Living Someone Else's Life to Understand Your Own

Theatre and film actors. Performers. They are admired, loved, and envied. They are recognised on the streets, people want photographs with them, dream of befriending them, and await them on stage and screen. The audience sees the characters created, applauds, offers flowers, attends premieres, and rejoices in their success, yet many have no idea what the acting profession truly entails. It is daily labour, nerves before stepping out, stern discipline, an endless search for "that very" character, the ability to listen to one's partner, and an inner work without which it is impossible to make the audience believe in another person's life.

Every entrance like the first

There are only a few moments left before the curtain rises. At that point, the actor is always alone on stage. Even when the lines are memorised, trusted colleagues are nearby, and the play may have been performed dozens of times, there always remains a sense of uncertainty. You might think that, after years in the profession, stepping out from the wings would become second nature.

Experience does not cancel responsibility; on the contrary, the longer a person "lives" on stage, the clearer it becomes that yesterday's success guarantees nothing today.

Nervousness, moreover, is by no means necessarily a sign of insufficient skill. Even those who, it would seem, have mastered their craft and literally "grown roots" into it feel it. Hollywood actor Hugh Jackman ("X-Men", "Les Misérables") once recounted at a BAFTA gathering how he found himself backstage beside actress Judi Dench ("Shakespeare in Love", "Pride & Prejudice") before performing the song Send in the Clowns ("Send in the Clowns") at the Royal Gala. The actress, already possessed of immense stage experience, was deeply agitated and then, in Jackman's words, delivered one of the finest stage numbers he had ever witnessed.

Perhaps a true professional never stops feeling nervous precisely because they know the cost of a mistake. Fear does not fade with the years; the actor simply learns to step onto the stage alongside it.

Talent or toil?

From the outside, acting often seems a set of special abilities: voice, physicality, memory, the knack of laughing or weeping at the right moment, of transforming—even morphing! And in the auditorium we see only the result: and the greater the skill, the easier it appears.

But behind this "ease" lies colossal labour.

Professor at VGIK Rustam Sagdullaev, who today himself teaches and "nurtures" future actors, when asked what should be taught above all, replies:

In other words, mastery begins with the ability to be ready, not to keep a partner waiting, to know the text by heart (and not only one's own lines), to look after one's voice and body, and to manage one's own energies.

Honoured Artist, theatre and film actor Seidulla Moldakhanov shares his views on an actor's professionalism:

The history of world cinema knows many examples of the labour hidden behind apparent on-screen ease. One of the most striking is Charlie Chaplin. His masterpiece "City Lights", for instance, is the longest film in terms of shooting time. Work on the film began on 31 December 1927 and continued until 22 January 1931—more than three years, of which shooting alone took 180 days. On the outwardly simple scene of the first meeting between the protagonist—the Tramp—and the blind flower girl, he laboured for weeks. Chaplin himself recalled:

And in the finished film, the audience must not see this labour. In this, perhaps, lies one of the highest forms of professionalism: months of searching are distilled into a few minutes that look as though they "were born" of their own accord.

Talent may bring a person to the stage. But only toil allows them to remain there.

The key is not to lie

So, technique can be taught, discipline can be cultivated, and lines can be memorised. But the audience comes to the theatre or to a film screening for a truthful story.

This is the paradox of the acting profession. A person steps onto the stage to "become" someone they are not in reality. They speak another's words, live another's life, love, suffer, lose, die. And into this "life" the audience must believe.

Anvar Kartaev recalls how his teacher Rimma Kashaeva advised students to seek within themselves their own "pressure points", through which one could reach the character's emotions, and adds:

American actress Viola Davis (“The Help”) speaks of much the same thing. Reflecting on her craft, she admitted that when working on a character, her primary aim is to “tell the truth of the moment, the truth of the character, the truth of the story.” In the actress’s words, an actor builds their work precisely on the search for that truth.

No ready-made instruction manual has ever been written for any actor on how not to “falsify” another person’s life and another person’s pain.

The Teacher stays with you

To teach and nurture this life within the actor on stage and on screen, there is a Teacher, a Mentor, close at hand. Not one who corrects diction and explains where to turn on stage. A true Mentor teaches something greater: an attitude to the craft, a way of thinking, the ability to ask oneself questions.

Anvar Kartayev speaks of those whom fate brought into his life and whose advice still echoes in his soul — Nabi Kayumovich Abdurakhmanov, Rimma Rashidovna Kashayeva, Georgy Arkadyevich Mustafin:

Rustam Sagdullayev recalls Nina Ivanovna Timofeyeva with particular warmth:

And one of Seidulla Moldakhanov’s teachers at VGIK was Oleg Kiselyov — a former actor of the Taganka Theatre. The students had asked for a mime instructor, but received far more — work on the expressiveness of the human body:

In the history of acting, the bond between Teacher and student has sometimes defined the development of an entire school. Marlon Brando was a student of Stella Adler. At the acting school she founded, he is named among those artists who helped establish the principles of the Stanislavski system in American theatre and cinema. His work in “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “On the Waterfront” became exemplars of a new stage and screen realism for their time.

But this does not mean that a Mentor can “create” talent within a student. They simply help the student understand what to do with that talent.

And then the student becomes a Teacher in turn.

Rustam Sagdullayev leads an acting workshop at VGIK. Seidulla Moldakhanov teaches what he once learned himself. Anvar Kartayev, now chief director of the Youth Theatre of Uzbekistan, admits that he understands differently the people who were once responsible for him.

But even on the other side of the rehearsal process, a true actor never ceases to be a student.

On stage, you cannot be alone

However vast the actor’s knowledge, however much they work on themselves, on stage they still do not “live” alone — they have a partner. And you grasp that person’s worth very clearly in the second of professional catastrophe, when you forget your lines.

Actors also love to observe their understudies and learn unexpected solutions from them, to see a familiar role from another side.

Or a shared play.

The same is said by one of Britain’s foremost directors and winner of numerous awards, Mike Leigh (“Secrets & Lies”, “Vera Drake”), known for his distinctive method of working with actors. He emphasises that characters and scenes are born through lengthy rehearsals and improvisations, gradually refined until they take their final form. For the master, it matters that the result satisfies him from a directorial standpoint, while remaining organic and truthful for the actor and their character.

And theatre, in any case, sits ill with the word “alone”. An actor may stand alone on stage in a one-man show or in a mise-en-scène, but behind them still stand the director, the designer, the lighting, the sound, the school, the text, and even the memory of mentors. And before them — the audience.

One of the most difficult aspects of the craft lies precisely in preserving one’s own individuality while not overstepping the line.

Did it reach the person?

We are accustomed to saying that an actor plays a role. But, to be more precise, the actor gives us, for a few hours, the chance to live a life we will never have. Gives us the chance to see the world through another person’s eyes, to feel their fear, their loneliness, their love, to see the weakness of the strong or the dignity of one we never noticed before.

Anvar Kartayev recalls a disabled spectator who wept after watching the performance ALONE based on Franz Kafka’s story “The Metamorphosis”:

An actor's craft is not revealed in the technical mastery of voice and body. Nor even in how many times the audience calls them back for a bow. True craft lies in conveying to the audience what the film's authors wanted to say. And here it is essential to speak of professional honour.

Source: ACDF Press Office

Even at the birth of the Moscow Art Theatre, Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko spent many hours discussing, alongside their principles of staging and technique, stage ethics. In Konstantin Sergeyevich's memoirs their assessment of one talented actress is preserved: "She does not love art, but only herself in art". For the future theatre, this was enough to keep her out of the company.

More than a century has passed; theatre has changed, cinema has changed, new technologies, new forms and new schools of acting have emerged. But the very essence of the profession remains the same. The audience should not see before them an actor who is performing; they should see a living character.

Yesterday's applause will not help to play today's performance. The curtain will close, the lights will go down. And if on that evening the actor has truly given themselves to their role, the audience will leave the theatre as different people. An actor lives another's life. But they do so in order that the audience might feel their own a little more deeply.