Core Post: King Around Here vs. Queen of the Stage

In Elaine Stritch at Liberty the legendary stage comedian relays the story of her failed courtship with Marlon Brando. When the two were in acting school together, Brando stormed out on their first date after learning that Stritch was a virgin, and wouldn’t put out. A year later, he invited her to dinner, and sat wordlessly across from her, avoiding her eyes, before shattering his glass in his bare hand: “Elaine,” he said, “I’m sorry.” 

I remember this story because it resonated with the ideas I had preconceived of Brando: intense, powerful, brooding, outcasted, sensitive. These are the vital characteristics of his persona: his real personality combined with the film roles that reinforced it. Discussing Brando’s Method acting as a reconciliation of impersonation (embodying a character) and personification (acting limited to facets of the actor’s personalities), King explained Brando’s form of impersonation as “referring back” to his real person. Considering Stritch’s broken glass story in light of the Streetcar Named Desire scene in which Brando dashes dishes against the wall, this assessment is on the mark. The effectiveness of Brando’s Method acting, particularly in his definitive “rebel” years, relied upon his ability to adapt impersonation - total immersion into character - to personification—the real personality traits codified into his performances. 

If Brando was the definitive example of this phenomenon in the Method tradition, his co-star in Streetcar Named Desire may be so for the melodramatic. Vivien Leigh was a true British theatrical, trained to play to the farthest reaches of a West End playhouse. Her name was also synonymous with that of her most iconic film role, Scarlett O’Hara, which itself carries connotations of Southern gentility and white femininity. But to simply say that set against one another, Brando represents the naturalness of Method and Leigh the exaggeration of melodrama, is to construct a binary where there is actually a confluence. It is not that Leigh is necessarily a melodramatic actor—rather, it is that her skill and understanding of that technique enable her to wholly embody a melodramatic character.

Blanche is constantly performing. She has constructed her personality and behavior into a perverse performance of the Southern belle archetype. Soft-spoken and false-naive, she pretends innocence and feminine weakness in order to manipulate the men around her. With the hypnotic focus in her eyes, pointed premeditation of her gestures, and affectedness of her voice, Blanche/Leigh acts the part of a perverted Scarlett O’Hara—but not well enough to fool Stanley/Brando, creating the crux of their conflict. The ‘bigness’ with which Leigh plays her character is intrinsic, necessary, and natural to the character: Blanche/Leigh, therefore, represents a conflation of acting styles that may be unique in the cinema. Leigh may not be a Method actor, but to say that she did not “identify” wholly with Blanche, did not construct her unhinged performance along the psychological makeup of her character (both elements of the Method), is to misunderstand the naturalistic character purpose behind her melodramatic performance.

I went to a performing arts high school for theater, the highly competitive, crazy stage mom kind, and in my experience, even Method is considered outmoded, a style of acting that had its greatest cultural moment when Freud was still enjoying unquestioned legitimacy. The Meisner technique, preaching spontaneity and instinctual reaction to other actors, had supplanted the Method in our instruction. So to look at Method and the melodramatic as a binary may have been useful decades ago, but as we've seen, even films where the actors articulate that binary - Streetcar Named Desire - end up problematizing it more. The personhood and persona of stars, brought to characters designed to play upon them, complicate their easy packaging into particular acting traditions.