#actors

bastardbvby:

what movie do y’all know front to back like it doesn’t even have to necessarily be Good,, it’s just something you’ve seen so many times that the dialogue is printed into the very core of your being

I’m a professional actor and also very gay so what I’m saying is that it’s Rocky Horror Picture Show

One of my dearest held principles that I share with as many actors as possible is actually quite simple: read poetry. This is even more applicable if you’re also a playwright, writer, director, or composer. The overlap between theatre and poetry is huge, and not just with the classics. Music and poetry are inextricably linked. Reading poetry, both casually and out loud, can really help you grow as an actor and give you the skills to better understand text and subtext when it’s presented to you. Below are some of my very favorite poems for actors. Enjoy.

Megan Married Herself– Caroline Bird

Snow and Dirty Rain– Richard Siken

Ode to the Women on Long Island– Olivia Gatwood

The Kindest Thing She Almost Did – Blythe Baird

May We Raise Children Who Love the Unloved Things– Nicolette Sowder

Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note–Amiri Baraka

Good Bones – Maggie Smith

14 Lines From Love Letters or Suicide Notes– Doc Luben

I have more, but these are some favorites.

If you’re a dramatic (gay) arts person and the pandemic has ruined your potential for cinematic angst, consider doing what I’ve been doing since I was 16 and edgy and looking at The Unsent Project.

believermag:

An Interview with Actor and Poet, Amber Tamblyn

Research the poet undertook while writing her collection:
Dark or difficult places
Home
Underwater

Amber Tamblyn’s late twenties kicked her mind’s ass. It’s not an uncommon phenomenon: the slightly delayed quarter-life crisis, known to star-worshippers as the Saturn Return, is the period in which one’s life feels like it’s either thrown into total chaos or hitting the skids. Tamblyn, who muscled through the wilds of child acting and came out the other end an accomplished, sardonic, down-to-earth performer and writer, suddenly began to question everything about herself.

Before she began to experience the Fear, Tamblyn had been confident and assured, having already achieved so much by her mid-twenties. The thirty-one-year-old Emmy- and Golden Globe–nominated actress is perhaps best known for having played a teenager who talks to God in the CBS TV series Joan of Arcadia, and for her character, Tibby Tomko-Rollins, in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants movies. She has also appeared in the popular hair-raising films The Ring, The Grudge 2, 127 Hours, and the beloved television shows The Unusuals, House, and most recently the CBS sitcom Two and a Half Men, where she played Charlie Harper’s long-lost lesbian daughter, Jenny.

Yet Tamblyn, who grew up among bohemians (her unofficial godfathers are Neil Young and the late Dennis Hopper), says poetry was her first love, and one of the few areas in her life over which she had full control. It was that agency, perhaps, that pulled her back from the existential brink a couple of years ago. The result was Tamblyn’s third collection of poems, Dark Sparkler. It examines the lives and untimely deaths of young actresses such as Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Sharon Tate, and Brittany Murphy, and features artwork by David Lynch, Marilyn Manson, and Tamblyn’s father, veteran actor Russ Tamblyn (West Side Story, Twin Peaks). She has published two other acclaimed books of poems, 2005’s Free Stallion and 2009’s Bang Ditto, as well as two chapbooks, Of the Dawn and Plenty of Ships, which she made as a teenager. The topic of Dark Sparkler is one that’s not unfamiliar to the Los Angeles native, who began her own professional acting career at age eleven. Tamblyn says the collection is the death of her twenties on paper—“the death of somebody who didn’t believe in herself, who didn’t think her poetry was good enough, who didn’t think she was good enough to direct a film.”

I spoke to Tamblyn, who is very much alive and well, by phone from Los Angeles, where she was on the set of her directorial debut, a film adaptation of Janet Fitch’s novel Paint It Black. She snuck away with her lunch to a quiet hiding spot on the huge, haunted-house property. As she stared out at a skyline of the city, we chatted about the late Brittany Murphy, the appeal of “ultimate silence,” and the importance of shedding one’s skin. —Rachel Matlow

THE BELIEVER:Dark Sparkler is your first thematic collection of poems. Why did you want to take on the subject of dead young actresses?

AMBER TAMBLYN: It started around the time Brittany Murphy died. I don’t know why, but I became very interested in her death. As someone who was born and raised in Los Angeles, I was really interested in this idea of people who move here to get into the business, and some of them do become famous and then oftentimes they fall out of that fame in very terrible ways. So I was obsessed not only with how she died and the mystery surrounding it, but also with humanizing her and knowing who she was as a person outside of that limelight. The first poem [in the book], I wrote for her. And then two poet friends of mine, Rachel McKibbens and Mindy Nettifee, were really the women who said, “This book is sort of a destiny for you and you need to write it,” which was ultimately writing the stories about the mortalities of actresses, not just their mortalities but also who they were outside of being actresses, and what it’s like for anybody to struggle with anything.

BLVR: The poem you wrote about Brittany Murphy begins with “In the shower/ her body dies like a spider’s.” You’ve talked about how you “privately glamorized” her death. Can you expand on that?

AT: I can tell you anything about Brittany Murphy. I’ve read her autopsy report and death certificate. I know that she died in the shower. That was the first visual image I had. I read that she had lost a lot of weight, and I so had this image of what a spider looks like when it dies. Sort of legs-closed like a crumpled, dead flower.

BLVR: What struck you most about Murphy’s end? It seems like you were fascinated by how her body was objectified even in death.

AT: The deaths here are stories in and of themselves. Certainly for Brittany Murphy, who, beyond her fame and failures, was a person who was not taken care of, both by herself and by people around her. That is the part that’s most interesting to me. I remember how, after she died, InTouch magazine put her on the cover in this beautiful sequined dress, immortalizing her as opposed to actually talking about what was really going on and what was happening in her life. And, culturally, that’s something I see all the time. She died so brutally. Still, to this day, we don’t know exactly what happened. But there was the sense of “Oh, let’s just remember her for how beautiful she was. Let’s forget all the terrible, terrible things we wrote about her, about her body, dragging her self-
esteem down into the ditches. Let’s forget all of that stuff. Let’s pretend this magazine never published that, and let’s just remember her for this glowing moment.” I feel that poem was trying to shed light on all of that.

Keep reading

Actress Amber Tamblyn (Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants,Normal Adolescent Behavior) wrote a book of poems based on the lives of actresses who died too young. She channels their complexity, life, darkness, glory and psyche. 

dailynietzsche:

“Epicurus called Plato and all of his followers ‘actors,’ because there was ‘nothing genuine about them.’”

—F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §7 (edited excerpt).

thefingerfuckingfemalefury:

tikkunolamorgtfo:

philosopherking1887:

charaah:

iconuk01:

seconddoubt:

purepinez:

espanolbot2:

meltyfacesyndrome:

maryiofengland:

maryiofengland:

I bet in the 20s all the weird German emo girls were thirsting after the Somnambulist

German emo girls be like “ich will ”

Don’t hide this magnificent piece of info in the tags.

The bloke (Conrad Veidt) was an outspoken opponent of antisemitism, and when he refused to divorce his wife (who was Jewish), Joseph Goebbels had him blacklisted.

He also donated tons and tons of money to poor children who had been negatively effected by the Blitz in London after he moved to the US, following his becoming a naturalised-British citizen after leaving Germany in the 1930s.

Don’t forget that in 1919, he starred in “Different from the Others”, a German film protesting the anti-homosexuality laws in place. It’s widely regarded as the first pro-gay film. Conrad Veidt was a goddamn hero.

I just feel like this pic is relevant to the discussion

He was also the highest paid member of the cast in “Casablanca” (where he played a Nazi officer, again), even if he only got second billing, because he was THAT big a star.

He and his first wife divorced after… well she said it better than I ever could.

“I excused a lot of his failings and whims because I loved him. But one day he did something to me that I couldn’t forgive. I was singing that evening at the cabaret. I left him home and he told me: “I invited a few friends; we’ll dine while we wait for you.” And it just so happened I had received a new dress from Paris. That evening, after work, I arrived home and what do I see? All these gentlemen dressed as women. And Conrad had put on my Paris dress. At this point, I divorced!”

And as  Anita Loos put it

“Any Berlin lady of the night might turn out to be a man; the prettiest girl on the street was Konrad [sic] Veidt.”

Good to see the tumblr sexyman precludes even tumblr

*predates

Conrad Veidt was an amazing human. To quote his wikipedia page: 

Veidt fervently opposed the Nazi regime and later donated a major portion of his personal fortune to Britain to assist in the war effort. Soon after the Nazi Party took power in Germany, by March 1933, Joseph Goebbels was purging the film industry of anti-Nazi sympathizers and Jews, and so in April 1933, a week after Veidt’s marriage to Ilona Prager, a Jewish woman, the couple emigrated to Britain before any action could be taken against either of them.

Goebbels had imposed a “racial questionnaire” in which everyone employed in the German film industry had to declare their “race” to continue to work. When Veidt was filling in the questionnaire, he answered the question about what his Rasse (race) was by writing that he was a Jude (Jew). Veidt was not Jewish, but his wife was Jewish, and Veidt would not renounce the woman he loved. Additionally, Veidt, who was opposed to antisemitism, wanted to show solidarity with the German Jewish community, who were in the process of being stripped of their rights as German citizens in the spring of 1933. As one of Germany’s most prominent actors, Veidt had been informed that if he were prepared to divorce his wife and declare his support for the new regime, he could continue to act in Germany. Several other leading actors who had been opposed to the Nazis before 1933 switched allegiances. In answering the questionnaire by stating he was a Jew, Veidt rendered himself unemployable in Germany, but stated this sacrifice was worth it as there was nothing in the world that would compel him to break with his wife.Upon hearing about what Veidt had done, Goebbels remarked that he would never act in Germany again.

As noted above, he was also bisexual, a friend once stating: “He was very much in love with a beautiful girl whom I trained. I’ll say frankly that Conrad also loved men, once in a while.“

The man was a bi icon, an anti-fascist Jewish ally, and a goddamn hero and we stan. 

<3 I didn’t know much about Conrad Veidt before reading these posts but he sounds like an utterly amazing and fabulous human being <3

God damn love this movie