Acknowledgments Preamble: Saw the Air Thinking about actors and their allure; Natalie Wood in Rebel Without a Cause ; viewers'' love of acting; momentary performance; acting, action, and activity; acting, evidence, and biography; Linda Darnell; casting and gatekeeping. 1 Fantastic Performance Thinking about acting style and culture; innocent and scientific watching, and "falling in"; The Edge of Tomorrow ; The Last Laugh ; With Blood on My Hands : Pusher II ; predictive performance and John Way≠ transcendent performance and Katharine Hepburn; Bringing Up Baby ; Now, Voyager ; El Dorado . 2 Beaux Gestes Thinking about language and gesture; The Disorderly Orderly ; Anthony Perkins in Psycho ; Jeff Goldblum in Le Weekend ; Touch of Evil ; the flower of the gest; Ralph Richardson and Christophe Lambert in Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan , Lord of the Apes ; effects gesture; Life of Pi and keyframing; animated performance and puppetry; Blithe Spirit ; Robert Walker in My Son John ; The Stepford Wives ; The Musée Grévin; Jacques de Vaucanson''s duck; The Thief of Bagdad ; Charlton Heston and Gary Cooper in The Wreck of the Mary Deare ; cinematic gesture and The King of Comedy ; The Thin Man ; Cool Hand Luke ; The Red Shoes ; hands and handfulness; actors under direction; John Frankenheimer, Burt Lancaster, and The Train ; Antony and Cleopatra ; Hitchcock, gesture, and "cattle"; Kim Novak, Vertigo , and vertiginous gesture. 3 Curtains Thinking about the actor''s multiple selves; Vivian Sobchack and the actor''s four bodies; performance amplification; Alec Guinness and preparation; rehearsal and "downkeying"; curtain calls; Whose Life Is It Anyway? ; Murder on the Orient Express ; Citizen Kane ; The Magnificent Ambersons ; The Bad Seed ; "behind-the-scenes" musicals; theatrical exhibition spaces; credit-roll "goofing"; Peter O''Toole and Winona Ryder offscreen; Birdman ; fans and fan logic; actor-in-the-street stories; acting audiences; the Academy Awards. 4 "It''s Not a Man, It''s a Place!" Thinking about setting and the actor''s lab∨ workplaces under capitalism and factory design; the sound stage environment; Rope ; acting and make-up; Technicol∨ My Dinner with André ; Ian Carmichael; Ingrid Bergman and Under Capricorn ; The Wizard of Oz ; Grey Gardens; Simon Callow and A Room with a View ; Charles Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame ; Boris Karloff; 2001: A Space Odyssey ; Haruo Nakajima, Godzilla, and body division; Billion Dollar Brain ; The French Lieutenant''s Woman ; Chinatown ; Fred Astaire dancing with Ginger Rogers; the sound boom; the "caffeination schedule"; acting, editing, and lighting; predetermined focus; Suddenly, Last Summer ; The Hands of Orlac ; The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance ; "Instructions for John Howell"; panoptical setting; Laurence Olivier in Sleuth ; setting and characters; Bette Davis in The Letter ; the character "at home" in Marnie ; "hypothetical" performance, Sandra Bullock, and Gravity ; Andy Serkis; the actor''s mirr∨ animation vocalizing; The Member of the Wedding . 5 Acting Intimate Thinking about actors'' trade secrecy; Philip Seymour Hoffman in Boogie Nights ; Anthony Hopkins and Hannibal Lecter; Colin Farrell and truth-telling; Joaquin Phoenix in The Master ; zombie performance; George Herbert Mead; Hud ; Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice ; onscreen urination and bleeding; Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained ; the actor''s voice; acting and musculature; the actor''s touch; interpersonal contact and audience exclusion; The Bourne Identity ; anxious interiors; Peter Lorre in Casablanca , The Maltese Falcon , and Hotel Berlin ; Richard Burton in The Spy Who Came In from the Cold ; the "Doctrine of Natural Expression"; anti-intellectualism, the portrayal of genius, and Jesse Eisenberg; acting the "amnesiac"; forgotten moralities and cathartic awakening. Notes Works Cited and Consulted Index.