Honorary Graduates
Orations and responses
Response by Alison Steadman
First of all, thank you John Baraldi for all your
kind words. I hardly recognise myself. I am very moved, overwhelmed I
suppose by the love that I have been shown over the years by friends and
colleagues. I would like to say thank you to the University of Essex for
this honour, which I am absolutely thrilled and delighted about. I feel
very humble in front of you all today. I only wish that my parents could
be here today, because they would be extremely proud. My parents
encouraged me, supported me in every way. They were not rich, but they
gave me what they could and the main thing that they gave me was
confidence and courage to face quite a daunting career.
My mother said to me "In life always say you can,
never say you can’t." Very often in my early days I would phone her up
and I’d say "Mum, I’ve got this part and I’m really terrified, and I
honestly don’t think I can do it" and it wasn’t false modesty, it was
true. She would say "Courage, have courage, never say you can’t, always
say you can." I have used that phrase over and over again to actually
give myself the courage, particularly on a first night or a very
frightening part, when I have got to start filming. Actors always seem
terribly confident in front of an audience, but backstage we are all
quivering and we are all absolutely terrified. So it was always good to
have that backing that my parents gave me, and I thank them very much
for that, and I am sad that they cannot be here today.
I will always be thankful that acting opened a
door for me. It gave me the ability to be creative, it opened my life. I
left Liverpool, knowing I had some talent, knowing that I had something
to offer, but very bewildered and very frightened. And East 15 just
opened the door for me – there it was, and it was one of the most
thrilling and exciting time of my life. Recently, as John said, I went
back to East 15 and I did a little bit of directing. I dipped my toe in
the water of directing, quite reluctantly at first. Having done that, I
was absolutely thrilled, watching the students. I would like to thank
those students today for being just great, so co-operative, inventive,
fun, totally committed to the work. I was inspired by it. It refreshed
me. I came home every night and I was excited about the next day, going
through the scripts, thinking what I could do, how inventive we could
be. It was an absolute joy. The whole atmosphere at East 15 is lively:
students all over the place, sword fencing, doing speeches, singing,
movement lessons. The whole place is alive and vibrant, and it has grown
and grown since I was there. But it still maintains that honest core,
that absolute commitment to good work, to sincerity, to thinking about
other actors, to sharing, and not about celebrity and ‘aren’t I
marvellous’ and all the rest of it. It’s a truly creative place, and I
was very proud to go back there, and hope to do some more work with the
students.
Actors sometimes get a bad name. They get told
that they are lazy, or that they are in a profession that’s actually a
bit of a sham, and not really worthwhile. But actors are very sincere
about their work, and you enter the profession not lightly. I think
people are born actors. You have it in you. You can’t do anything else –
it’s just there. Actors over the years have been ridiculed. Recently I
was given a piece to read, written by a man called William Hazlitt, who
was an essayist and theatre critic (he lived from 1778 to 1830) and he
had many friends who were actors, and thought that actors were pretty
hard done by. He wrote this piece in defence of actors and I would like
to read it to you today. I think it’s amazing - these words could have
been written actually yesterday about actors. So all those East 15
students, pin your ears back, and take heart, ‘twas ever thus for
actors.
Actors have been accused, as a profession, of
being extravagant and dissipated. While they are said to be so, as a
piece of cant, they are likely to continue so. With respect to the
extravagance of actors, as a traditional character, it is not to be
wondered at. They live from hand to mouth. They plunge from want
into luxury. They have no means of making money breed and all
professions that do not live by turning money into money, and have
not a certainty of accumulating it in the end by parsimony, spend
it. Uncertain of the future, they make sure of the present moment.
This is not unwise. Chilled with poverty, steeped in contempt, they
sometimes pass into the sunshine of fortune, and are lifted to the
very pinnacle of public favour. Yet even there they cannot calculate
on the continuance of success.
With respect to the habit of convivial
indulgence, an actor, to be a good one, must have a great spirit of
enjoyment in himself: strong impulses, strong passions, and a strong
sense of pleasure: for it is his business to imitate the passions,
to communicate pleasure to others. A man of genius is not a machine.
The neglected actor may be excused if he drinks oblivion of his
disappointments; the successful one if he quaffs the applause of the
world in draughts of nectar. There is no path so steep as that of
fame, no labour so hard as the pursuit of excellence.
Actors are, as it were, main bearers in the
pageant of life, and hold up a glass to humanity frailer than
itself: they show us all that we are –all that we wish to be, and
all that we dread to be.
They are the only honest hypocrites – their
life is a voluntary dream, a studied madness.
So today I would like to wish all the students
good luck in whatever their field may be, and happiness, and good luck
to all those acting students and I hope you have wonderful careers that
are full of fun. Thank you.
Alison Steadman
10 July 2003
NB Alison Steadman spoke spontaneously – simply
reading the piece by William Hazlitt