Book Review of "Acting Professionally" by Robert Cohen

"Acting Professionally"
Sixth Edition
by Robert Cohen
McGraw Hill, NY, 2004

Book Review by Bill Schaeffer

copyright(c) 2013, 2018
William Schaeffer

p.11

If you are going to make a living as an actor you must possess the following:

1. Talent
2. A charming, fascinating, interesting, likable, hateful, definable PERSONALITY
3. Looks
4. Training
5. Experience
6. Contacts
7. Commitment and a massive will to succeed
8. A healthy attitude and capacity for psychological adjustment
9. Freedom from entanglements and inhibitions
10. Good information, advice, and help
11. Luck

p. 25
" You should clearly either be a character actor or not. Weight and age have a lot to do with this: Character actors since Roman times have invariably been fat or old, if not fat and old, if not fat and old and ugly. You should surely know whether or not you're fat, and you should be either fat or not fat -- nothing in between. Don't be neither fish nor fowl here. If you are ten or twenty pounds overweight, you're dead in the water. Either get your weight down to where it should be (and a bit lower in TV, because the tube will round you out a little or gain forty pounds more. And if you feel you are ugly, don't worry about trying to hide it. Cultivate it. Make it work for you. Use what you have to create a distinctive appearance. The only "Bad" appearance is a bland, characterless, typeless one."

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