In Her Words — On Acting

Lea Gramsdorff on vocation, technique, the body, the audience and what it means to be an artist.

Lea Gramsdorff in Medea — photo by Stefano Fanni

“Discover who you are as an artist. And study. A lot.”

VOCATION

Asked in 2012 what had led her to become an actress, Lea Gramsdorff's answer was simple: “A childhood dream.”

Was acting a professional choice or a life choice? “Neither. It's a vocation. You don't choose it, unfortunately.”

Nine years later, speaking with Gianluca Floris, she returned to that early certainty. As a child, she had already decided she would become an actress, although at first she imagined herself primarily in theatre.

Cinema arrived almost unexpectedly, through the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. Once she began working on film sets, she discovered that cinema was the medium that gave her the greatest joy. Later, living in Cagliari and finding fewer opportunities to work in film, she returned to theatre and began directing. At the same time, visual art became an increasingly important part of her practice.

“An artist cannot live without expressing themselves in some way. It's like water: sooner or later, it has to find somewhere to flow.”

TECHNIQUE

In 2012, asked what qualities an actor should possess, Gramsdorff replied: “Art and science, Plato would say. Then an obsessive fascination with the human soul, discipline and restlessness. Charisma.”

Technique is essential, but it is not enough.

In the 2021 RadioX interview, she draws a distinction between being a professional actor and being an artist. Voice training, diction and technical foundations are indispensable to the profession. But eventually something apparently paradoxical has to happen:

“The actor's craft ultimately requires technique to disappear completely.”

Naturalness is not the absence of technique. Credibility and truth may be the result of extensive analysis, conceptual work and study of the character.

As Gramsdorff puts it, “They say that the actor is both the musician and the instrument.”

Learning a technique is therefore only the beginning. She describes finding one's own technique as a fundamental step for an artist: “Creating and inventing your own handwriting, your own grammar, your own spelling, your own syntax.”

This gives a deeper meaning to the advice she had offered aspiring actors almost a decade earlier: “Discover who you are as an artist. And study. A lot.”

CHARACTER & BODY

A decisive encounter in Gramsdorff's training was the Russian theatre pedagogue Jurij Alschitz, whom she met while studying at the Centro Sperimentale.

She describes the years of work with him as revolving around one fundamental question: the distinction between an actor and an actor-artist. Rather than providing a formula, that training gave her the means to dismantle and reconstruct her own creative process.

In her 2022 reflections on Dacia Maraini's Maria Stuarda, Gramsdorff recalls actress Olga Knipper's image of the ultimate goal of working on a character: “to feel as though you are wearing the character like a glove.” For this small act of magic to occur, she argues, the actor must first be willing “to take a step back from the character.”

The encounter between actor and character can even become a struggle before reaching what she calls the “breath of life”: the actor assuming the character's thoughts, emotions and destiny in order, finally, to give them life.

Cinema and theatre demand different relationships with the character. In cinema, “the distance has to disappear completely.” Film anchors itself in reality and attempts to recreate it. Theatre requires another movement: “to reach a slightly greater degree of abstraction than you would in front of a camera.”

At the centre of both is the actor's body.

“The body is always the actor's great dilemma and, at the same time, their great resource.”

When a line feels lifeless, the problem may not lie in the words at all. It may be in a posture, the direction of a gaze, the position of a foot. Change one physical element and suddenly everything can fall back into place and, in Gramsdorff's words, “smell more of truth.”

Here theatre and visual art begin to converge: “The relationship between figure and space is fundamental; it can never be left to chance. In this respect, theatre is no different from painting.”

And what is absent matters as much as what is present. Stillness, silence and empty space are not necessarily things to be filled. The temptation to add a gesture, extend a line or escape silence can come precisely from the actor's discomfort at being left exposed.

THE AUDIENCE

For Gramsdorff, the audience is not a passive recipient of a performance.

In 2012 she described it as an active participant: “The audience does a large part of the work during a performance. It can make it wonderful or deadly dull.”

“On stage, you receive the breath of those watching you, their attention or their distraction. After all, they're the reason we do it.”

By 2020, in an interview with Ambra Pintore for I 5 sensi dell'arte, the relationship between artist and audience becomes part of a broader reflection on the purpose of art itself.

“Art can entertain, of course. There's nothing wrong with that. But for me, that isn't its primary function.” Its primary function, she argues, is not to turn our attention elsewhere, but “precisely to turn inward.”

And then comes an image that brings artist, artwork and audience together:

“Art reflects: first it thinks, and then it becomes a mirror.”

Art can mirror a thought, a state of mind, an observation of the society in which we live. In making someone reflect, it can make that person a mirror in turn.

THE ACTOR AS ARTIST

The idea of the artist runs through Gramsdorff's reflections over many years and across different disciplines.

Speaking in 2007 about roots and the risks of cultural isolation, she argued: “For an artist, I believe it is essential to maintain a universal outlook. Drawing artistically on your own traditions and roots is a good starting point, but you cannot stop there.”

In 2012, her advice to a young actor was to discover who they were as an artist.

In 2021, she traced that question back to her years of study with Alschitz and described an artistic attitude that extends beyond acting into directing, writing and visual art.

What, then, is an artist?

“I think the fundamental characteristic of an artist is being a researcher who, unlike other researchers, isn't looking for the answer.”

The artist is someone capable of “remaining within that long, unbearable, abyssal ‘I don't know.’”

For Gramsdorff, this uncertainty is not a failure to find an answer. It is a creative condition. Art communicates an underlying restlessness that may become beauty or provocation, depending on the artist.

And an artist inevitably belongs to their own time. Even performing a work written centuries ago means approaching it from the present.

This is also why directing increasingly attracted her: it offered the possibility of taking a text by Euripides, for example, and discovering its relationship with contemporary society. “When you manage to build that bridge, people cross it with you.”

A year later, reflecting on Stanislavskij and Maria Stuarda, Gramsdorff formulates the same principle from another direction: “For me, the actor is an artist.”

When psychology falters, when the desire to play fades, when inspiration disappears, emotions wear out or research becomes exhausted through repetition, the actor can return to the fundamental questions.

And that is where the search begins again.

“Questions are that tiny particle of energy that never runs out, that is always there for us.”

In her professional profile on Filmmakers, Gramsdorff describes the same process from the perspective of the present: cinema taught her the search for truth, transparency and minimalism; theatre taught her audacity and the need to keep evolving as an artist. Directing, writing and painting, in turn, expanded one another.

“One discipline expands the others, so I am a different actress now, than I was when I started.”

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