acting | The Smart Set

The Successful Gesture

Matt Hanson — Mon, 01 Apr 2024 11:30:00 +0000

There’s a line in The Great Gatsby that took me by surprise when I first read it in high school, and I’ve been puzzling over it ever since. Early on, the fictional narrator Nick Carraway is thinking about what makes Gatsby special. He wonders “if personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures” which seemed […]

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A Life in Theatre

Norman Allen — Thu, 19 Aug 2021 11:30:00 +0000

Family lore holds that my great-grandfather, who owned a vegetable business near the corner of Polk and California in San Francisco, timed his deliveries to the St. Francis Hotel so that they’d coincide with Enrico Caruso practicing scales in a room above. When an earthquake and a fire devastated the city on the night of […]

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Resonating Roles

Byshera Williams — Fri, 09 Nov 2018 15:20:31 +0000

Rolanda D. Bell is an actress and singer from Oakland. Recently, she was featured as Nak in the film Blindspotting (created by Rafael Casal and Daveed Diggs). Outside of being very excited about this film, I was pleasantly shocked to see Bell, a plus-sized black woman, in an industry that tends to favor standard size, fair-skinned […]

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A Star is Made

Anvita Sudarshan — Fri, 05 May 2017 13:00:29 +0000

2006. Just a bit more than ten years ago. Two mega blockbusters were released in India, and three stars were born into the industry called Bollywood. One was a 21-year-old called Deepika Padukone. The other two were star kids, destined to be in the industry; Sonam Kapoor and Ranbir Kapoor. For those of you who […]

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Charlton Heston’s Last Act

Morgan Meis — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 16:12:43 +0000

As the story goes, Cecil B. DeMille chose Charlton Heston to play Moses in his epic The Ten Commandments because Heston looked a hell of a lot like the Moses of Michelangelo’s famous statue. Apocryphal or not, I believe it. It had to have been an awesome experience being approached by a young Charlton […]

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