Luminous legacy of senior stars

Local show biz is so slavishly youth-oriented that quite a number of starlets and stars are regarded as has-beens by the time they hit 40. That would sound like a bad and sad joke in Europe, where the age is the rage, not the curse, and “maturing” stars are regarded as sexier and much more exciting than their young and callow counterparts.

Locally, however, most senior talents are put out to pasture or relegated to playing embarrassingly silly and insulting cameo roles, like freakily ugly vampires and viragos. Which is why we thank our lucky stars for durable veteran luminaries like Eddie Garcia, Gloria Romero and Anita Linda, who continue to grace films and TV dramas with their time-tested acting prowess.

True grit

We’ve always been deeply appreciative of veteran actors, because we need their experience and true grit to add depth and range to our TV and film productions.

If those shows and movies had to rely on their young and fave leads for their dramatic vitality and telling insights, we’d all be knee-deep in big trouble!

It’s the seniors who show the callow juniors the way to meaningful and perceptive characterization and motivation, which should be the most important elements in their performances, not their “kilig  value”  or ability to delight the ga-ga and gago members of the peanut gallery.

Voice of experience

True, some senior talents’ acting style is frozen in the frigid and rigid part of 19-kopong-kopong, but the likes of Eddie, Gloria, Anita, Susan Roces, Boots Anson-Roa, Ronaldo Valdez, Tommy Abuel, Perla Bautista, Gina Pareño and Tessie Tomas, and “younger” icons like Vilma Santos, Nora Aunor, Hilda Koronel, Tetchie Agbayani and Tirso Cruz III have been able to keep their portrayals relatively fresh and current, and continue to do vital work.

Truly, they are the voices of experience, teaching new starlets and stars that, while their youthful good looks have gotten them into the biz, staying there and getting better require an entirely different set of tools—including sensitivity, feeling for others, ability to analyze what makes real people and written characters tick, how to vivify those people and the actors’ insights into them.

Golden treasures

Yes, some new talents take all sorts of workshops, but most of them tend to be part of the pat and quickie sort. Really learning how to act perceptively and well literally takes years—a lifetime, even.

That’s precisely what senior stars have to offer, a veritable lifetime of experience in creating characters. Watching them at work and acting with them, new talents can learn much more than the knee-jerk techniques they pick up from easy-breezy workshops.

So, instead of dismissing “old” talents as has-beens, let’s value them as the golden treasures they really are.

In this regard, one of our new projects for 2012 is a series of shared public interviews with some of the most revered senior artists in the biz—to remind everyone, especially the youth, that they’re still very much around, and are in fact here to stay.

Illuminating

And to enrich us all with the wisdom of their years of experience—and the depth and texture that life, loving and living have graced and blessed them with, which they so generously and insightfully continue to share with us.

Without them, and their insightful and illuminating work, we would be left groping and fumbling in the dark.