Gordon Lightfoot Forums - Gordon Lightfoot / A Lesson In Love ~ HOTEL~ 1988 !

Quote:

Originally Posted by Don Quixote (Post 162029)

Sorry--I'm a huge fan, but this was just an embarassment. The show was awful, the plot and dénouement hokey and contrived, the songs totally inappropriate and as an actor, well...Gord is a great singer/songwriter. I don't know if this was his last shot at acting, but if it was, then he made the right decision not to pursue it. I find it interesting that he has such a good singing voice, but not much expressive range in his voice when he's acting. I think it was Dorothy Parker talking about Katherine Hepburn when she said that her acting ran the gamut of emotions from A to B...
DQ

I've never seen the Hotel series, and never got the chance (until now) to see the episode Lightfoot appeared in. So, needless to say, I was pretty happy to see these clips.

I agree, the script *is* hokey, and so is the dénouement. But those failings are fairly standard for a lot of the network TV shows that surfaced in the Seventies and Eighties, most of which were not much more than evening soap operas. And not much better than their daytime variants to boot.

On the other hand, I didn't think Gord's acting was all that bad. If anything, it was a cut above what we saw in Harry Tracy - that is, fairly wooden and lifeless. At least the producers of Hotel gave Gordon a role that he could play fairly convincingly, and with a degree of authenticity.

I agree that Gord's range of expression is limited; but that hasn't stopped too many people from becoming big-name, Hollywood actors. Arnold Schwazenegger and Sylvester Stallone (among others) come to mind when I think of actors who have a limited emotional range.

Gordon's deadpan delivery may well have been the result of culture, besides the fact that by nature, 'he is what he is'.

By and large, Canadians are a fairly straightforward kind of people, not really given to wearing their hearts on their sleeves. Moreover, they don't have a sense of the 'larger-than-life' that their American cousins seem to have in spades and seems to work so well for them in the movie/TV business.

Trust me, I'm Canadian, and I know what my fellow countrymen are like. :)

In any case, what I saw in Hotel was enough to make me wonder if Gordon couldn't have become a half-decent actor with training and more experience.

Then again, perhaps it's better that he opted to stay in the music business anyway. Few actors have been successful in their musical ventures, and vice versa.