Vincent Price, Meta Actor

by Kurt Sayenga

Vincent Price wasn’t always considered a “horror actor” or a “ham actor,” but he was always willing to play it big. He was hardly alone in that: for roughly 75 years, theatrically trained actors with large personalities treated the cinematic scenery as a food group. These days, actors like Price are the exceptions; naturalism and underplaying are the house style of “serious” screen acting. Projecting the awareness that you are an actor in a movie – conceding that nothing you do is real, however hard you anchor your performance in reality – is grounds for excommunication. Nicolas Cage and Willem Dafoe are the most prominent holdouts against the rule – both are capable of giving nuanced performances, but they are unafraid to embrace the inherent unreality of film, and when asked, they will pitch their performances to operatic levels. Cage credits his aunt Talia Shire with the liberating formulation: “Naturalism i…