ON ACTING: All Great Acting is Emotional Reality

From "Acting is Living:"

"In the history of Western Civilization drama, from the Greeks to the Romans to the Renaissance to today, I would argue that the greatest acting has always been emotionally true to life; always been Shakespeare’s “mirror up to nature.” Great acting onstage or on screen has always been onstage real emotional life itself, regardless of the epoch, period, styles, restricted parameters, and/or the staged presentations of that life—and that includes all those epochs when the great actors lacked any psychological understanding of how they attained that real life onstage or onscreen."

For the audience to feel, the actor must feel; for the audience to believe, the actor must believe. Only emotional truth from one begets emotional truth for the other.