If it's not one thing, it's your mother...
"I basically started performing for my mother, going, 'Love me!' What drives you to perform is the need for that primal connection. When I was little, my mother was funny with me, and I started to be charming and funny for her, and I learned that by being entertaining, you make a connection with another person." - Robin Williams "(Ann) Woodworth, Stephen Colbert’s acting professor ... remembers him as a 'constant clown' who had trouble accessing 'some of the emotions that were necessary to tap into the more tragic plays and characters.' Then, she says, she was having lunch with Colbert one day at Norris. 'I don’t know how it came out,' Woodworth recalls, 'but he said, "Well, it might have something to do with the fact that my father and two brothers were killed in a plane crash when I was 10, and I was left home with a grieving mother. And my main mission became to make her laugh." 'I can remember exactly where I was sitting in the lunch room when he said that because I thought I was going to fall over. It made all kinds of sense to me why it was difficult for him to get to the grief of Hamlet. And then it also made sense to me why his sense of comedy and his ability to entertain people and make people laugh was so strong, because he had been practicing it for 10 years.'" - Northwestern Magazine "When I was 8, my mother had a heart attack. Her doctor accompanied her home, and while she rested, he pulled me aside. "Don't argue with your mother," he said. "It might kill her." I didn't know what to make of that, except that I could kill my mother if I got angry with her. "And another thing," he said, "try to make her laugh." Though I'd never before tried to make anyone laugh, I began to sing her silly songs and perform Danny Kaye imitations. That was my first taste of performing. Then one Saturday night, when I was 11 years old, I went to see my older sister Corinne give a dramatic recital. I walked into the Wisconsin College of Music, where 200 people were jammed into the auditorium, jabbering loudly. As the lights dimmed, they began to whisper. Then...darkness. A spotlight hit the center of the stage, and there was Corinne in a lavender gown. As she gave a memorized reading of Guy de Maupassant's The Necklace, all eyes were on her. For the entirety of the recitation, you could hear a pin drop, and when she finished, everyone applauded. At that moment I thought that standing onstage must be as close to actually being God as you could get. When the recital was over, I asked Corinne's acting teacher if I could study with him. We began to work together, and I fell in love with performing. Since then, I've been in more than 30 movies. Every once in a while, when I was in front of the camera, I'd think back to the moment I saw my sister up there onstage, everyone around her rapt. She possessed some magic that I wanted, the ability to make everyone shut up and watch." - Gene Wilder Robin Williams
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Rob NagleActor-Guy Archives
October 2024
Categories |