The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act

by Isaac Butler

Part of the power of Steiger’s performance came—as did Brando’s in Streetcar—from the way he talked. His lines were delivered not with the clipped and precise speech of a classically trained thespian like John Barrymore, but the way a real person might say them. Steiger mumbled. He threw words away. A sentence might be structured not around its punctuation but around the feelings burbling away beneath the words. Actors weren’t supposed to talk this way. With the advent of the talkies, the book Speak with Distinction and its author, Edith Skinner, became mainstays on Hollywood lots. Part of your acting education after you signed on with a studio involved retraining your voice so that you could speak properly. If your type was ethnic or urban like John Garfield and James Cagney, you could get away with having a bit of a localized accent, but you were still expected to articulate syllables clearly. If you wanted to play anyone of class, you were drilled in the “mid-Atlantic accent,” a way of speaking that was not quite American, not quite English, but somewhere in between. The mid-Atlantic accent was constructed, artificial, a barrier to the kind of authenticity that Method actors so ostentatiously prized. But to the Method’s increasing number of detractors, their “authentic” way of speaking violated every rule of good acting, which required the clear delivery of text. There was a class component to all of this. The complaint that Method actors could not speak well was also a...