Tips for Aspiring Actors

by: Diane Christiansen

Here are a few tips for aspiring actors. My intention is to provide information that will save many of you time, money and heartbreak.

I love helping actors in any way I can, in fact, my personal goal is to guide every actor I meet to success, with the skills, discipline and techniques they will need to be a professional working actor. If you read everything here, you should have a good foundation upon which to get yourself started. You have to do the rest. No one is going to get your career started like you, because no one can jump-start you.

It’s interesting that since I began teaching over 20 years ago, I have received countless emails from young people, most often under 18, asking all sorts of questions about how to accomplish their dreams, and how to tell their parents they want to be actors, and which course of action will take them to the quickest road to fame. Since these questions are so common, and since I can’t answer them all individually, I’ll post a general answer here:

Fame, fortune, and celebrity, from my perspective, are the wrong reasons for choosing acting as a way of life. Real actors are artists first. They make their choices based on living acting as a way of life, not as a career. For most, it’s a struggle of monumental proportions for which there will be no reward. That fact does not concern the real actor, who has no choice but to continue to find ways to illuminate the life of the human spirit through art, because it must be done.

For the artist, acting is like food, a provision that must be ingested to fully LIVE. Without it, we could not exist. For the true actor, the artist, life is about finding the most fulfilling outlet possible. So when you set forth on this path, I always say “Keep your eye on the Prize, and adopt Acting as a Lifestyle”. Remember, this is a Noble profession and you cannot allow anyone to tell you differently.