At the beginning of An Improvised Life, Alan Arkin relates a conversation he once had with Madeline Kahn. As this was an audio book, I'll just paraphrase it:
Having long admired Madeline Kahn and her many talents, Arkin asks her which of these gifts was her primary focus. After thinking for a while, she couldn't really say."Well," he asks, "what did you start out wanting to do? Was your first impulse acting?""No," she replies."Singing?""No.""Playing the piano?""No.""Being a comedienne?""No.""What was the first thing you thought of doing?""Well," she said, "I used to listen to a lot of music when I was a little girl. And that's what I wanted to be. The music."
For a memoir, this is a short book, but as it's read by Alan Arkin himself, it's entertaining and sometimes thought provoking. I haven't seen that many of his movies, so my mental image is stuck pretty much at Little Miss Sunshine, and as that's about the age he was when he wrote this book, I suppose it's fitting. So, as I walked and listened, this grandfatherly figure shared some stories about how he got into acting, the struggles and sacrifices that entails, some very few stories about fellow celebrities, and quite a bit about his acting process and how he arrived at it.
I'm no actress, let alone an artist of any stripe, but I am interested in how art is created and Arkin lifts the curtain on this mystery somewhat; that strong acting is when you are the character, not just acting like the character; that, like Madeline Kahn, you become the music.
