Lucie Arnaz says her fans don’t understand why she doesn’t remember the specifics of a show and she’d tell them, “as fast as we’d learn the lines, we’d forget them.” She also said her mother never used cue cards, till midway through her second series, and while Lucille Ball could use them, no one else on her show could, according to her daughter.
George Burns said, he left school, with basically a “third grade education,” and was embarrassed he couldn’t read properly. He would have his secretaries read him the scripts and he would memorize them that.
George said his wife Gracie had the opposite problem. While radio was a breeze for her, one of the reasons she hated TV was she couldn’t just read her lines. For the TV show not only would she memorize her lines, but since her lines often made no sense, she had to memorize everyone else’s too.
Audrey Meadows said, Jackie Gleason had a near photographic memory and hated to rehearse. They often barely one run through. She said, the problem was Jackie wouldn’t memorize the lines, as written and that made her afraid she’d miss her cue. So she developed the classic, poses and pauses Alice uses on Ralph, before saying her punchline, to give her time to think.
Vivian Vance says her TV husband William Frawley, would only memorize his line and nothing more. She said, there were times he’d come to her asking what the script was about, as he didn’t even bother to read the whole thing. Vance said he was the only actor she knew that would complain about having too many lines, and he’d as Desi to give some to her.
I heard a story on a podcast (WTF) recently where an actor mentioned working with some (older, famous) actors who didn’t even bother memorizing the few lines for the scene they were filming, but had their lines fed to them via an earpiece.
Jackie Gleason may have had a photographic memory, but even he could forget his lines. Every time you see him pat his stomach in The Honeymooners, that’s the signal he couldn’t remember what was supposed to come next.
In his autobiography, Tony Curtis describes what it was like to work with Mae West in ***Sextette **(1978). Her mind was by that time so far gone, she had to be fed all her lines through an earpiece. Occasionally, she’d start repeating police transmissions coming in over the radio receiver, instead of her lines.
**Fun Fact: **Tony Curtis was one of only two actors to have worked with both Mae West and Marilyn Monroe. The other was Cary Grant.
*IIRC, she also had problems with her personal hygiene after trips to the toilet.
How Do Actors Memorize So Much?
They work their butts off.
I didn’t try out for one play in college, telling the director I was sorry, but I had especially tough classes that semester, including Tuesday and Thursday nights when most rehearsals were held.
A week later, I ran into a friend who said “Umm, have you seen this?” and showed me the cast posted… with me in the most verbose part. And a note that I wouldn’t have to practice Tuesday and Thursday nights. Did I mention the singing? And dancing?
Did I mention my grades suffered while I memorized lines? And dance steps? Sigh…
One thing that helped was that if you could really understand your character, and become that person, then reacting to the other actors in character made sense. So it was less “I must say these words” and more “I’m so angry that Gretchen lied to me! I’m going to rant at her until she tells me why she met with Raoul. Then be crushed when she breaks down and tells me he’s the father.”
I acted in many plays in the 1990s, for my local community theatre, and sometimes I struggled with learning lines when I was at home going over them, but as soon as I was on stage it was easier. There are cues - not only is the line of dialogue that is fed before it a memory jog, but where you are standing on the set, who you are there with, how far into the story you are, all help cue you to say the next line.
Also, they’re usually conversations, so context is also a great prompt. You can reply with just the gist of what it should be, if not the exact wording, in some cases. That’s not encouraged, of course, especially for classic plays like Shakespeare or something familiar, but occasionally you can get away with it for lesser known or new works.
TV and movies are a different ball game to plays, in that it’s more piecemeal, but most actors will tell you that after a few weeks of being on their first movie it becomes a routine, a muscle memory that gets easier the more you exercise it. Soap actors especially get good at it quite quickly, then ever after it’s a doddle for them.
I remember hearing he did that when he played Jor-El in Superman. During the big scene where the three super-baddies are being sentenced to the Phantom Zone, Brando had cue cards placed around the set where he could see them while delivering his speech.
Not an actor, but I’ve always loved this bit of the documentary on pianist Sviatoslav Richterwhere he describes how he learns and memorizes new pieces. The cross-interview with his wife, where they disagree on the amount of time he used to practise, always puts a smile on my face.(13:25-15:00)
I like him a lot as both a musician and actor. It sounds like it’s a good thing he didn’t have all that many lines in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (I love this movie). I don’t know if this is true but I read years ago that every word spoken in a Coen Brothers film is in the script. There’s never a second of improvisation. I always remember that when I see something like The Trapper scene of The Mortal Remains segment. Chelcie Ross stole the whole thing.
TNG would be a lark. There’s short term memory and long term. A lot of people can look amazing by memorizing something very quickly…and then it f**ks off! I have no mid term memory. But let me sleep on it and a four page monologue can be learned in a fairly short amount of time.
Also helps to go over it again and again while you’re driving or biking or whatever.
Personally I’ll go over all my lines right before the show starts, then again at intermission.
A lot depends on the nature of the show, and the professionalism of the cast and crew, and in the case of shows with a recorded music track, yes, obviously, everything in that sequence happens exactly the same every time.
However – and it’s been a long time since I was involved in anything close to professional theater, so I could be wrong – I believe that, in most shows, most lighting and set cues are still manually initiated by technicians. They just don’t push a button that raises the curtain and starts an unbreakable chain of events that lasts for the whole act or the whole show. There may be sequences that run for many minutes without a break, but most of the time, if an actor’s timing gets seriously off, the lights and set changes aren’t just going to proceed as if nothing happened.
Of course, on Broadway, and in other similarly professional shows, most performances do proceed like clockwork, so perhaps they have moved to near total show automation. Is Snowboarder Bo or some other theater professional around to enlighten us?
When I did theatre in high school, the director/producer (a teacher) always sat in the back of the auditorium with a headset and was in constant communication with the stage crew over an intercom. I remember when we did a “silent movie” bit with a strobe light and titles, he was there going “Strobe. Slide. Strobe. Slide.” The whole thing went like clockwork.
It was the same at Middlebury, except we were working with a professional director and his wife and teenaged son (they’re now doing a production in Kiev). The theatre at the Midd had a sophisticated control booth from which the light, music, sound effects, and so on were controlled manually by the director and his son, while the wife sat in the front row to act as prompter (and we never needed prompting).
Anecdotally, actress Genevieve Bujold (who primarily did film work) was the original Captain (Nicole) Janeway on Star Trek: Voyager. After the first two days of production, she quit the show, unhappy with the demanding work schedule on a television series. I imagine that at least part of this could have been the volume of lines she had to memorize in short order.
This led to the role being recast with Kate Mulgrew, and the character being renamed Kathryn.
I did forget that technobabble has been noted as a problem for some people. I’ll bet its that TV actors have the same amount of time to memorize a technobabble scene as they would a normal scene so its not like having weeks to memorize The Bard.
I’ve been a professional actor for 40 years. I’ve appeared in 70 plays and have done every job an actor can do. I was famous for about 45 minutes about 20 years ago. Every time I quit (retire), an old friend calls and asks me to do a play he or she wrote or is directing and I get pulled back in.
Here is how it works:
1 - Learning lines is a requirement for us to do our job. If an person cannot learn lines, he or she will soon know they are in the wrong line of work.
2 - We usually get scripts a month or so before first rehearsal. This gives us some time to learn the parts that we think will be most difficult to learn before we walk into the room for the first time.
3 - Blocking helps. “Blocking” is where we are standing on the stage at each moment. Many times I know that “when I cross down left I talk about this.”
4 - We have probably said the words a 50 times in rehearsal before an audience sees us.
5 - The real trick is getting the words into our long term memory. Once I get it in there, I can remember whole scripts for decades. I did a play in 1997 that was going to Broadway in 2001 with a different actor (read “star”) in my part. Two days before the first out of town preview, he got injured and couldn’t go on. I got a call and went into the rehearsal hall three hours later. I did the entire play that morning without dropping a line. I could do the play today with one or two rehearsals. Once it is in long term memory, it is in forever.
6 - There are apps that help. “Line learner” is a good one. Some of us love to drill lines. Actors that like to drill find each other and run lines whenever they can. Other actors can help an actor in stage who has, “dried up.” They can feed us a line or jump over our line to theirs in a clever way and keep the play moving.
7 - Memorizing is a muscle. I was on a soap for a couple of years. After 6 months I could easily memorize 20 pages of dialogue a day. I was once at a commercial audition with another long time soap star. We had minute of copy to read. Just before he went in he read it through once, looked at me and said, “Got it.” He memorized it that fast.
8 - It gets harder as we get older. I won’t take a job today without at least 4 months of lead time. I want to be “off book” the first day.
9 - In the theater we generally have good material. One of the sayings in my business is, “garbage in, garbage out.” If the script is weak, it doesn’t stick, but if we have great words, we form a personal relationship with the story that has long term value. I did “Taming of the Shrew” 40 years ago. I could do Kate and Petruchio’s meeting scene right now even though I haven’t said those words in decades.
10 - I once got a job in which I had 3 weeks to memorize 186 pages. It was hell. I lost 28 pounds doing that gig. I did nothing but eat, sleep, rehearse and study. I had interns working lines with me every day. I will never do that again, but I made it.
11 - We do NOT PARAPHRASE. I was hired 7 different times to work with a playwright who had won 3 Pulitzer Prizes. I assure you he knew every comma he’d ever put on paper. An actor would change his words at his peril.
12 - The three worst parts of our job are: a - auditioning for a job we really want but do not get, b - changing our clothes 10 times in 2 hours, c - learning lines.
Being good in a good play with good people in a good place and getting paid for it is the best thing in the world. A, B, and C above are dwarfed by the thrill we get once we get it right.
I’ve done a little community theater, and it does sometimes happen that actors don’t say their lines word-for-word exactly as they appear in the script. Paraphrasing happens fairly often during the rehearsal process, but occasionally it makes its way into the final performance. And it usually bugs me when this happens. I’m a believer in saying the lines exactly as written. Partly this is out of respect for the playwright. But there’s more to it than that. I’ve heard paraphrases that render another actor’s lines nonsensical, because they’re reacting to a wording that wasn’t actually said. Paraphrases that make a character sound like a modern American in a play that isn’t set in modern America. Paraphrases that render a funny line unfunny. Paraphrases that throw other actors off, when they’re listening for a particular word or phrase as their cue. And paraphrases that just don’t sound quite as good as the correct, scripted lines.
Eff that. I can memorize a four page monologue in a week with a lot of hard work. but for ME…i can work as hard as i want, but until its shifted into long term memory…there’s nothing i can do. There’s nothing more frustrating then thinking you’ve got something and it just drops out of short term memory.
Agree whole-heartedly with number 10. On Charlie Rose, Gary Oldman reported that Laurence Olivier said, “It is not how well you know the role that matters, it is how long you’ve known the role that matters.”
