"I very much wanted classical training, particularly one which focused on Shakespeare," says Peter Francis James. "Seeing James Earl Jones' Lear gave me the idea that it was conceivable for an African-American actor to be employable doing Shakespeare in America." Since studying at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, James says, he has encountered actors in the United States who are equally well trained in the Bard, but he's still glad he made the trip. While he was at RADA, the faculty spanned three generations, "representing a remarkable evolution of European theatre."
An additional plus for James was the chance to see the era's rising stars on stage—the likes of Alan Bates, Ian McKellen, and Maggie Smith. When we spoke, James was waiting for a plane that would take him to London to rehearse for the new West End production of Edward Albee's The Lady From Dubuque, in which he'll play opposite Dame Maggie. "I already had a dream come true working with James Earl Jones when he returned to the stage after 17 years in On Golden Pond. I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. Now, to work with Maggie, needless to say, I am beyond thrilled."
As a result of studying in London, James says, "I think I approached Shakespeare with a relative ease, which was uncommon at the time among young American actors. I actually made my living for 10 years as a classical actor, Shakespeare being the most produced playwright in America. So it actually turned out to be an economically intelligent choice. It wasn't what I anticipated, but this was the heyday of regional theatre and everyone had a Shakespeare slot in their season and you could do three or four productions a year."
Sloane Shelton's experience upon returning to America a decade earlier than James was quite different: She just couldn't get work at the Public Theater's New York Shakespeare Festival. "I was dying to do Shakespeare when I came back, but they didn't want people with English training," she recalls. "But I did get to do some David Rabe plays for them."
The North Carolina–born actor began her career in New York but chose to apply to RADA because, she says, "I had such a heavy hillbilly accent that I couldn't even get hired in Southern plays!" The school was everything she hoped for: "It gave me exposure to the classics. I did Ibsen, Shaw, and a lot of Shakespeare. And it gave me the tools that I needed—everything from mime to fencing."
Shelton eventually got to do Shakespeare (at Yale Rep and other regional theatres), but what was really invaluable, she says, was hands-on classical training, which she acquired by touring for two years with Eva Le Gallienne's American Repertory Theatre, performing in The Trojan Women and The Madwoman of Chaillot. Later she got her chance to play Southern in English director Peter Hall's 1989 Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams' Orpheus Descending. Recently she portrayed Pulitzer Prize–winning author Eudora Welty in the one-woman show Eudora, and later this year she expects to reprise her role as pacifist activist Dorothy Day in Candy and Dorothy, David Johnston's well-received fantasy about an encounter between Day and Warhol-era drag queen Candy Darling.
Zeljko Ivanek expected to return from training in London and find work performing Chekhov, Ibsen, and Shakespeare in regional theatre. Instead he launched his career in New York doing new plays, including Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine, Athol Fugard's "Master Harold"…and the boys, and David Hare's A Map of the World. Born in Slovenia, Ivanek was raised in America and did his undergraduate study at Yale, where the focus was on scene work. To further his craft, he decided to train at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.
"I missed having really rigorous training, so I was drawn to that," he recalls. Most English schools at the time, he explains, followed a similar curriculum—classical plays, vocal training, stage combat—without being tied to any specific teaching method. At LAMDA, however, Ivanek was most influenced by a movement teacher who had studied with Jacques LeCoq in Paris. "It wasn't at all what I went to English drama school for," he says. "We did animals and clowns. I didn't even know about that kind of work before, and it turned out to be the most influential thing coming out of there that helped me the most, when either I had trouble with my own work or just had to try to figure out how to go about things."
Ivanek says he would encourage anyone interested in it to train overseas, but he has words of caution: "The hardest thing, I think, about actors coming back from training in England is you just don't know anybody. You miss out on all the networking that happens when you go to a school here. You go to any of the prestige schools in America and everybody wants to know who you are. You have a kind of instant entry into the business just through that." In his case, he considers himself very lucky: "In my first summer after my first year at Yale, and for three summers in a row, I worked at Williamstown, and that had a huge effect on what happened after I came back from England. I got an agent and started working very quickly. I think in the English schools now they're making an effort to set up things to expose the students to agents and casting people. But all the training doesn't have a chance to kick in until you get yourself in front of people."
Edward Hibbert went to RADA, but—valuable as that training was—nothing prepared him for having to endure repeated doses of spit, as he did in the Broadway musical The Drowsy Chaperone. "There were no classes on spit-takes, but I think now I would like to give them," he says with a laugh. "I've got it down to a fine art."
Hibbert's parents are English, but he was born in New York because his father, actor Geoffrey Hibbert, was there as part of the original 1954 Broadway cast of The Boy Friend. The family returned to London after Hibbert turned 2 years old, hence his study at a British school. Since returning to New York as a full-fledged actor in the late 1980s, Hibbert's career has run the gamut, from playing Oscar Wilde Off-Broadway in Gross Indecency to 11 seasons on NBC's Frasier. Now he's best known for his musical comedy performances. He left The Drowsy Chaperone early this year to start work on Curtains, in which he plays an English director with "an industrial-strength ego."
Hibbert says he received comprehensive training in his two years at drama school but insists that the real training comes after you leave: "I was extremely fortunate, several years after I left RADA, to go for a season at the Chichester Festival, which is not dissimilar to the Williamstown Theatre Festival. There, as a young member of the company, I was working alongside the likes of Alec Guinness, Maggie Smith, and Joan Plowright. This was an extraordinary master class in being able to watch these great artists at work.
"Training is essential," he continues. "But having said that, I feel now that our industry has changed so dramatically that I'm advocating that the most important thing for a theatre student to do is to work—to learn from their peers. That's where the learning comes in: practicing the craft, maybe going off and doing plays out of town, summer stock. That is of paramount importance."
Anthony Cochrane echoes that sentiment. He was born and raised in the north of Scotland and won a local scholarship to Glasgow's Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in 1982. When he graduated, he says, "I was very lucky because it was on the tail end of repertory theatre, so it was a huge training ground for me." The practicalities of sustaining a long run and the challenges of performing in different plays on consecutive nights with little rehearsal are things you can't learn in school, he explains. "When you're thrown out into the business, you very quickly learn shortcuts. You haven't got the time to go to the library to study the background of the characters and read all the letters. You just have to get on with it." He adds, "It's about finding your route through it, finding a shortcut that takes you across the fields to the destination."
Cochrane first came to the United States to work with the Aquila Theatre Company, a troupe of British and American actors devoted to classical drama, now based in New York. Many of the popular conceptions about British-trained actors are myths, he says, such as the idea that they work from the outside in. "Perhaps 20 years ago, certainly with Olivier," he says. "The myth of an actor choosing a pair of shoes and saying, 'Ah, I've got my character'—I'm not saying that it doesn't happen. But I know an American actor I work with at Aquila like that. He's very movement-based, and once he's got the walk, then he's got the character. I'm just the opposite. I'm very internalized. Everything has to come from an emotional and reactive base for me."
English actor Sean Maguire, who now works in Los Angeles, spoke with us immediately prior to shooting the season finale of CBS's The Class. He began acting as a 5-year-old (in the 1982 TV version of John Mortimer's A Voyage Round My Father, starring Laurence Olivier) and made his mark in the long-running BBC soap EastEnders. He didn't work on the stage until he was 21, and he trained independently with a teacher friend instead of going to drama school. "I started doing a degree in speech and drama so that I could possibly teach later," he says. "I'd love to be able to give something back and teach kids the basics of drama. It helps your confidence a little bit, to have that in the basement. But ultimately, when the acting has to be done, that has to come from the person."
Maguire—like Cochrane and Hibbert, his compatriots from the U.K.—extols the immense value of training through work. He gained what he deems "incredibly valuable training for a sitcom" in the British stage production Funny About Love, saying the experience taught him the basic rules of comedy. About his current job in The Class, he says, "I've found myself spending more time on this than any other jobs since I did Shakespeare. A lot of comedy comes from the little idiosyncratic qualities that one has. Making jokes in a different accent, you can lose the funny things. I play American and gay in this role, and I have to find an entirely new guy and a slightly different sense of timing and rhythm."
Then there are those who insist that their British training is the mainstay of their acting. Take Susanne Blakeslee, who finds that her studies at Drama Studio London still resonate through her work. An Anglophile when growing up, she'd always wanted to study in London. "The thing that I really loved—besides the theatre, which was incredible—was the speech classes and learning different dialects phonetically," she says. "I had always sung, so I loved anything to do with training the ear. I think that the training was just incomparable."
Before moving to L.A., Blakeslee made a name for herself in New York in several editions of the musical spoof Forbidden Broadway, doing memorable impressions of Barbra Streisand, Julie Andrews, and other divas. "When you've studied different voices and dialects, you're a little less fearful of trying to do an impression of another performer," she says. She repeated her success on the West Coast, adding Forbidden Hollywood to her repertoire, but now she spends most of her time doing voiceovers for iconic Disney characters. "I usually do the villains and most of the British characters," she says. And for that her London training comes in handy: "I manage to use that Shakespeare training somehow. I'd say Cruella de Vil has some high drama in her."
Of the eight actors interviewed, Jane Pfitsch crossed the pond for training most recently and says she found the experience invigorating and eye-opening. She was looking to supplement her liberal arts education at Vassar and applied for a one-semester program at RADA through New York University. "It was fabulous," she reports. "Definitely, that program confirmed my feelings about wanting to be an actor and encouraged me to continue training. The level of work and the discipline was really inspiring. I think it's a lot stronger and more focused than in the United States."
Pfitsch credits her overseas experience for a fundamental change in her acting process: "When I went to England, I learned that theatre is like a craftsman's art, like a potter or a painter, a technical skill. I realized right when I came back and I was working with some of my same colleagues that my approach was really different—more practical, like a potter would work with clay: to start doing work by just doing it and not sit around and think about it that much."