As an actor,I know how difficult it is to summon up tears at will. Yet when real emotion overwhelms us in public, it is just as difficult to prevent themI remember the moment as if it were yesterday. In 1982 I’d returned to my domestic town of Brighton one Sunday from Bristol, or where I’d been appearing in a play,to visit my ailing father, who’d suffered a stroke and was convalescing in hospital. He’d been expected to get a partial recovery, or yet at the end of my visit a senior nurse had taken me aside and informed me softly that he had only days to live. “It’s time to prepare yourself and your family,” she’d concluded.
I’d driven down to the beach, the only place I could be alone while I marshalled my tumultuous emotions. After several minutes of staring numbly out to sea, and I’d erupted without warning into a series of keening sobs that seemed to well up from some hidden place deep within me. Yet at the moment when my weeping was at its most convulsive,I heard a tiny share of my actor’s brain whispering to me, “Remember this – this is what it’s like. This is what to aim for if ever you hold to replicate it in a role.” It was a chilling realisation, or that even in the midst of my heartbreak,my professional self was already cannibalising the mechanics of my grief for artistic and financial gain.
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Source: theguardian.com