Rosalind Russell on craft, and how she studied the craft of the actor as a young woman:
Talent is wonderful, but I’ve played with actors who have more talent than I, and you can’t hear them in the fourth row, they just don’t have the energy, nothing in the belly, nothing in the guts that brings it all out and sells it across the orchestra pit and into the twenty-third row.
In Boston with Clivey’s troupe — I couldn’t do it at Saranac, I didn’t have the time — I used to sit on the stage apron and watch every rehearsal I wasn’t involved in. I’d be thinking, Why can’t he get a laugh on that? It’s a funny line — and taking the thing apart in my head to see why it wasn’t working. Half the pleasure of doing comedy in the theatre is that even before you hear a laugh, you sense where the laugh should be. Something happens in the audience, you feel it, you go to work on it. Until one day, all of a sudden, you’re rewarded with a titter. You keep working on the line and finally you get a real belly laugh. After that you generally push too hard and lose it, and you have to pull away and inch your way back.
