Tommaso Salvini | |
|---|---|
 Tommaso Salvini at the age of twenty-nine | |
| Born | 1 January 1829 Milan, Italy |
| Died | 31 December 1915 (aged 86) Florence, Italy |
Tommaso Salvini (1 January 1829 –31 December 1915) was an Italian actor.
Tommaso Salvini | |
|---|---|
| Tommaso Salvini at the age of twenty-nine | |
| Born | 1 January 1829 Milan, Italy |
| Died | 31 December 1915 (aged 86) Florence, Italy |
Tommaso Salvini (1 January 1829 –31 December 1915) was an Italian actor.
Salvini was born in Milan to parents who were both actors, his mother being the popular actress Guglielmina Zocchi. [1] Finding the boy had a talent for acting, his father organised tuition for him under Gustavo Modena, who took a liking to the boy. [1] His father was involved in the Bon and Berlaffa Company who were presenting Goldoni's Donne Curiose, and the actor who was to play the harlequin Pasquino fell ill. Instead of closing the theatre for the night his father asked the young Salvini to play the role. In his autobiography, he writes that "when I perceived that some of Pasquino's lines were amusing the audience, I took courage, and, like a little bird making his first flight, I arrived at the goal, and was eager to try again … It is certain that from that time I began to feel that I was somebody." [2]
In 1847 Salvini joined the company of Adelaide Ristori, who was then at the beginning of her career. It was with her as Elettra that he won his first success in tragedy, playing the title role in Alfieri's Oreste at the Teatro Valle in Rome. [3]
Salvini fought in the First Italian War of Independence in 1849, but otherwise devoted his life to acting.
In 1853, however, he took a year off because "he rarely felt adequately prepared for a role". [2] During this time, he prepared roles in great depth.
1865 was the 600th anniversary of Dante's birth, and as part of the celebrations Florence invited four of Italy's greatest actors—Ristori, Rossi, Salvini and Majeroni—to play in Silvio Pellico's Francesca di Rimini, which is based on an incident in La Divina Commedia . Rossi, who was to play the part of Lancelotto, felt himself ill-suited to the smaller part and Salvini, who had the grand role of Paolo, graciously exchanged with him, and made a memorable performance of it. Grateful for his display of urbanity, the government of Florence presented Salvini with a statuette of Dante. [1]
Salvini's most famous role was Othello, which he played for the first time at Vicenza in June 1856. His other important roles included Conrad in Paolo Giacometti's La Morte civile, Egisto in Alfieri's Merope , Saul in Alfieri's Saul , Paolo in Silvio Pellico's Francesca da Rimini , Oedipus in Niccolini's play of that name, Macbeth and King Lear. [3] The core of his acting method came from his studies. While visiting Gibraltar, for example, he spent time studying the Moors and found one particular man whom he based his Othello on. Instead of relying on a mustache, which was the traditional way of depicting a Moor, he tried to copy "gestures, movements, and carriage" to depict the character. [2]
Salvini acted frequently in England, and made five visits to the United States, his first in 1873 and his last in 1889. In 1886, he played Othello to the Iago of Edwin Booth. [3] He always delivered his lines in Italian while the rest of the company spoke English (except during his first tour, when he had an Italian company). According to the New York World (27 October 1885), "had he spoke Greek or Chocaw, it would have been much the same. There was that about him that was universal, and had he remained mute and contented himself with acting alone his audience could scarcely have failed to understand, so faithful was his portraiture of human instincts and their action" [4]
Salvini's acting in Othello greatly inspired the young Russian actor Constantin Stanislavski, who saw Salvini perform in Moscow in 1882 and who would, himself, go on to become one of the most important theatre practitioners in the history of theatre. Stanislavski wrote that Salvini was the "finest representative" of his own approach to acting. [5]
Salvini retired from the stage in 1890, but in January 1902 took part in the celebration in Rome of Ristori's eightieth birthday. Salvini published a volume entitled Ricordi, aneddoti ed impressioni (Milan, 1895). Some idea of his career may be gathered from Leaves from the Autobiography of Tommaso Salvini (London, 1893). [3] He died, aged 86, in Florence.
Salvini was so confident in his talents as an actor that he was once quoted as saying, "I can make an audience weep by reading them a menu."
Salvini made at least one recording for Zonofono in 1902 of "Il sogno" from Saul, which is listed in a recently-found contemporary Zonofono celebrity catalogue.
His son Alessandro (aka Alexander Salvini) (1861–1896), also an actor, had several notable successes in America, particularly as d'Artagnan in The Three Musketeers. [3] Another son, Gustavo Salvini, was a stage actor. Gustavo's sons, Tommaso's grandsons, were Alessandro Salvini (1890–1955) and Guido Salvini (1893–1965). Alessandro acted in movies dating back to silent pictures and Guido directed and wrote for films in the sound era.
Acting is an activity in which a story is told by means of its enactment by an actor who adopts a character—in theatre, television, film, radio, or any other medium that makes use of the mimetic mode.
Konstantin Sergeyevich Stanislavski was a seminal Soviet Russian theatre practitioner. He was widely recognized as an outstanding character actor, and the many productions that he directed garnered him a reputation as one of the leading theatre directors of his generation. His principal fame and influence, however, rests on his "system" of actor training, preparation, and rehearsal technique.
Othello is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare, probably in 1603. The story revolves around two characters, Othello and Iago.
Vittorio Gassman, popularly known as Il Mattatore, was an Italian actor, director, and screenwriter.
Method acting, known as The Method, is a range of rehearsal techniques, as formulated by a number of different theatre practitioners, that seeks to encourage sincere and expressive performances through identifying with, understanding, and experiencing a character's inner motivation and emotions. These techniques are built on Stanislavski's system, developed by the Russian actor and director Konstantin Stanislavski and captured in his books An Actor Prepares, Building a Character, and Creating a Role.
The Power of Darkness is a five-act drama by Leo Tolstoy. Written in 1886, the play's production was forbidden in Russia until 1902, mainly through the influence of Konstantin Pobedonostsev. In spite of the ban, the play was unofficially produced and read numerous times.
Stanislavski's system is a systematic approach to training actors that the Russian theatre practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski developed in the first half of the twentieth century. His system cultivates what he calls the "art of experiencing". It mobilises the actor's conscious thought and will in order to activate other, less-controllable psychological processes—such as emotional experience and subconscious behaviour—sympathetically and indirectly. In rehearsal, the actor searches for inner motives to justify action and the definition of what the character seeks to achieve at any given moment.
Adelaide Ristori was a distinguished Italian tragedienne, who was often referred to as the Marquise.
The Moscow Art Theatre (or MAT; Russian: Московский Художественный академический театр, Moskovskiy Hudojestvenny Akademicheskiy Teatr was a theatre company in Moscow. It was founded in 1898 by the seminal Russian theatre practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski, together with the playwright and director Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. It was conceived as a venue for naturalistic theatre, in contrast to the melodramas that were Russia's dominant form of theatre at the time. The theatre, the first to regularly put on shows implementing Stanislavski's system, proved hugely influential in the acting world and in the development of modern American theatre and drama.
Paolo Giacometti (1816–1882) was an Italian dramatist born at Novi Ligure. He was educated in law at Genoa, but at the age of twenty had some success with his play Rosilda and then devoted himself to the stage. Depressed circumstances made him attach himself as author to various touring Italian companies, and his output was considerable; moreover, such actors as Ristori, Rossi and Salvini made many of these plays great successes. Among the best of them were La Donna (1850), La Donna in seconde nozze (1851), Giuditta (1857), Sofocle (1860). La Morte civile (1861). A collection of his works was published at Milan in eight volumes . His Marie Antoinette was written expressly for Ristori, and first staged in New York.
My Life in Art is the autobiography of the Russian actor and theatre director Konstantin Stanislavski. It was first commissioned while Stanislavski was in the United States on tour with the Moscow Art Theatre, and was first published in Boston, Massachusetts in English in 1924. It was later revised and published in a Russian-language edition in Moscow under the title Моя жизнь в искусстве. It is divided into 4 sections entitled: 1-Artistic Childhood, 2-Artistic Youth, 3-Artistic Adolescence and 4-Artistic Adulthood.
Realism in the theatre was a general movement that began in 19th-century theatre, around the 1870s, and remained present through much of the 20th century. It developed a set of dramatic and theatrical conventions with the aim of bringing a greater fidelity of real life to texts and performances. These conventions occur in the text, design, performance style, and narrative structure. They include recreating on stage a facsimile of real life except missing a fourth wall. Characters speak in naturalistic, authentic dialogue without verse or poetic stylings, and acting is meant to emulate human behaviour in real life. Narratives typically are psychologically driven, and include day-to-day, ordinary scenarios. Narrative action moves forward in time, and supernatural presences do not occur. Sound and music are diegetic only. Part of a broader artistic movement, it includes Naturalism and Socialist realism.
Othello is a character in Shakespeare's Othello. The character's origin is traced to the tale "Un Capitano Moro" in Gli Hecatommithi by Giovanni Battista Giraldi Cinthio. There, he is simply referred to as the Moor.
The "art of representation" is a critical term used by the seminal Russian theatre practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski to describe a method of acting. It comes from his acting manual An Actor Prepares (1936). Stanislavski defines his own approach to acting as "experiencing the role" and contrasts it with the "art of representation". It is on the basis of this formulation that the American Method acting teacher Uta Hagen defines her recommended Stanislavskian approach as 'presentational' acting, as opposed to 'representational' acting. This use, however, directly contradicts mainstream critical use of these terms. Despite the distinction, Stanislavskian theatre, in which actors 'experience' their roles, remains 'representational' in the broader critical sense.
The Moscow Art Theatre production of Hamlet was a 1911–12 production of Hamlet, produced by Konstantin Stanislavski and Edward Gordon Craig. It is particularly important in the history of performances of Hamlet and of 20th-century theatre in general. Despite hostile reviews from the Russian press, the production attracted enthusiastic and unprecedented worldwide attention for the theatre, with reviews in Britain's The Times and in the French press that praised its unqualified success. The production placed the Moscow Art Theatre "on the cultural map for Western Europe", and it came to be regarded as a seminal event that influenced the subsequent history of production style in the theatre and revolutionised the staging of Shakespeare's plays in the 20th century. It became "one of the most famous and passionately discussed productions in the history of the modern stage."
Masks or Faces? A Study in the Psychology of Acting is an 1888 book by William Archer. It is based on a series of articles entitled “The Anatomy of Acting” that he had previously published in Longman's Magazine.
Sandro Salvini (1890–1955) was an Italian actor. He appeared in around thirty films during the silent and sound eras. He played the lead role of the Duke in Alessandro Blasetti's Mother Earth (1931). His grandfather was the 19th century Italian stage tragedian Tommaso Salvini.
Creating a Role is theatre actor/director Constantin Stanislavski's third and final book on his method for learning the art of acting. It was first published in Russian in 1957; Theatre Art Books published an English-language edition, translated by Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood, in 1961.
In addition to its appearance in the theatre, the character of Othello from the tragic play by William Shakespeare has appeared in many examples in art and culture since being authored by Shakespeare in the early 16th century.
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