I could not afford freedom.”
—Barbara Howar (b. 1934)