(3 of 10)
He has an uncanny command of stagecraft, that arsenal of small gestures and bits of business that an actor uses to establish his character for the audience. In the final scene of a 1962 production of The Merchant of Venice, Scott, playing Shylock, held a handkerchief belonging to his daughter Jessica. The production was staged outdoors, near a lake in New York's Central Park, and every night a gentle wind blew across the stage. To signify Shylock's loss of Jessica, Scott simply released the handkerchief, and the wind carried it away. In O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms, he had two loads of farm equipment of clearly different weights placed just off the stage. When he and his son made their first entrance, the father carried the heavier one. The audience was silently but clearly told what O'Neill wanted them to know about the old man's strength and his relationship with his son. As Shakespeare's Richard III, he taped a piece of metal to his leg to keep it from bending, then attached a rigid aluminum strip to his arm to make it virtually inflexible. "As I continued to rehearse the play, though," Scott says, "I found I needed these restrictions less and less. The knee taping went during the first week's performance, then the arm. I found I had been programmed to move as though they were there, and I never had to worry about falling out of the character movements again." Scott is also a perfectionist with makeup, and he has the devotion and knowledge to fill the demand he makes on himself. For Patton, he borrowed old newsreels of the general and watched them so often, recalls Producer Frank McCarthy, "that they were completely worn out when he finally returned them." Scott also read 13 Patton biographies several times each, had his dentist mold him a set of caps to duplicate Patton's teeth, shaved his head and wore a wig of realistic white fuzz. He even insisted on having moles on his face identical to Patton's and filled in part of his nose to make it more like the general's. When she saw the film, Patton's daughter was astonished. "Once it gets rolling, a character is never off my mind," Scott says.
Means of Survival
His fellow actors often express admiration for Scott because he has the courage to risk professional failures. His characterization of Mordecai Jones, the aging but still canny Flim-Flam Man, was too strongly derivative of W.C. Fields, and his performance as Antony in Antony and Cleopatra was a self-proclaimed disaster. "I should have played Cleopatra," he says; Antony is one of the few roles beyond his ambition. "The great danger with most actors," he says, "is that the more successful they become, the less risk they will take with their careers. They forget why they became actors in the first place. They become successful personalities instead. Spencer Tracy ultimately became a symbol actor. So did Grant, Cagney, Robinson."