You sang in church, you know, and you didn't act at all. You tried not to act, you tried to tell the truth. The idea of being a troubadour on the road singing for your supper was very disturbing to him.
From James Earl Jones
When I was in New York after I left the Army, I studied for two years at the American Theater Wing, studied acting, which involved dance and fencing and speech classes and history of theater, all that.
So in my junior year, I switched to the drama department.
So by the time I got to Michigan I was a stutterer. I couldn't talk. So my first year of school was my first mute year and then those mute years continued until I got to high school.
Reading was a big thing, yes. Books were a big thing. But the things that stick out were the newspapers.
No one asked me to be an actor, so no one owed me. There was no entitlement.
My grandmother had the most dramatic effect on my life because she set me in one direction, and I had to go back the other direction for my sanity, and for my ability to be a social human being.
I think the extent to which I have any balance at all, any mental balance, is because of being a farm kid and being raised in those isolated rural areas.
I happened to happened to land in a time, in the middle '60s, that without knowing it, and without being told by the history of theater - which we now see from a historical point of view was an explosive time.
Before my grandpa built his own church, we went to the neighboring town, and it was a white community. You know, up north, mostly middle European people and Indians, Chippewa Indians. We were welcome to that church, but once we got in, they didn't know what to do with us.
4 perspectives
3 perspectives
1 perspectives