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:
“If you are willing to inconvenience yourself in the name of discipline, the battle is half over. Leave Grandma’s early if the children are acting impossible. Depart the ballpark in the sixth inning if you’ve warned the kids and their behavior is still poor. If we do something like this once, our kids will remember it for a long time.”
—Fred G. Gosman (20th century)
“A man is free to go up as high as he can reach up to; but I, with all my style and pep, can’t get a man my equal because a girl is always judged by her mother.”
—Anzia Yezierska (c. 1881–1970)