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
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