DeWolf Hopper

“ If a passing automobile splashes a street cleaner with mud you do not smile; but let that car splatter a pompous stroller in morning clothes, a gardenia in his buttonhole and a silk hat on his head, and you shout with glee. It isn't the flivver being towed into the garage that brings the grin to your face, but the straight-eight that passed you so insolently on the hill ten miles back.
The actors and the newspapermen of New York once played a game of baseball at the old Polo Grounds as a benefit for Carl Rankin. ”

“ There is plenty to be said of the movies as an institution, an art and an influence on modern life, and plenty are saying it. I confine myself to personal grievances. First, the art does not appeal to me as an actor. The appeal of acting to those who practice it lies in the enkindling of the emotions of an audience and the reward of applause, laughter and tears then and there. This is the actor's daily bread, and the movies offer him a stone. ”

“ With that eager sympathy characteristic of the real Broadway, Judson's friends used to make it a point to stop in and brighten his day with the chatter of the stage, the paralytic listening wistfully to the talk of the life he had loved and now was denied him. Occasionally, when the weather was fine, a lawyer friend used to wheel him along the sidewalks of Forty-sixth Street in a hospital rolling bed, as the crowds were moving into the theaters, Judson's eyes lighting up with a pathetic blend of pleasure and pain. ”

“ I go to see a play to be amused, to be stirred, not as a visiting mechanic studying the machinery, and I was so moved by the tragedy I had watched that, despite my professional training, I hesitated to accept the invitation of Louis Nethersole, her brother and manager, to go backstage and meet the star. Instinctively I thought of myself as intruding on death. But I went, and found her, of course, as self-possessed as if she had been playing a George M. Cohan heroine. ”

“ Very early in the play she reached her climax and had nothing left for contrast in the bigger scenes. In life, grief is not necessarily majestic; often it is a bit ludicrous. One may respect and pity the tears of a weeping woman and yet find her streaked and swollen face and reddened eyes a little ridiculous. And so in the scene which Bernhardt had made so arresting, this second actress seemed rather to be a bride sniveling over her first burned biscuits or a matron grieving over the marriage anniversary forgotten by her husband, than a figure of stark tragedy. ”

“ That is a spectacle to be enjoyed even at the expense of the home team, but there always is a chance that the Babe will strike out, a sight even more healing to sore eyes, for the Sultan of Swat can miss the third strike just as furiously as he can meet it, and the contrast between the terrible threat of his swing and the ludicrous futility of the result is a banquet for the malicious, which includes us all. There is no more completely satisfactory drama in literature than the fall of Humpty Dumpty. ”

“ The secret of fine acting, the secret of all art, is suggestion, the inflaming of the spectator's imagination; and the secret of suggestion is studied repression. The actor, the writer, the painter who flies into a fine frenzy overacts, overwrites, overpaints. The best writing, that which reads without effort, is that which has been rewritten most often. The artist who tries to be literal leaves the imagination cold. The photograph is literal. It copies, and the clearer and harder its accuracy the worse it is. The rogue's gallery photograph is fine realism. ”

“ Yet I was much more obviously equipped by nature for the heroic than for buffoonery, and it was by chance that I have sported the motley of the clown rather than worn the dark cloak of tragedy on the American stage these more than forty years.
The actor and the actress, I have said earlier, do not, like the most of mankind, drift into their life jobs by accident or inanition. They are obsessed by the stage and seek it out as June bugs do a street light. ”

“ CAME DAWN AT HOLLYWOOD
Before any one else can say it first, let me admit that I was no earth-shaking success in the movies. If the truth must be known, I died on the silver screen; I sank majestically beneath the oily waves of the cinema sea and never was heard of again. Not so much as a life belt or a spar was picked up. The fact that a gallant company of stage celebrities perished with me made my demise less poignant personally, but not the less indisputable. ”

“ He did not adopt the foolish theory that the true art of acting consists in doing upon the stage exactly what people do in actual life. He knew that art is romantic and that the moment romance is sacrificed to reality, the stage is as impotent as a paper flower. An actor may be natural without being literal. ”

“ The Lambs, of course, is the hotbed of Equity and was the keystone of the actors' strike of 1919. The thought of union and collective bargaining by a profession of rampant egoists and artists was laughable until that brief and sweeping strike turned out the lights of Broadway and kept them out until the managers agreed to end a number of ancient and cruel abuses of the theater. The sufferers from those abuses and the beneficiaries of the victory were the journeymen actors and actresses, not the Lambs, who are, for the most part, leading men and stars. ”

“ Versatility was the first demand of the theater; without it one was not an actor.
A few of the heroic roles, such as "Othello" and "Hamlet", were thought a bit beyond the range of the ordinary actor, but with such exceptions every player in his or her time ran the gamut from blank verse to low comedy.
As Blanche Bates was told at the outset of her career by her mother, "An actress should be able to play Topsy or Lady Macbeth equally well. It is not how she looks, but what she makes the audience think and feel." ”

“ The democracy of the place is complete and unfeigned. We actors are not the most self-effacing of mankind, but we put aside most of our airs in our club. The motto of The Lambs is Floreant Agni, which, translated from the Sanscrit, means "You may be all the world to your public, but you're only an actor to us." This matter-of-factness seldom is resented, though an occasional old member who has left the stage for triumphs in Hollywood, has found it irritating and been seen less and less about the club when in New York. ”

“ It is unique in all verse in that it is not only funny and ironic, but excitingly dramatic, with the suspense built up to a perfect climax. There is no lame line among the fifty-two. And so, although it might be thought I should have had my fill of Casey, I hope to go to bat with him for as many more seasons before we both strike out. I am not yet being pushed on to the stage in a wheel chair, but when an actor has been before the public as long as I some of his audience come to expect it. ”

“ A stolid savage, knowing only a dozen words of English, and her native speech unintelligible to the man, she cannot convey her grief, despair and ravished mother love by impassioned rhetoric or gestures. Whoever plays the part is restricted to little more than grunts. The squaw grasps the situation slowly, consents with a nod, almost as if it were a commonplace for a woman to surrender her child and mate to an abstraction of which she understands nothing, and leaves the stage. ”

“ A group gathered socially in a drawing-room do not naturally talk one at a time. On the stage they must. An actor who spoke as loudly in his home or on the street as he should on the stage would be a man one would cross the street or dodge into a doorway to avoid. He raises his voice in the theater to be heard. Inaudibility is the curse of current acting. There is no more serious offense in the theater. ”

“ They are puppets dancing at the ends of strings to his piping, seldom knowing anything of the sequence of the story they are enacting and little of its sense; theirs not to reason why, theirs but to clown or cry when and as a megaphoned voice instructs them to. No more initiative is expected or desired of them than of a squad of soldiers being drilled by a top sergeant in the manual of arms. ”

“ It is not a pretty sight to see a broken actor or an ex-mayor frantically shaking the empty vial of incense.
Even the other arts offer no such reward as the stage. The lawyer may sway a jury as few actors can an audience, but bailiffs are at hand to stop a demonstration. ”

“ Richardson did not set himself up as any great shakes at baseball, but the contrast between the sublime figure he had cut at third for eight innings and the ridiculous fruition was the stuff of Casey. Few among the spectators had not sometime winced under the flick of Leander's forked critical tongue. His bitter bread returned to him that afternoon manyfold.
Mr. Jawn McGraw's athletes do not and never have played polo, and the name has puzzled many thousands of baseball fans. ”

“ Thirty years and more ago the native actor spent so large a part of his time on the road, as many as three thousand miles from Broadway, that he could not maintain a home. The Players was to be such.
Parenthetically, our stage to-day is recruited quite as much as the British theater from the schools and the best homes, yet, curiously, the drama has not benefited as largely as might have been expected. Hand these young men and women a side of Shakespeare and they are dumb, but ask them to sing, dance or stand on their head and they oblige instantly and with professional skill. ”

“ The spectator can rightfully ask only that the pretense be convincing at the moment. A room full of persons in life never has talked and never will talk and move as a room of actors talk and move on the stage. The stage is a narrowly restricted medium, and dramatist, stage manager and players are not permitted to forget it for an instant. If an actor should wander aimlessly about the stage as he does in the home of a friend he would distract the audience's attention from other actors at the moment more essential to the story, and play general hob with the performance. ”

“ The only hiatus I discovered were the Elsie books. I must, when this arduous task is completed, rearrange my time to make better use of the club library. But there is this to be said for it; the directors hold all their meetings in its cloisterlike seclusion.
If we do not read it may be because we have learned that the conversation in the club is better than any printed literature. We always have numbered amongst us many of the best wits of their times. In the old days in Twenty-sixth Street when I joined, Maurice Barrymore, father of Ethel, Lionel and Jack, was the quickest mind in the club. ”

“ Thomas was mistaken or carried away by his argument when he told Charles Frohman that my stature and voice were thrown away in comedy. Nothing is thrown away in comedy: there is nothing but what is useful, and my height and sounding voice have greatly extended the range of my clowning by providing that sublime-to-the-ridiculous contrast that is the very juice of most comic situations. ”

“ Drew was being more generous than critical. Two strangely diverse men agreed with her; Edward Everett Hale and Pat Sheedy, the gambler. Sheedy was so enthusiastic that he wished to back the company for a summer engagement at the Metropolitan Opera House, his only stipulation being that "the old woman" play Dame Quickly, Percy Winter play Slender, and I, Falstaff.
No actor who has reached the age of anecdotage can escape the question: Who was the greatest of them all? My answer, and that of any one who has been on the stage as long as I, must inevitably be: Edwin Booth. ”

“ The actor in the films is the creature of the director. The director is an important factor in the speaking stage, more so than the spectator often realizes, but in the pictures he dwarfs the players. ”

“ So it is the audiences more than the managers who are at fault for the type system which has grown to be such an evil in the legitimate theater, sentencing this man to play an irascible old man all his life because he once did such a part very well; that woman to a lifetime of slangy chorus girls because she first attracted notice in such a rôle. Hundreds of actors and actresses are confined to-day in such strait-jackets, the most of them competent to play well any part within the limitations of their sex and age. ”

“ The acrobat or the dancer may leave the stage exhausted, but an actress who knows her business no more swoons at the finish of her big scene than Whistler had to be revived with smelling salts on completing an etching. The poor actress puts her heart into the rôle, the trained actress puts her head into it.
Mr. George Arliss has said it perfectly in one short sentence: "The art of the actor is to learn how not to be real on the stage without being found out by the audience."
A revolution in the theater from artificiality to realism has taken place in my time. ”

“ The workaday world returns home at five o'clock and gives the evening to recreation. The actor does not finish work until his audience is ready for bed. He then eats, and enjoys his leisure. He might, you may suggest, be in bed himself by midnight and up by eight, with the forenoon free, but leisure comes after work, not before, as all night workers know.
A lesser nuisance of picture routine is the necessity, when on location away from the studio, of appearing in public in costume and make-up. It is such a commonplace that the native does not bat an eye ”

“ The theater is on the eve of a revival, and the movie will continue to flourish. For one cause or another it has captured a certain audience that the stage may never recover, but its bulwark is the vast new audience it has created. The throngs in the picture houses to-night are, most of them, persons who did not attend a theater once a year, if ever, and a certain proportion of these will graduate into the public of the speaking stage if the stage presents them with the opportunity. ”

“ She was an actress of sufficient ability to enable me to read in her face something of what I could not hear, but as the play was not billed as a pantomime, my irritation and that of the bulk of the audience was justifiable.
A writer of fiction may let his characters stray over the face of the earth without restraint of space and little of time. When he attempts the same story on the stage he is in the predicament of an artist in colors restricted to black and white for his effects. ”

“ The theater really doesn't care much to-day how Memphis, Dallas, Wichita and Lexington spend their evenings. They can go to the movies or stay home and play charades, as far as the show business is concerned.
When the producer is reproached for this indifference he laments that most good actors no longer will leave Broadway and that railroad rates are prohibitive. It is true that a great many actors and actresses no longer can be pried loose from Broadway. Their homes, their clubs, their friends are there, and train whistles are just a noise to their ears. ”

“ Often I have heard the highest compliment that may be paid an actor spoken as a belittlement. I have heard it said of John Drew, for instance, "He's not an actor; he just goes on and plays himself."
Mr. Drew could ask no finer tribute to the perfection of his art. If, in the highly artificial environment of the stage, one can seem oneself, there is an actor.
J. C. Nugent wrote in Variety recently of a clash between James A. Herne and an actor at a rehearsal of "Shore Acres." The man had spoken a rhythmical line in the mouthing elocution of the "reading actor." ”