Thespian Advice from 1930s Stage and Film Stars

In the 1930s, the editorial staff of The High School Thespian wrote the biggest stage and film actors of the day, asking them to share tips for success with their high school counterparts. Their advice is equally relevant to Thespians today.

Eva Le Gallienne

YOU IN THE HIGH SCHOOLS can play an important part, if you will, in the future of the American theatre. This will not be by studying to fit yourselves for actors, producers, or playwrights, though from your ranks undoubtedly will come successful workers in all these lines. Your great contribution to our theatre will be in training yourselves as audiences — in learning to discriminate between the best in dramas, in acting, in production, and that which is inferior, tawdry, and sensational. The majority of your tastes are formed during the years you are in high school. Once you really know the finer things of the theatre, you will discover that they are more exciting, more engrossing than their opposites, and the inferior things will never satisfy or interest you. When America has an audience that demands it, she will have a great theatre.

– Eva Le Gallienne, 1935, actress, director, producer, and founder of Civic Repertory Theatre

Katharine Cornell

When the theatre presents with simplicity and sincerity a phase of life that touches upon the fundamentals of human existence, I believe there is no more inspirational experience to be found. By seeing through the medium of the player and the playwright the struggle, the success, or the failure of men and women, the spectator comes closely to glimpsing life itself if the actor and the writer are honest to their purpose and to themselves. There is the added poignancy to the drama that comes only in art, since the business of art is to edit life, to point it up, to accentuate the highlights and the depths and to bring in sharp relief the essentials of character and of human action. When, as in the plays of William Shakespeare, there is the added beauty of words and the sense of the nobility inherent in mankind, the theatre can be one of the great forces toward a finer understanding and a truer appreciation of living. If we of the stage reach this thrilling and inspiring pinnacle only once in our lives, we have justified our existence; even the striving for such a realization, which perhaps is all any of us really can do, is to make the theatre one of the truly great cultural powers of our civilization.

– Katharine Cornell, 1936, Tony-winning stage actress, writer, theatre owner, and producer who was the first performer to receive a Drama League Award

Mary Pickford

Please extend my greetings to your young actors and actresses and tell them for me that they are enjoying real privileges. I often look back on my own early struggles and wish that I might have had such splendid opportunities for training. I have always believed that dramatics is as important a branch of study as any of the high school courses. It not only gives youth the joy of self-expression, but it also adds to their grace and poise in hearing and speech.

– Mary Pickford, 1936, “America’s Sweetheart,” Oscar-winning silent film star, and pioneering co-founder of United Artists film studio and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

Osgood Perkins

I had never heard of The High School Thespian until a week ago. But I wish there had been such a publication when I was in school. Even at that time I knew that my goal was the theatre, and it would have made that goal seem easier of attainment somehow, if it had been possible to learn what was going on in the theatre from a magazine such as yours. Probably the question often asked me is one which has no answer: “How can I get into the theatre?” If there were a formula, there would be an answer, but no formula exists. If you talk to actors, you will quickly understand what I mean. Their stories of “how” are as varied and numerous as the people you ask. Wanting to, and working for, and plugging at it, are all I can suggest, and sometimes none of those succeed. But that is true of any field in the arts. It is work, and it is fun, and those two things are important as a combination when you are earning a living.

– Osgood Perkins, 1936, American stage and film actor, who originated the role of Walter Burns in Broadway’s The Front Page

Helen Hayes

The young actors and actresses are probably the most important figures in the theatre today, for from their ranks must come the Duses and Bernhardts of tomorrow. A number of my friends in the theatre realize this fact, and we have seriously discussed a project of establishing an American School of the Drama, modeled on famous European institutions such as the Stanislavski School in Moscow, the Comédie Française in Paris, or the Old Vic in London. As the project has not gone much beyond the discussion phase as yet, I am not at liberty to reveal the names of my associates. We have, however, approached the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations to ask for funds. Unfortunately, those cultural foundations seem to be more interested in well-known old actors rather than in young actors, which is just the condition in the professional theatre that we want to remedy. So, I am afraid that the money for the project will have to come from stage circles. I’m sure that it will come from there, though, and in the not-distant future we shall have a school for young actors where they can learn to act by acting, by playing fine roles in fine plays. The theatre as a whole will be healthier for it, young players will have the opportunities they need, and the cultural level of America will be raised.

– Helen Hayes, 1937, “First Lady of American Theatre,” whose career spanned 80 years, earning her Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony awards

Beatrice Terry

The first purpose of the theatre is to provide good entertainment. Life is full of problems. People do not wish to face in the theatre problems which will only serve to remind them of their own insufficient lives. They want to be lifted out of themselves — to be thrilled, to laugh, to weep. This does not mean that problems cannot be presented in the theatre, but they must be presented in such a way that those who see them worked out can forget about themselves — lose themselves in the play. Is it, therefore, up to the actor. He must be convincing; and it is only through intelligent hard work that an actor can be convincing. He should throw himself wholeheartedly into the portraying of a character and live that character. The actor who is “always the same,” “always himself,” instead of being completely the person he is playing, should not be on the stage. So I would say to all who are connected with the stage, be it through high school dramatics, amateur society, or the professional theatre, three things: Work hard; forget yourself, and remember only the character you are playing; and, above all, use your imagination.

– Beatrice Terry, 1937, Broadway actress and part of a dynastic family of performers, who was an original member of Civic Repertory Theatre

These excerpts originally appeared in The High School Thespian (now Dramatics). Subscribe to our print magazine.