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Wednesday, December 24, 2008

"Abigail! Your breasts are magnificent!"*

Stockard Channing is a former star of The West Wing, for which she won an Emmy, and an Academy Award-nominated actress who's been in such films as Twilight, Smoke, Six Degrees of Separation, Staying Together, Grease and The Hospital. As if that weren't enough, she also won the 1985 Tony Award for a revival of Peter Nichols' A Day in the Death of Joe Egg.

I mean, she knows what she's doing up there. So you might like to see what she has to say about it in this Q& A piece.

Best part (IMO):

What’s the best piece of professional advice you ever got?
It’s [from] John [Guare], and it’s in the text of Six Degrees. I’m paraphrasing, but the character Flan asks why paintings in the second grade are clear and beautiful, and then by third grade they all look like mud and camouflage. And the teacher says, “I know when to take their paintings away from them in the second grade.” John and I went out to dinner one night and he equated those lines to acting, where you have to know when to stop. There has to be a point where you say, “The painting is done.” There’s a real temptation in acting to always fiddle with it, and sometimes you ruin the color balance when you do that.


* British Ambassador Lord John Marbury, "Dead Irish Writers," The West Wing.

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