How I ruined my career

I lived in Los Angeles for 26 years pursuing an acting career.  I did sort of meh okay.  Small roles in a couple of sort of meh okay feature films.  Small roles in a fair number of TV series.  A couple of commercials.  But my career never popped, never moved on to bigger or juicier roles.  Always just barely enough success to stay hopeful, but not nearly enough to pay the bills, not enough to feel that my career was actually blossoming.

Since then, I've given some thought to why acting never took off for me.  I had some native talent and found an acting coach who gave me access to it, helped me develop it.  I was never thin and pretty enough to strike anyone as a leading ingenue, but I was young and strong and well-proportioned.  And not every leading actress has standard beauty (although they are almost to a one quite thin), because it takes something else for someone to become a star, and by that I mean a consistently working actor whose name carries some weight.  What is that something else?  The competition for work is absolutely crushing in Los Angeles.  So daunting to walk into an audition anteroom to see two dozen women vying for the same role - and those are only the ones whose audition time coincide with yours.  So what does it take to shine in that crowd?  What is it that makes a producer, director, casting agent say "This one has something.  This is someone to promote."?

Persistence is certainly key in the pursuit of any goal, and I did have that.  I stuck with it for two and a half decades.  Connections can matter, and I did have one connection, with a casting director who was the ex-wife of a man I dated for a while.  She is the reason I got my first two or three small roles.  But even a strong connection can only take one so far.  Liza Minnelli's name may have had something to do with her being given opportunities, but she had the goods to turn those opportunities into well-deserved stardom.

I think part of what didn't go right about my career is that I never developed my look, my style, my persona.  It is very useful for an actor to know what type she is, to recognize what roles she will be considered for, and play that up during an audition.  I, for example, could have fostered an image of myself as the kooky best friend to the leading lady.  That probably would have been a good persona for me, at least at the beginning, at least until my awesomeness inspired filmmakers to give me bigger and better roles and higher billing and big awards----

But I didn't do that.  I didn't occur to me.  I was not very smart about things like that.  I also didn't have the grit and commitment to develop myself physically, to learn new skills, to find mentors, to train and train and train.

My biggest downfall, however, was my desire to be liked and loved.  I understand now that a performer of any sort needs to have a certain kind of ego, a sense of herself as someone who should be successful, who deserves to be successful, the person everyone in the room should be watching.  (As an example, years ago I saw a performance by a fleshy brown-haired singer who, in an interview after her performance, declared she was going to be the biggest pop star in history.  At the time I thought, "Honey, you have a bloated sense of yourself."  You may have guessed that her name was Madonna, and that bloated sense of herself, along with her talents, got her exactly where she said she was going to go.)  

I didn't have that.  I walked into every audition desperately hoping they would like me, desperately hoping I was what they were looking for, desperate for approval and validation.  I never once in those years walked into a room with the attitude of "Here I am.  Your search of over.  I know what I've got and if you hire me, you'll know it, too.  I'm the one for this."

That hunger to be liked and loved and approved of also got in my way in my relationships with men.  I wanted to be chosen; it never occurred to me that maybe I should be doing the choosing.  But that's another subject.

Thank goodness I discovered writing.  At last I had something I could do that I'm really good at, something I can generate on my own without waiting for someone else to give me work.  The upshot is that now that I'm out of L.A. and focused on writing, I'm a much, much better actor and have a great deal more success in auditions than I used to, because I'm no longer desperate and hungry and eager to please.  Auditions are fewer in Seattle than in L.A., and I'm older so there are fewer roles for me.  But I am cast in most of the roles I audition for now, because now I walk into the room with the attitude "Here I am.  I can do this.  I'm either who you're looking for or I'm not, but I know I can do this."  And once the audition is over, I go back home to Sweet Hubby and my writing, rather than spending the next few days chewing my fingernails, "Did they like me?  Did I get it?  Was I good enough?"

It's hard not to wonder if I might have had a more successful acting career if I had been less interested in being liked, being loved, being chosen.  In fact, a lot of my life might have looked different.  But still, I have a great marriage, my plays are performed, and I get to act now and then.  So I guess it all turned out all right.