| | Hong Zhang wrote: "... he really was playing playing! He revealed it in an introduction when the movie was shown on TV some years ago. I think for people who really play piano, it is probably obvious."
Well, it was not obvious to me. I guess I really don't play the piano, seeing as how I don't but I grew up with it and I grew up with Chopin being played on one. We tend to underestimate what makes actors worth so much.
We watched the extra material on the King Arthur DVD and they trained for months before shooting started, learning to ride horses, handle swords, etc. The girl in Flashdance really learned to weld. On the other hand, Eddie Murphy confessed that when making Trading Places, he had no idea what was supposed to be happening on the floor. We all have our limitations. John Travolta really flies, so he plays pilots really well, in Broken Arrow, for instance. The same is true of Harrison Ford in Six Days and Seven Nights. In fact, speaking of Ford, he is quite the handyman, coming into acting as a carpenter.
I just watched a Star Trek Next Generation oldie where Data and Dr. Crusher were tap-dancing. They could have done almost anything at that point, but what they did was tapdance. Actors who take themselves seriously tend to acquire a raft of ancilliary skills, just as a business manager will learn accounting, foreign languages, etc., etc.
Brent Spiner and Gates McFadden tapdancing was part of a continuing theme in ST:NG that I liked -- the cast got to work into the plots the skills they had, playing actors, playing instruments, etc. Probably the best actor's movie I saw was Outrageous Fortune with Shelley Long and Bette Midler. In that movie, at the moment of climax, Long hits the dirt as if she were shot dead and her life depends on her convincing her assailant that she is dead and I swear her face must have suffered in the fall. It was perfect. She probably did it exactly once. At any rate, I was convinced.
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