Can you recognize if an actor has good acting skills?

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Nice insight, visagrunt, and it reminds me of seeing similar issues in a recording studio. Directors know what is needed and what they want, and a good studio musician comes in with the necessary abilities and experience. An artist once insisted on having a famous friend's brass section come in to help lay some of the tracks for her new album, and those players were in the top of their field on-stage. But with them in the studio, I had never before seen a director have to work so hard!

I love acting and leap at the opportunity when I get the chance. What visagrunt pointed out may technically be correct. I have to disagree about movement being the class an actor should take if given the choice of only one. The problem is is that an actor can and often does get bogged down with all that running through his head and the end result of a production can end up looking stilted.

In my opinion, if one class should be taken it would be a communication class or if it has to be a theatrically related class, improvisation. One of the things I have noticed when taking on a role or when directing is whether or not the actor is listening to the other actor(s) in a scene. I can tell who is interested in just delivering a role and who is interested in delivering a scene. An improvisation class forces the actor into listening to the other person. Listening is basic and fundamental to communication. Listening involves verbal as well as non-verbal communication. All the technical stuff that was outlined above is great for knowing and learning for expression. I use these tools as well but that would be fine-tuning. It won't do the actor much good if they don't know the art of communication of which listening is one of the most important elements if not the most important element.

Acting as I see it is more about reacting than acting. And you can't get that if you aren't listening. You can have all the actors come out on stage with proper beats and proper inflections and can perform admirably as a textbook dictates but it all becomes pointless because the scenes become stale and flat because there is no true interaction between the characters. It amazes me how listening so often gets overlooked when performing theater.

I don't disagree Upochapo, although my experience with actors coming out of improvisation classes is not universally positive. I've worked with some enormously talented improvisors, and I find that some can't see the forest for the trees--they are so focussed on the scene, that they forget that the scene has to fit within the framework of the larger piece.

This is, of course, where the role of the director is crucial. Like a conductor, the director is leading a group of talented performers, ensuring that everyone is working through the piece in the same vein. I can easily call an actor up short, and point out where the actor is not listening to a scene partner, and there are some basic exercises that are part of any actor's repertoire to build that collective listening.

In my experience it is much more difficult to get actors out of their own body and into the body of the character.

I stand amazed at actors who can do this. I love John Cusack and see all his movies (will soon see Hot Tub Time Machine) but in every movie he's still John Cusack. Luckily I love John Cusack so I'll see it anyway. So I'm entertained, but not blown away. But sometimes I am just blown away at how an actor stops being themself and becomes so much the charcater that you feel like you are actually watching the character's life and not just a movie. (Sorry if I'm priviliging movies. It's just what I'm familiar with more than stage.) Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler was that for me. I wasn't watching Mickey Rourke anymore. I was watching this wrestler who just physically resembled Mickey Rourke but wasn't him. It was amazing.

Ok. I see where you are coming from when you put it like that. Makes a lot more sense to me now why movement would be the class of choice. It must be me then. It's just from my own experience from acting that my movement seems to become natural when I become the character. My crowning achievement as an actor was not the fame and fortune that most seek but the fact that I did a play called Greater Tuna where I had to play 10 different characters and I assume I pulled it off swimmingly as people came up to me and asked how I made each and every character look so distinct and believable. They couldn't imagine pulling off one role let alone 10 of them in one play.

My therapist says I have great self-awareness of myself and my surroundings. Probably why I am always the actor with the least amount of notes at the end of rehearsals and why the movement just seems to fall into place for me. I just assumed this to be true for most actors. I'm now rethinking things lol. Thanks for the insight visagrunt. Always nice to see the other perspective.

Not only that but there seems to be two different kinds of people in this world, people who loved MASH the TV show, and people who love MASH the movie and thought the TV show was a travesty.

Greater Tuna is a wonderful piece. I saw a very good production a few years back (lamentably the theatre had the most purgatorial seats known!). Kudos to you for meeting that challenge.

Movement has never been a serious challenge for me, because I started dance training as a child, very soon after starting theatre training. Improvisation is my blind spot. I am very strong on exercises and games, but I am completely stumped on creating a scene. No amount of training, performance and workshop has ever gotten me beyond the skill of quickly pulling remembered material and reproducing it. (Maybe this is one of the reasons that I didn't list it in my quick review of the actor's toolbox. Perhaps I should revisit that...)

My counsellor and I had a few long conversations about my ability to present emotion in conversation, and the contrast with my lack of internalized emotional response. He perceived me to have a wide range of emotional presentation and assumed that it reflected a wide range of internalized emotion--but then I walked him through the cognitive process that lay underneath it.

Hmmm...I'm a little confused here. I don't know what you mean by pulling remembered material and reproducing it. But, as far as improvisation goes for an actor, it was covered in my acting classes. An actor doesn't need to be excellent at improv but to be able to do the basics. The way I see it, improvisation is about making things up on the fly more than it is about pulling up remembered material and reproducing it. When a scene goes horribly wrong (and it does happen), the actors need to be able to communicate with each other on stage in a way that will help trigger missed lines or when an actor is completely frozen and cannot remember what they are supposed to say or do so that they can get the show back on track and moving along as quickly as possible while hiding that little hiccup from the audience. Improvisation is plan B, lol.

I'm not surprised that you get stumped. When I was doing one of my workshops, I had a lady who was great at directing and acting but admitted that she couldn't do improv to save her life. By the time the workshops had concluded, this same lady was doing improvisation pretty well. It still may have been rough and embryonic but she was doing it. She was so happy that she was doing it because throughout her long and extensive theatrical career she never could get a handle on that skill. Like you, she always got stuck. The key to doing improv is unlocking that brain of ours and taking one of the thoughts running through our head and communicating it. It may help to think about the fact that we improvise everyday in our day to day conversations and things we do depending on what we are thinking and/or feeling. The same applies to the improvisation scene only not as you but as your character.

With the acting skills that I've used to get through life and fit in, in the past, I can tell if a celebrity's a good actor.

I have the "get out of jail" skills--those are part of the basic toolkit.

I was appearing in The School for Scandal. During one performance the actor playing Sir Peter was late for a cue, and then froze in the wing and would not come on. The actress playing Maria and I had to improvise our way through his piece of scene. but that sort of thing is easy for me, because it is a matter of manipulating existing text (Sir Peter's lines) and working them into dialogue for two others. (This is what I mean about pulling remembered material and reproducing it).

I have long since been content knowing what I can and cannot do on stage. No actor can do everything, and I know my limits. I can (and have) played Lucky in Waiting for Godot, I can't (and won't) audition for TheatreSports. I am sure there are others for whom the opposite is true.

Oh my goodness. What a chance encounter to see this thread first as I'm just entering this community!
This topic right here is something that is now one of the things that's keeping me more pursuaded that I do indeed have Asperger's. It's been three years since my family and I suspected it, and realized it made total sense of my whole life, but we have yet to find a doctor who actually knows what he or she is talking about. They CLAIM to, but they know nothing if they actually think they can tell me I don't have it after looking at me for five seconds!
Okay, ANYWAYS, see? rambin' on.. I have ALWAYS realized I seem to have no idea how to tell if someone is a good or bad actor, except of course people who are just plain horrible.. sometimes it's quite obvious. But this is something I realize no one else has ever seemed to have trouble with. Wow, that's amazing. This is a key factor now, on top of sooo many other things I identify with.

I cannot recall enough details to speak of either over the other, but I have definitely watched and enjoyed both even in spite of anyone's acting!

if you can tell someone is acting then they arent very good