The Late Jim Kirkwood, an Acting Mentor for Many

It was another day at the office for me, staring at a computer and taking calls, when I got a message from my good friend Shane whom I haven't seen for awhile. He informed me that our acting mentor from Diablo Valley College, Jim Kirkwood, had passed away at 5 am this morning. For the past year or so, Jim had been fighting cancer and had to endure an operation to remove a tumor that last several hours. Hearing this news was a blow to me and and everyone else who had the unique privilege of having taken an acting class from him.

Right now, my heart feels so heavy, and I'm wondering why tears are not coming out of my eyes. I want to feel this loss fully for Jim had such a profound effect on my life and on so many others in the Bay Area of Northern California. For many years, he was an acting teacher at Diablo Valley College, and I enrolled in several of his classes during my time there before I transferred to UC Irvine. Much had been said about him and how hard it was to get in his class, and that he had studied with some of the great teachers such as Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler among others. For those truly serious about acting, you could not pass up any course he taught (even the one on directing).

When it came to my first class with Jim, I was nervous to say the least. The man was treated like a legend in the area, and it first felt incredibly intimidating to be in his presence. Grades were not necessarily a priority with Jim, and his one rule that stood out was that if you missed three of his classes without informing him of why, you were out. This was back in the day when those strict guidelines really unnerved me... Maybe they still do...

Anyway, I came to this new place of learning for me straight from high school where I did many productions and counted myself as being a really good actor. Of course, the whole thing about acting back then is that when you're onstage and you have nothing to say, get off. That first day with Jim, he immediately gave you a sense of what acting was really about. It was living in the moment, acting with purpose and with an objective in mind. You could not think too much about the outcome of the scene you're in because that would just take away from you fighting for your objective. Every character has something to go for, and that's what powers the actor through the entire show. Even when you're onstage and have nothing to say, he made you see that listening is part of the performance as well.

Among the lessons that I remember the most from his classes was how he explained that you did not need to have preconceived ideas of how to play a scene or say a line. It was never about pushing for some grand emotion that spelled out Oscar to the audience, it was about letting the emotion come to you while you pursue your objective. To just deliver a line in a preconceived way would just kill the moment. You would just come across as lifeless and vacant, and your scene partners would suffer because of that.

Jim demonstrated the danger of preconceiving what you will do by giving different readings of the line "get the hell out of here!" First one was angry, the other was dismissive, the next had him laughing like he was talking to a friend, I think he made it look like he was crying in another, and so on. By the end, everyone in the class including myself were laughing because he made it all look ridiculous, and it was. By getting stuck in that way of acting, you weren't really connected to the scene or those you are working with onstage.

Sooner or later, we came to see that we get our performance from the other actor in the scene. While this became more abundantly clear to me when I was a student at Second City, this lesson originated in Jim's classes. There was no "me, me, me, me, me, me" in his class because we were all put on the same level. No one was necessarily better than the other, so no prima donnas were ever present (thank goodness).

For those new to Kirkwood's classes, his regimen was of breaking us down and getting rid of all those high school emoting habits many of us had been stuck with for far too long. Jim could be brutally honest with you, but it was never in a Simon Cowell kind of way (I would have dropped out were that the case). He wanted you to see what went wrong and how you could improve on it for next time. Feelings did get hurt from time to time, and our self-confidence took several direct hits at what seemed like point blank range, but it was never done out of spite or cold-heartedness. Simply put, we had a lot to learn, and the road was designed to be a long one and for good reason.

Another great lesson he taught us which has never left my mind was when he did the "pick up the pen" bit. With this, he went back to when he was an acting student himself, and he was directed by his teacher to pick up a pen that was laying there on the stage. Since the teacher didn't say how he should pick it up, Jim just walked up on stage like he was doing a happy skip across the park and just stumbled upon the pen. We were all laughing hysterically as he looked at the pen with a giddy look on his face, playing up the emotion of the scene as he picked it up.

But the teacher did not look impressed, and Jim said he was made to put it back up on the stage and to pick it up again. This time, he moved stealthily around and looked like he was about to steal the pen. In that moment, he made it look like he was waiting for the perfect moment and then found it by absconding with the pen like Indiana Jones took off with that golden idol in "Raiders of the Lost Ark." The teacher again shook his head and said to Jim that he was still doing it wrong and to do it again. Jim didn't understand what he was doing wrong, but he did it again anyway.

Now Jim came onto the stage as if his leg was broken and he was limping over to that ordinary looking pen. At this point, Jim tried (and failed) to make it look realistic when he was struggling to reach for that pen despite the injury he was faking miserably. Once again, he got the pen and went offstage. Now the teacher was losing his patience with Jim:

"Jim, did you hear anything of what I just said?!"

"Yeah, but what am I doing wrong?"

"I told you to pick up the pen!"

"I DID!"

"Well I didn't tell you to go all over the place doing this big act around it, did I?"

"So what do you want me to do?"

"JIM, JUST PICK UP THE PEN!!!"

"Fine!"

So Jim just walked straight up to the pen and picked it up, and then he walked off the stage as quickly as he got on it. After that, the audience of his fellow students applauded him loudly. Jim said he didn't understand what the big deal was, and the teacher (who also applauded I should mention) explained it to him:

"You followed through with the objective. You didn't think about it, you just did it and with the same level of energy. You didn't need to put on a big show, you just needed to just pick up the pen. In that moment, that was your only objective. This is the difference between a good performer and a great actor."

That last sentence has stayed with me to this very day. It's easy to get up and put up a big act just to get laughs from all your friends. It's another thing to be the character instead of just playing one. You never play the emotion, you play the action, and the emotion will come to you that way.

I went through a rollercoaster of emotions throughout my time in his classes. At that time, I was trying to get all my general education courses out of the way so that when I transferred to a four year university, I could concentrate solely on my major. As a result, I didn't always give his acting classes my full on attention, and it did lead to me having a nervous breakdown at the end of one day. It felt like I was failing the class and myself, and while my fellow classmates were there to console me, I was a complete wreck. Jim took pity on me though, gave me a hug (and he had everyone in the class give their scene partners a hug before and after a scene), and urged me to not be so hard on myself.

But in the end, through all that emotional agony, we each came into our own and we all seemed to have that one moment where all the training and all the character work paid off. We had gotten to where we had studied the scene and memorized our lines so many times that we weren't thinking about what we were doing. All that mattered was that we went after our objective in the scene. Nothing else mattered at that point. Getting a compliment from Jim was not always easy, but when you got it, you know that you damn well earned it! When we each got that moment, it wasn't just a victory for us, but for the class as well. Each of us wanted the other person to succeed in his class.

On the last day of the Advanced Acting class, we all chipped in and got Jim a plaque thanking him for all that he had done for us. He looked at it, and he immediately burst into tears. It meant so much to him that we did this, and it was a symbol of the kind of people we were becoming thanks in large part to the time we got to spend with him. Everyone in the class came around to give him a hug, not wanting him to cry. Another guy, I can't remember his name right now, offered him a bottle of scotch but then realized he had already drunk it.

In the end, Jim Kirkwood's acting classes were never about becoming a star or a celebrity. His classes were about how an actor must life to the fullest and be serious about the art and their individual craft. It was about getting better and taking on new challenges throughout our lifetimes, and to never be complacent with where we were at as artists. The life of an artist, be it an actor or director, was never meant to be an easy one. But then again, how else could you learn and grow? It's like what my brother keeps telling:

"If life were easy, no one would bother showing up."

I loved how I got to make him laugh on occasion. I was in his directing class and did this one scene where I used magazine covers with gorgeous women on them as stand ins for a couple of characters. Jim got a kick out of the fact that one of them was an issue of Playboy Magazine with the centerfold being Pamela Anderson, and he jokingly asked me if he could borrow it. Being the incredibly literal minded person that I was back then, I thought he was being serious and handed it to him earnestly. Along with the entire class, he was in utter hysterics.

Then there was another time where we were working on scenes and voicing out what was going through our minds in order to keep us in the moment. Be it if you didn't know your line or were frustrated and had to vent it somehow, we needed to be there fully and not let all these distractions cloud our ultimate goals. For me, my chief distraction involved a comedy album I bought a few days earlier from the nearby record store. It got to where I could no longer resist it:

"DAMN IT!! I GOT STEVE MARTIN'S NATIVE AMERICAN SINGING GOING THROUGH MY HEAD!!!!"

Jim got a kick out of that and would never let me forget it. It's nice to have such memories of him this way.

Now Jim is gone, and the loss is deeply felt by those who were in his presence. He wasn't a perfect person and had his faults, but who doesn't? I tell you, it was hard to work at the office for the rest of the day without thinking of him and the lessons and memories he left behind. The loss is there, and the sadness is strong. I write this with a heavy heart and it will still take some time to accept the fact that I won't get to see or talk with him ever again. That's still hard to swallow hours after I got the sad news. It didn't matter how old he was (he probably didn't look his age anyway), he left us too soon. The last time I saw him was at a Christmas party last year with friends from that class, and he dropped by and was endlessly interest in what we were all up to. His words of kindness meant a lot to me, and I will never forget them.

I thank him for all those lessons on character development, understanding a script and the character's place in it fully, and of the passion he brought out of all of us. We didn't just come out of his class as better actors, we came out as better people. Much of what he taught still comes back to me every once in a while, so I know I'm growing as an artist and will continue to.

I miss you Jim. Why did you have to leave us now? Leonard Cohen was right, this is no way to say goodbye. But what you taught will live on through all of us for you touched so many lives and all that you taught is being passed to another generation. So much of what I've learned from other teachers in the Bay Area was thanks to you. You were a big part of my life, and there is no way I can forget you. I'm not even going to try. You will live on with us always.

Still wish you were here though. It feels very empty here without you. ;(