Starting with the Nose

Laurence Olivier was fond of false noses. He wore them often, built them up himself, and is often quoted as saying that he could not begin to find a character until he had found the right face for him. The exact wording varies from one retelling to the next, but the method behind it he described many times, in interviews and in his books: he worked from the outside in. Find the walk, the voice, the posture, the physical detail, and the person would turn up inside them.

For a generation brought up on the American schools, this sounded almost like a confession. The prestige version of acting, by the 1950s, began with inner truth: memory, feeling, the actor's own experience. Starting from a nose looked like starting from the wrong end. Olivier was cast, in the crude version of the debate, as the great technician who imitated life rather than living it.

The crude version leaves a lot out. Olivier's Richard III, on stage in 1944 and on film in 1955, was built around a limp, a hunch and a nasal voice, and it is one of the most frightening performances of its era. His external method did not make the work shallow. It gave him a way in. His Othello in the mid-1960s, for which he reportedly lowered his voice and trained his body, shows the limits of the approach too, in a different way: it was played in dark make-up, a practice that now looks indefensible, and that reminds us externals carry meanings beyond the actor's intentions.

A more systematic version of outside-in work came, surprisingly, from inside the Moscow Art Theatre. Michael Chekhov, nephew of the playwright, was among Stanislavski's most gifted students and a celebrated actor in Moscow in the 1920s. He left the Soviet Union in 1928, taught in Europe, then in England and America, and ended up in Hollywood, where he was nominated for an Oscar for Spellbound and coached actors including, by most accounts, Marilyn Monroe and Yul Brynner. His book To the Actor appeared in 1953.

His best known tool is the psychological gesture. The actor finds one large, whole-body movement that expresses what the character most wants: to grasp, to push away, to rise, to collapse. They rehearse it fully, exaggerated, until its impulse is in the body. Then, in performance, they shrink it to nothing visible at all. The gesture is gone, but the shape it gave remains, colouring the voice and the way the character sits in a chair.

British drama schools absorbed a similar emphasis by a different route: hours of voice training, movement classes, work with masks, and the study of how bodies of different ages and classes carry themselves. The result is sometimes described as a technical tradition set against an American emotional one. It is a tidy contrast, and like most tidy contrasts in this subject it is mostly a matter of emphasis.

The modern case that makes the point most clearly is Gary Oldman's Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour, released in 2017. The prosthetic make-up, designed by Kazu Hiro, took hours to apply each day and changed Oldman's face and body almost beyond recognition. He won the Oscar for Best Actor, and the make-up team won theirs. Nobody seriously argues that the latex did the acting. Nobody seriously argues that Oldman would have played the same Churchill without it. The outside and the inside were working on each other.

That is the real lesson of the old quarrel. Feeling changes the body: grief bows the head, fear shortens the breath. But the body also changes feeling: hold your shoulders up and forward for an hour and see what mood arrives. An actor can start at either end and travel to the other. Stanislavski, the supposed founder of inside-out acting, spent his last years on physical actions. Olivier, the supposed king of externals, said the nose was only the beginning. The schools argue about where to start. On where to arrive, they have always agreed.