Charles Laughton once famously said, 'Method actors give you a photograph. Real actors give you an oil painting.' How true is that ? To some extent everyone must agree that method acting is a safer option. You go through the process & most of the times you get a satisfactory result on stage or on the camera. But to give audience 'that bit extra' which is the difference between a good actor & truly great ones one must possess some real acting talent. Funny we are talking about talent on this blog. Cause there is nothing you can do about talent. You either have it or you simply dont. So no point wasting time discussing about it. Stanislavsky made it pretty clear what acting is all about. He told that acting is nothing but reacting. It might appear vague but it isnt. Acting is nothing but reacting to a certain situation, reacting to one's co actors, reacting to the audience. But there is a small catch. Actor needs to be selective & make sure that he doesnt over do it or in other words overact. Lillian Gish once told, 'never get caught acting.' So if the audience doesnt catch an actor acting that means he has been successful in taking them into a different world. That is where the true success of an actor lies. There is no shortcut to truthfulness, actor must oblige to this fact. After the actor has assembled all the external facts about a character and used his imagination to feel what it is like to live within those boundaries, there still remains the difficult task of using these insights to better understand the human condition. At the end of the day rules are irrelevant. The process is all that matters.
October 12,2007

N.B.- I added Stanislavsky, the guru of method actor