"Michael Chekhov actor in Hollywood"

International audienceMichael Chekhov never held the film industry in high esteem, and his method seemed, in the whole, rather incompatible with Hollywood acting practices. However, during his 12-year stay in California, his coaching was a great help to some major film stars, and he did himself have opportunities to play character parts or bit parts in ten feature films. With the exception of Spellbound (A. Hitchcock, 1945), these films were mostly B studio productions, and were not widely distributed either in Chekhov’s time or afterwards. Yet they are a priceless archive, since they allow us not only to see and hear Chekhov on screen but to see and hear him in the only roles he ever played in English, far from his ever unsuccesful attempt to play King Lear. Chekhov’s Hollywood years are not, of course, an unexplored field : Lisa Byckling’s seminal work, based on Chekhov’s correspondence with his friend, the set designer Mstislav Doboujinski, provide the most complete account of this part of his life. However, until the Paris Chekhov conference, there has not been any academic attempt to consider Chekhov’s filmography as a whole and analyse his acting work in detail in a film studies perspective. In this paper, I will try and fill this gap. As I will argue, Chekhov’s work in Hollywood, although a lesser-known part of his career, does give us access to a better understanding of his talent, personality and theories