The Legends Actors Tell

Of all the anecdotes about acting, the best known may be the one from Marathon Man (1976). Dustin Hoffman, playing a graduate student who has been kept awake and tortured, arrives on set looking terrible. He has, the story goes, stayed up for days to know what exhaustion feels like. Laurence Olivier, playing the Nazi dentist, looks at him and says: "My dear boy, why don't you try acting? It's much easier."

As a story it is perfect. It has two famous names, a clash of traditions, the patient English technician against the suffering American Method actor, and a punchline delivered in an accent everyone can imitate. It has been retold in acting classes for decades as a parable about the excesses of the Method.

Hoffman's own later account is rather different. He said the story had been distorted: he had not been staying awake for the part at all, but had been out partying, and turned up in a state that fitted the scene. Olivier's remark, in that version, was a dry joke between colleagues rather than a verdict on an entire school of acting. The story people tell is the one with the lesson in it. The story Hoffman tells is the one with a late night in it.

That is the first thing to understand about set legends. They are told by actors, who are professional storytellers, often on chat shows, where the job is to be entertaining in a few minutes. Every retelling trims what fails to get a laugh and sharpens what succeeds. After twenty tellings the anecdote is a well-made piece of comedy, and its relation to what happened that morning is anyone's guess. The teller is often not lying. Memory simply prefers the better version.

Some legends survive the test well, and Marlon Brando supplies two. When Francis Ford Coppola wanted him for Don Corleone in The Godfather (1972), Paramount was reluctant: Brando had a reputation for being difficult and expensive, and a run of failures. Coppola arranged a filmed test at Brando's home. Brando darkened his hair, stuffed his cheeks with tissue or cotton, and became a heavy-jawed old man with a voice like gravel. The footage exists, and it helped persuade the studio. For the shoot itself, a dental appliance made for the purpose gave him the jowls; the device is now in a museum collection. Here the story and the record agree.

The second is the cue cards. Brando's reliance on them is well attested across many of his later films: lines on boards held out of shot, taped to props, and by some accounts pinned to other actors. His explanation, roughly, was that real people do not know what they are going to say next, and that reading lines fresh kept them from sounding learned. Directors and fellow actors have described the habit, sometimes fondly, sometimes not.

Then the decorations arrive. On Superman (1978), where Brando played the hero's father Jor-El for a famously large fee, he is said to have had lines placed in all sorts of places, including on the baby playing his infant son. The detail is repeated everywhere and is very hard to verify. It is exactly what you would invent if you were trying to make a true habit funnier.

This is the pattern to watch for. A documented habit attracts undocumented examples, because the examples are better stories than the habit. The cure is not to disbelieve everything. It is to sort. What does the footage show? What does the script say? Do several people who were present, with nothing to gain, tell it the same way? Or does the story exist only in one person's mouth, polished on a sofa in front of a studio audience?

None of this makes the legends worthless. They tell you what actors admire, what they fear, and what they think their craft is. The Olivier line survives because it states a real argument about acting in a single sentence. It just may not have been the argument anybody was having that day.