I think you have to be schizoid three different ways to be an actor. You've got to be three different people. You have to be a human being. Then you have to be the character you're playing. And on top of that you've got to be the guy sitting out there in Row 10, watching yourself and judging yourself. That's why most of us are crazy to start with, or go nuts once we get into it. I mean, don't you think it's a pretty spooky way to earn a living?
GEORGE C. SCOTT comes as close to fitting his definition of the ideal actor as one man can without breaking apart into three disparate individuals. In his life offstage he has been stubbornly, even violently individual; when he is acting, he creates a character and hides his individuality with singular success; as the man in Row 10, he is a perfectionist critic, more demanding of himself than of those around him. In more than a dozen stage and screen roles in a steadily growing career, Scott has demonstrated that he is one of the best of contemporary actors. His talent is both subtle and obvious; it makes his art at once unsettlingly real yet larger than life.
It is no accident that Scott's tripartite ideal is a human being first. His own life, and his intuitive ability to use it at the right time in the right role, is his fundamental resource. As a great actor, he achieves something new in every part—something of himself reborn, fathered by insight, nurtured by skill and imagination. Scott also offers something more. Always, just below the surface, there is an incessant drumbeat of anger. Says Jose Ferrer, who directed him in The Andersonville Trial on Broadway: "It's a concentrated fury, a sense of inner rage, a kind of controlled madness."
In his personal life, Scott has often lost that control—with dramatic ferocity. When he is acting, he makes his rage work for him: it produces a consistent, overwhelming image of strength in all of the varied characters he so convincingly creates. And it is that projection of strength that makes so many of his parts almost tangible in a viewer's memory. Anyone who recalls one George C. Scott can easily see half a dozen: the unctuous gambler Bert Gordon in The Hustler; the slithering prosecutor in Anatomy of a Murder, squinting at witnesses through slit eyes like a starving mongoose ready for the kill; the self-destructive doctor in Petulia; the cool, clipped English sleuth in The List of Adrian Messenger; General Buck Turgidson in Dr. Strangelove, slapping his burgeoning paunch and producing a sound like a thunderclap from Olympus, wrestling the Russian ambassador to the floor of the war room as the world ends with a comic bang.
Rain Through the Cloud