Eleanora Duses' Blush

“Did I tell you the story about Eleanora Duse?” Meisner recently asked a visitor to his office. “I never told you that?” After being assured that he hadn’t, he recounted George Bernard Shaw’s 1895 review of the legendary actress in Hermann Sudermann’s Heimat…This is what Shaw wrote:

‘Magda is a daughter who has been turned out of doors for defying her father, one of those outrageous persons who mistake their desire to have everything their own way in the house for a sacred principle of home life. She has a hard time of it, but at last makes a success as an opera singer, though not until her lonely struggles have thrown her for sympathy on a fellow student, who in due time goes his own way, and leaves her to face motherhood as best she can. In the fullness of her fame she returns to her native town, and in an attack of homesickness makes advances to her father, who consents to receive her again. No sooner is she installed in the house than she finds that on of the most intimate friends of the family is the father of her child. In the third act of the play she is on stage when he is announced as a visitor…
The moment she read the card handed her by the servant, you realized what it was to have to face a meeting with the man. It was interesting to watch how she got through it when he came in, and how, on the whole, she got through it pretty well. He paid his compliments and offered his flowers; they sat down; and she evidently felt that she had got it safely over and might allow herself to think at her ease, and to look at him to see how much he has altered. Then a terrible thing happened to her. She began to blush; and in another moment she was conscious of it, and the blush was slowly spreading and deepening until, after a few vain efforts to avert her face or to obstruct his view of it without seeming to do so, she gave up and hid the blush in her hands. After that feat of acting I did not need to be told why Duse does not paint an inch thick. I could detect no trick in it: it seemed to me a perfectly genuine effect of the dramatic imagination…and I must confess to an intense professional curiosity as to whether it always comes spontaneously.’

…that blush is the epitome of living truthfully under imaginary circumstances, which is my definition of good acting. That blush came out of her…”
This excerpt was taken from the book : “Sanford Meisner on Acting”.