Listening to Actors

"Occasionally I mused over the possibility of making a sound film, but the thought sickened me, for I realized I could never achieve the excellence of my silent pictures. It would mean giving up my tramp character entirely. Some people suggested that the tramp might talk. This was unthinkable, for the first word he ever uttered would transform him into another person."

—Charles Chaplin (1964)¹

It has long been recognized that the actor's voice is of utmost significance for successful acting. Yet when one combs the theoretical literature with the aim of finding out why this is so, one comes up with very little. In several recent papers I have proposed a philosophy of acting centering on "existential amplification." Here, I would like to suggest how such an approach may explain the particular import of the actor's voice. The first part of this essay presents a cluster of claims regarding the centrality of voice to acting. The second section accounts for this repeated focus by situating voice in relation to existential amplification. The third section offers a typology, in which the actor's voice is shown to play a crucial role in seven distinct dimensions of the relationship between character and thought. All of these dimensions constitute intimate strands of the actor's existential amplification that, once achieved, greatly facilitates the audience's identification with such an act. The essay's final section discusses possible ideological implications of this analysis.

Voice

Striking, memorable acting is often bound up with effects created by modifications in the actor's voice. Konstantin Stanislavski summons Salvini's testament on the point: "When Tommaso Salvini, the great Italian actor, was asked what one must have to be a tragedian, he replied: 'Voice, voice, and more voice!'" (100). Salvini is not alone in selecting voice as a crucial tool of the actor's trade. John Barrymore's groundbreaking performances of Richard III and Hamlet in the 1920s in his transformation from a lightweight comedian into a great Shakespearean actor were the result of a thorough metamorphosis of his voice (a source of repeated concern for him) through undergoing intense voice exercises with Margaret Carrington,² and in Being an Actor, this is what Simon Callow says:

I had installed the play into my brain. Only one thing was missing: I had no idea how Molina should speak. I believed I knew him, as a man, his speed of thought, his camp vivacity, his neatness and would-be daintiness; I saw, too, the emotional openness, the sexual need, the instinct for subservience, for service; and I had a most vivid sense of his dream life, filled with the myths he had drawn from his obsession with the screen, and especially with love goddesses. . . . I saw all this, and felt it in my bones and in my muscles. I could become Molina at a moment's notice. Except for one thing: how the hell did he talk? The voice is almost invariably the starting point for me: until I hear the right sound coming out of my mouth, everything sounds false, out of tune, and my body ceases to behave as it should. I feel awkward, blocked.

(260-61; emphasis added)

Callow thus presents vocalization as no less than the key, authenticating, role-establishing component of theatrical characterization. He appears to conceive of voice production as if it somehow emanated from an external entity, saying that he needs to "hear the right sound coming out of [his] mouth." We also note how the experience of producing an imprecise voice is rendered problematic in several distinct ways: Callow feels false, unexpressive, distorted, out of synchronization. He does not refer merely to the mechanics of vocalization—tonal range or smooth diction—but strives to specify a linkage between genuinely inhabiting a character's world and mastering its voice. The mysterious dimension of Callow's remark is that since there is no preexisting voice that the Molina character simply possesses and that the actor aims to discover, "hear[ing] the right sound" appeals to a sense of authenticity that is not predicated on correspondence, but instead on some unspecified...