Eric Morris (actor)
| Eric Morris | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Frederic Morris November 19, 1931 Mount Sinai Hospital, Chicago, Illinois |
| Residence | Los Angeles, California |
| Alma mater |
|
| Home town | Chicago |
| Spouse(s) | Joy (2nd wife) |
| Website | ericmorris |
| Military career | |
| Allegiance |
 United States
|
| Service/branch | U.S. Army |
| Notes | |
Eric Morris is an American acting teacher and actor who founded his own theory of acting based on the works of Lee Strasberg and Martin Landau. Morris lives with his wife in Los Angeles and teaches actors the Eric Morris System of Acting.
His parents were Scottish Immigrants; his father emigrated from Scotland to the United States in 1912. Eric lived with his family in various apartments in a neighborhood inhabited chiefly by Jewish immigrants from Russia or Poland until, in seventh grade, when his father bought a house. He spent some years as a Boy Scout, attaining the rank of Star Scout. He was a soda jerk at Walgreens, and at age fourteen spent some Saturdays doing stand-up comedy at a mafia nightclub. After a false start and a detour in therapy, Morris returned to Wright Junior College in 1950 and took up drama. He enrolled at Northwestern University School of Speech in 1952, as a junior theater major. Alvina Krause taught him acting, though he reports she did not like him; he got a "C" in the class. In 1978 he bought a house at Lake Arrowhead, fulfilling a wish he had made as a ten-year-old in 1941.
Having published over six books in his theory, Morris claims that his System is derived partly from Lee Strasberg's Method Acting. However, Strasberg's Method focuses too much on craft, according to Morris, and not enough on the actor's instrument. Facing struggle in finding truth, he contemplated his theory while heading the Directors Unit at the Actor's Studio in Los Angeles. Morris' method recognizes the fact that actors have emotional blocks, tension, insecurities and other preventions to achieving a fundamental state of being, and works to clear these blocks, rendering the actor truly organic. In this sense, Morris stresses that acting is essentially living and being. There are seven major obligations to material, according to Eric: 1) Time and Place, 2) Relationship, 3) Emotional Obligation, 4) Character Obligation, 5) Historic Obligation, 6) Thematic Obligation, 7) Subtextual Obligation. After recognizing these 7 obligations, there are the choices the actor utilizes to render these emotions, and finally the approach to which the actors use these choices.
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