Up Till Now: The Autobiography

actor needs a minimum of ten performances in front of an audience to understand the timing, because the response of the audience has to be incorporated into that performance. Audiences react in unexpected places, and you learn where to leave room for the audience to respond. You don’t want to walk into their reaction with your next line, which might be key to the plot. So the audience becomes a character in a play, but you don’t see that character until you are in front of the audience.
    Except for that night. I took from the audience an internal strength that made me capable of an inexplicable performance. Until near the very end, the last few lines, only seconds away from perfection.
    The play changes character for the last few scenes. After all the grander and marshal speeches, Henry has some playful scenes with the French princess and the play is over. I got through all the breaches, all the blood of Englishmen, after the battle of Agincourt, all the way to the brilliant repartee with the princess. And then it hit me.
    The French princess entered and I went totally blank. And I’m standing onstage with twenty-five hundred people looking at me with rapt expectation and there was nothing. A dead pause. The hopelessness of my situation began to hit me. I didn’t have the slightest idea where to go, what to do, what to say. It was the equivalent of being at an important business party and starting to introduce your wife to your boss and suddenly realizing you can’t remember your wife’s name. Into that breach, dear friends, flowed the tidal wave of panic.
    I looked across the stage, hopelessly. I have met so many thousands of people in my lifetime that sometimes it’s difficult to recall the names of people I’ve known for years. Yet as long as I live I will never forget Don Cherry. Don Cherry, with blondish hair and the longest blond eyelashes I’ve ever seen. There stood salvation. Don Cherry had a photographic memory. He knew the entire play! Every line. During rehearsals if someone forgot their line he would give it to them. And he was only twelve feet away from me, playing my usual role. So Henry walked over to him and put his arm around his shoulder, an extraordinary piece of staging that had never occurred to anybody before or since. The exhausted king goes to his younger brother and leans on him for support. I leaned in closely and said, “What’s the line?”
    And Don Cherry with his photographic memory looked at me blankly. He had not the slightest idea. But in that instant I remembered the words I was supposed to say and continued on successfully to the end of the play. I received a standing ovation. Even the cast was applauding. The critics loved it, lauding my instinctive and original movements onstage and my halting interpretation of the part. It was one of the greatest moments of my life.
    That was the night I knew I was an actor. Now if I could only find a way to make that hundred bucks a week.
    At Stratford I rose from bit parts and walk-ons to become a leading player in Julius Caesar, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Merchant of Venice. In our third season Guthrie resurrected a play he’d had great success with in England, his own version of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great . Anthony Quayle was the lead and Guthrie told me, “When we do this, you will play Usumcasane, the second lead.” As it turned out the second lead consisted mainly of carrying Anthony Quayle around the stage in a sedan chair. But obviously I did it well because Guthrie named me the Festival’s Most Promising Actor that year. The Stratford production received such good notices that the legendary Broadway producers Roger Stevens and Robert Whitehead decided to bring us to New York.
    I still thought of myself as this little Jewish kid from Montreal,Billy Shatner, who was just trying to figure it all out—but I was going to Broadway, to New York City, to the mecca of serious actors.
    This was my second time in New York and this time I was going in theater style. My first trip had been very different—I’d paddled there in an Indian canoe.

TWO

    Like paramotoring down the Ohio River into the largest paintball fight in the world or hunting a brown bear in Alaska with a bow and arrow or singing “Rocket Man” on national TV, this was one of those grand ideas that falls into the seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time category. At the end of a summer during which I’d worked as a counselor at a B’nai