Like mother, like daughter. After many years in film, including Bugsy (as Warren Beatty's wife) and Midnight Run (as Robert De Niro's wife), and on TV (starring in Falcon Crest, Savannah, Promised Land, A Year in the Life, Homefront, and The Robert Guillaume Show), stage-trained Los Angeles actress Wendy Phillips discovered that she shares with her mom, Jean Shelton, a passion for teaching.
Jean Shelton has been the Bay Area's foremost independent acting teacher since 1969. Before that she acted and taught in New York. She also directs, most recently Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at San Francisco's Actors Theatre. Phillips grew up in an extended showbiz family. Her father, the late Wendell Phillips, acted on Broadway and taught for many years. As a child, Phillips and her sister and brothers toured all over California with Shelton and Bay Area actor Robert Elross. Both Phillips' brothers are now San Francisco actor/directors, and her husband, Scott Paulin, is a film and TV director and actor who also has a stage background.
Phillips has now joined forces with Los Angeles colleague Judith Weston to teach at the Judith Weston Acting Studio. She flew up to San Francisco recently to join her mother for lunch at Kuleto's, near the Jean Shelton Actors Lab. Over wine, salad, and calamari, they discussed the tricks of the teaching trade—and took a few cheerful detours down memory lane. Their mutual love of actors, and their seriousness of purpose, was inspiring.
Jean Shelton: I've never known anyone that had a real theatre family like we did, where we took the kids with us everywhere and would do shows. At one point we had a flatbed truck. Remember that? We'd travel up and down the Central Valley, doing theatre for the farm workers. It was fascinating.
Wendy Phillips: Yeah, I'm 13 in the farm fields doing modern dance and Jules Feiffer sketches.
Jean: That is what we did. Those were kind of hippie days, and we didn't have any money. It was the late '60s. And you grew up as an actor. You kids all went to college, all studied other things besides acting, and all came back to it.
Wendy: When you're a teenager, you look for conformity, for a place where you belong, and when you're looking around, you go, "Nobody else I can see has a family like mine." So you go off to school and you pick one of those picture-perfect families and try to become like that. Then you realize, No. 1, they don't really exist, and No. 2, you were in the best place all along; you were in the circus. Everyone wants to run off to the circus. We were gypsies. I really believe this: Actors for the most part are the best people I know.
Jean: And the best adjusted.
Those Who Can, Teach
Wendy: I think I had a real avoidance toward teaching acting. When I came down to L.A., I was so scared. My mantra through the dry periods between work—I mean, you're gonna punch me on this—was, "Well, I can always teach." I'm 48, and I still have an agent; I still go out and audition. But the roles I'm auditioning for are props to the younger people, and it's not that they're small parts or demeaning, but small parts have to be well written.
Jean: They don't give you a chance to act.
Wendy: Also, I see my daughter getting ready to go to college, and I don't want her to go off to college and see her mom as a sad, defeated person. Maybe that's a kind of vanity, but I wanted her to think of her mom just out there, busting her butt at something. So I went to Judith Weston, and she invited me to substitute teach, and I really liked it, and I did it some more, and I liked it some more. I finally got my courage up, and I said, "Judy, what about a partnership?" And she's been so generous and supportive and a friend. So here we are, and here we go. My first class starts next week, and it's packed.
Jean: You're gonna find that you get a lot of satisfaction in teaching.
Wendy: I already am. It probably sounds boring, but basically, as an actor, one of the things that you love about being an actor is feeling that you are contributing to the betterment of the world. Whether anyone else agrees with you, you feel you're giving a gift. As a teacher, there's 30 years of stuff I can communicate. I believe acting can change people's lives. I feel anything can change people's lives if they find a true love.
Jean: I think people who are really committed to the arts, most of them must feel that way. You learn your craft, and it makes sense, and then you want to pass it along. I don't think teachers are just disappointed actors.
Wendy: Mom, when you're teaching, every cell in your being is for that student. Not your children, not your husband—there's nothing left outside that classroom door. It's all about helping that student get to the next step. A lot of teachers don't teach from that; they teach from "what I have to give you" as opposed to "let me just take what you have and pull it out." You hold nothing back, and it's been a great concern to your children; we feel you give too much. We worry about your health.
Jean: I think that's what makes good teachers: that you care about your students, all your students, not just your best students. Whoever is the slow one you don't ignore, because you know that there's something there. I feel fortunate that I've done as well as I have. I think I'm very good, and I think you will be.
Artist vs. Worker
Wendy: People in L.A. are terrified of identifying themselves as artists. With every good impulse, they want to be close to the crew, be a worker, and I think the managers and the agents and the studios reinforce that: Yeah, you're one of the people, you're just naturally like that, you just have that great quality—like you had nothing to do with it, they picked you 'cause you had a great look. And in that way they make you feel like a victim of the business as opposed to an artist, successful or unsuccessful, who has something to contribute. And if you see yourself as an artist, no one can humiliate you. No one.
Jean: That's a great gift.
Wendy: And that's what should be put out there, because acting is an art form and that's the way it should be approached, and it's the only way I'm interested in approaching it. People think a lot of actors, but the overall atmosphere in this country, certainly in L.A., is that they are commodities, unless they have a name above the title, and then you can call them whatever they want to make them happy, but they're just a big corporate product. The big corporations don't have to think of them as artists, but the actors need to think of themselves as artists.
Jean: I think that's the role of the teacher. We ought to help the student understand that they have something to give and not be ashamed of it and not apologize for it, and that to be creative is a wonderful thing. It's not all dollars and cents.
Script Partners
Jean: I hate to say it, but I know practically every acting problem in the world and where it comes from and how to correct it. But the biggest influence on me was Stella [Adler], because if you don't know how to read the script, you're lost; you can be a genius, but you can't play the words. I don't do exactly what Stella does, but the big thing is script analysis now, and to know that you have a partner in the script, and you have a place to start from, and you're not all by yourself.
Wendy: The corner I turned as an actress that made me finally really enjoy acting as opposed to being some kind of emotional painful release is when I finally felt a partner to the script, and I could leave the script or the script could leave me, but we were partners and the script and I—we fall in love.
Jean: I'm so sorry that when you were studying I didn't know that very well. I think I've always been a good teacher, but I've become better and better, 'cause I know where to start: It always starts with that script.
Wendy: A major influence on me was the late Peggy Fuery, and what I learned from her was script analysis. Before that, I had a great emotional life, a lovely quality, and lots of courage, but I was flailing until I just brought myself down and read the script, word by word by word. I can't understand how people can continue acting after a couple of years without having that to continually motivate them. Because after the first couple of years, you're just still working out your same old psychodrama, and that gets old—but then you get to the script, and that story inspires you, and that's why you're an artist. Because it's not just what the script tells you, it's what you bring to the script as an equal partner. And it's that synthesis that explodes into a creative partnership. BSW