One Saturday, after the newsreel and coming attractions, an explosion hit the screen -- Elia Kazan's East of Eden, the story of a lonely outcast who desperately needed his father's love, whose brother was the special one, whose mother had vanished. As the film continued, I saw this kid's life, searching, desperate, heartbroken, mean, haunted, confused. I wasn't in a movie, I was in my life.  I was this kid. He cried, raged, was romantic, weak, uncertain, vengeful, and, ultimately, brave. When the movie ended I was shaking all over. It was freezing from the air conditioning, but that wasn't the reason I was shaking.

As I walked out of the theater in shock, I was hit with 100-degree heat, and I almost passed out. I had just seen my life on the screen, but it wasn't my life, it was John

Steinbeck's, and Elia Kazan's, and James Dean's, and Julie Harris's, and Jo Van Fleet's; great artists.   I had just seen my life on the screen, but it wasn't my life, it was John Steinbeck's, and Elia Kazan's, and James Dean's, and Julie Harris's, and Jo Van Fleet's; great artists.  I cried for days. I woke up in the middle of the night, every night. My heart was so full, I was so alive with ideas, and with hope. After that blistering day in North Hollywood, my life was never the same. I was connected to a dream - the dream of becoming an actor.

I had just seen my life on the screen, but it wasn't my life, it was John Steinbeck's, and Elia Kazan's, and James Dean's, and Julie Harris's, and Jo Van Fleet's; great artists.  I cried for days. I woke up in the middle of the night, every night. My heart was so full, I was so alive with ideas, and with hope. After that blistering day in North Hollywood, my life was never the same. I was connected to a dream - the dream of becoming an actor.

When I was fifteen the explosion happened again, only this time it was in live theater. I read a review in the paper that said there was a searing performance by a brilliant New York actress that should not be missed.

The reviewer seemed to be so excited by what he had seen that I felt propelled to get on a bus and take the long trek downtown to see The Far Country, starring Kim Stanley. The play is about the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, and his discovery of the cause of hysterical paralysis. At the end of the second act, Freud tells a young woman that the reason she can't walk is that the night her father died, she did not go upstairs to give him the medication he needed because she was tired, and that somewhere within her she wanted him to die so that she could be free. Sitting in the front row of the theater, I watched Kim Stanley's cheeks turn bright red; then suddenly tears shot out of her eyes so fast and in such torrents that I clutched the edge of my chair. At that moment, the curtain started coming down as Ms. Stanley screamed with everything in her, "No, it's a lie!" And when the curtain hit the stage floor, she continued screaming in the darkness.

Thirty seconds later they brought the house lights up, and the theater went mad. People started talking to each other, grabbing at each other, for they had just witnessed a great actress give a performance that didn't seem to be a performance at all but a trauma in a real person's life that we shouldn't be allowed to watch. And yet we were. Once again, I walked out of the theater in a complete daze. I was deeply moved by the character's journey and by Ms. Stanley's amazing performance, and I was overwhelmed with curiosity as to how a human being at a given moment could demand such intense emotions as Ms. Stanley did night after night.

The need to know how she did it kept haunting me and made me see every live theater production that Los Angeles had to offer during those years. And there were many, because, luckily, at that time the great theater actors, after making enormous hits on Broadway, traveled the country with their plays for at least a year. My experiences of watching great actors continued to excite me but they also confounded me, because it seemed incomprehensible to me that these actors could bring such powerful feeling, beautiful voices, fascinating physical behavior, and spontaneity to their performances on demand.

When I was nineteen years old, embarking on my life as an acting student, I went to an art museum in Washington, D.C. It was the first time I'd gone to a museum on my own to observe paintings, and as I looked at the collection of Impressionists, I suddenly stopped in front of a Van Gogh, the first I'd ever seen in person, and became transfixed. The painting was of a farmhouse with a rickety fence surrounding it. What amazed me, and seemed to awaken me, was that every slat of the fence was a slightly different shade of brown, from the lightest beige close to white to light brown to medium brown and on to the darkest brown close to black. I could not walk away. The fence seemed to be alive with energy and with what I realized later was the artist's choices: Van Gogh's impression of light and shadow, Van Gogh's interpretation in color, texture, and form. Van Gogh's "simple" fence spoke to me of transition and subtlety and boldness. I knew intuitively that what I was seeing was deeply connected to acting, but it took me years to understand exactly how.

At that point in my life, music, dance, film, theater, and literature had become my salvation, my life's blood, my reason to live. I was all feeling, all desire, but with no concrete way to express all this drama within me. I had just begun to study voice, dance, acting, script analysis, and my own inner-world. I became obsessed with learning; if there was a way to answer the questions I had about acting, I had to know it. After much tumult in my life, many mistakes, and much avoidance of responsibility, I finally learned that there were answers to my burning questions about acting as well as about life.

I want this book to help you in your journey as an actor. In it I have distilled the important techniques and tools that I learned and have taught in my thirty-two years as an acting teacher and coach and that I've seen work for many of my students who have gone on to have significant careers. Whether you are a beginner or a more advanced actor, I want to give you specific meat-and-potatoes ideas that you can bring to your work today - right now - as if you were sitting in my class and I was working with you directly. Some of the ideas are simple and some are more complicated. Read the book slowly and demand of yourself that you do all the tasks and the homework that I give you. Read the plays and watch the videos of the films I use as examples. Do the exercises - and do them as fully as you can. I promise you, it will pay off.

One of the most important things I've learned about acting is that you can't separate how you live your life and how you practice your art. For that reason, I'm also going to share with you what my life experience has taught me about aiming high and believing in yourself and not allowing anything or anyone -- not even yourself -- to stand in the way of your dream, which in Chapter Two you'll find is your super-objective.

I call this book The Intent to Live rather than The Intent to Act because great actors like James Dean and Kim Stanley don't seem to be acting, they seem to be actually living. You know you're in the presence of the best actors when you forget that you're sitting in an audience watching make-believe and instead you are catapulted onto the screen or stage and blasted into the lives of the characters. I want to pass along to you what I've learned about living in a role. A huge part of this has to do with interpretation, which, I now understand, is what Van Gogh's fence was speaking to me about. A picket fence isn't just a picket fence - not to an artist. Because an artist says "I'm going to use these specific colors to bring this fence to life as I see it, fully, with emotion and character." That's what we do as actors as we bring a script to life.

I want to tell you another, more personal reason for the title of this book. When I was a young actor, I had many negative feelings about myself and about my life. I made a decision not to destroy myself but to understand and heal the pain that at times seemed so overwhelming. In other words, I made a decision to live. And one of the things that helped me was learning the craft of acting. I was not at first encouraged to be an actor. The first musical theater teacher I had informed me in front of the entire class that I had "the worst singing voice" he had ever heard. Needless to say, that felt horrible and humiliating. And, as you will read later, my first acting teacher, Sanford Meisner, told me that I had no ability to act or react with any truth whatsoever. But my desire was greater than my humiliation, and I kept studying and exercised my voice two to four hours every day. By the time I was twenty years old a raw talent that had been lurking beneath the surface, unable to reveal itself because of fear and lack of technique, emerged. I actually began having a career as an actor and I achieved a dream - working on Broadway. I was still in many ways unformed, but I had learned enough technique to be considered a professional actor for hire while I continued to learn.

Sometimes we feel we have a gift to give that no one can see because we don't have the tools or the confidence to reveal it. Sometimes we have a raw talent that comes out every now and then, maybe even brilliantly, but because we lack technique we don't know how to consistently give the gift to its greatest effect. That is simply a lack of education about how to do the job technically - whether we feel like it or not, whether we are terrified, intimidated, or emotionally blocked. I have experienced all of this so I understand the journey, a journey I am still taking. I hope that this book will inspire you to apply and dedicate yourself to learning the craft of acting and to have faith that if you persevere and you love the craft, you can become the kind of actor who lives on stage and screen.

When you do this, you can affect people in ways you may not ever imagine or know about. One night at a midnight screening of Steven Spielberg's film ET, I watched a very angry, lonely teenager sit down in front of me, sink way down into his seat, and look at the screen with complete contempt. His vibrations were so powerfully violent that I wanted to move, but by that time the theater was full. At the start of the film, the teenager shifted noisily in his seat, but soon he stopped moving completely. I saw him go from disdain to amusement to surprise to awe and, finally, to unashamed weeping. Just as the movie was ending, he ran out of the theater, embarrassed to be so moved. He didn't want anybody to see how vulnerable he really was. As vulnerable as I was at eleven when I watched James Dean. That's what our work can do: we remind people that things can change, that wounds can heal, that people can be forgiven, and that closed hearts can open again.