Robert Blumenfeld – författare

Blumenfeld convincingly argues that the basic techniques of acting apply whether the actor is performing onstage or in a sound studio. Numerous practice exercises help the actor to speak the words of a text that can be enhanced by the varying sounds of the human voice.

This practical book on the subject of how to act, based on Ms. Spivak's forty years of acting, coaching, and teaching classes – first at Herbert Berghof and Uta Hagen's HB Studio, then on her own – provides a step-by-step system for analyzing and building a character organically, which can be applied even in the short time an actor has to prepare for auditions and for many television performances. Timely advice includes how to do camera takes, interpret and follow stage directions, and how to prepare for auditions and work in theater, film, television commercials, and television soap operas, sitcoms, and nighttime dramas.

Paperback w/CD

Are you doing a play by Tennessee Williams? Or one of David Mamet's plays set in Chicago? Need to learn a Southern or Boston or New York or Caribbean Islands accent quickly, or do you have plenty of time? Then Teach Yourself Accents – North America: A Handbook for Young Actors and Speakers is for you: an easy-to-use manual full of clear, cogent advice and fascinating information. Contemporary monologues and scenes for two are included, and an enclosed CD contains the extensive practice exercises.Perfect for the young acting student, the book will help anyone beginning a study of accents to get a rapid handle on the subject and use any accent immediately, with an authentic sound. More experienced actors who need an authoritative quick guide for an audition or for role preparation will find it equally useful, as will speakers who want to improve a specific accent or liven up a presentation with an apt anecdote.This second volume of the new Teach Yourself Accents series by Robert Blumenfeld, author of the best-selling Accents: A Manual for Actors, covers General American, the most widely used accent of Standard American English, as well as Northern and Southern regional accents, AAVE (African-American Vernacular English), Hispanic, Caribbean Islands, and Canadian English and French accents.

Are you doing a play by Tennessee Williams? Or one of David Mamet''s plays set in Chicago? Need to learn a Southern or Boston or New York or Caribbean Islands accent quickly, or do you have plenty of time? Then Teach Yourself Accents – North America: A Handbook for Young Actors and Speakers is for you: an easy-to-use manual full of clear, cogent advice and fascinating information. Contemporary monologues and scenes for two are included, and an enclosed CD contains the extensive practice exercises.Perfect for the young acting student, the book will help anyone beginning a study of accents to get a rapid handle on the subject and use any accent immediately, with an authentic sound. More experienced actors who need an authoritative quick guide for an audition or for role preparation will find it equally useful, as will speakers who want to improve a specific accent or liven up a presentation with an apt anecdote.This second volume of the new Teach Yourself Accents series by Robert Blumenfeld, author of the best-selling Accents: A Manual for Actors, covers General American, the most widely used accent of Standard American English, as well as Northern and Southern regional accents, AAVE (African-American Vernacular English), Hispanic, Caribbean Islands, and Canadian English and French accents.

Paperback w/CD

The third volume in dialect coach Robert Blumenfeld''s new series on accents, Teach Yourself Accents: Europe, A Handbook for Young Actors and Speakers covers the European accents most useful for the stage and screen: French, German, Italian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Yiddish. The most important features of each accent are detailed, enabling the actor to begin immediately to sound authentic, and Mr. Blumenfeld''s unique approach makes the accents easily comprehensible.The incisive, succinct introduction to studying any accent is useful above and beyond the specific details of the accents covered here. The book provides a wealth of references to films where the reader can listen to authentic examples of the accents, and information as to what roles require the accents. There are extensive practice exercises, all recorded on the accompanying CD, as well as a selection of monologues and scenes. All of this makes the book not only a perfect guide for the young acting student but also an authoritative reference for more experienced actors and for speakers of all levels.

My mother, Ruth Blumenfeld, née Korn, was born on January 15, 1915; and died on August 18, 2015, aged one hundred years, seven months, and three days. My father, Max David Blumenfeld, was born on February 25, 1911 and died on December 26, 1994, about two months shy of his eighty-fourth birthday… I love my parents so much and I don’t want them to be forgotten, which is why I am writing this book. And I am writing this memoir for myself as much as for anyone else, because in doing so I bring my parents back to life in my memory. I do the same when it comes to my grandparents and aunts and uncles. I write also for my family members, who may wish to know more about our background. And I am writing for the general public, who may find this memoir of interest as being the embodiment in specific people of the history of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in the United States… When my father was born, World War One was several years away, and when my mother was born, World War One was raging. They lived through the Roaring Twenties and Prohibition, the Great Depression, and World War Two, and the subsequent wars… They lived through the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. The technological changes in their lifetime were the greatest in human history, from the evolution and ubiquity of the telephone, and of electricity and electric lighting, to airplane travel and the proliferation of the automobile, the invention and spread of radio and television, and the invention of such conveniences as frozen orange juice, the electric clothes drier, and the electric dishwasher, and, later on, of the internet, the computer and the smartphone, and of so much more… The world was a better place because Mom and Dad were in it. They did much political and social good in their time because they cared, and they wanted to help create a kinder, better, more loving world for everyone, a world where the ideals of equality and justice for all would at least begin to be fulfilled. When people like them disappear from the earth, the world is a poorer place.

The grim tale dramatized in these pages, while it may strain credibility, is undeniably and unfortunately true. Its horrible events took place in 1818 in one of the most unlikely settings for such a saga on the face of the earth: the picturesque French provincial village of Moreve in the Loiret departement on the post road one hundred and thirty-five kilometers southwest of Paris, and its surrounding countryside: a complacent, prosperous backwater of tenant farms, orchards, and vineyards. As any of the populace would have been happy to tell you, this is a place where "e;nothing ever happens, thank goodness"e;; that is, nothing until suddenly people start disappearing, and bodies are discovered of people and animals who appear to have been murdered by vampires, throwing the district into fear and panic. At this point, Raoul Champfleury returns from Boston, where his aristocratic family had fled during the French Revolution, to his ancestral chateau of Moreve-successfully reclaimed by the family under the Bourbon Restoration-for a prolonged visit with his mother, Dowager Countess Regine-Rosemonde, and his destructive brother and sister-in-law, the tyrannical Count and Countess of Moreve, religious fanatics pursuing their futile but abusive efforts to convert the dowager countess from her entrenched atheism. Raoul is accompanied by his lifelong friend, Christophe Beranger, whose family had fled Moreve with the Champfleurys. Before they know it, they are caught up together with the town's mayor, lawyer Maitre Littre, and the village's one policeman, the intelligent and resourceful Pierre Dupont, in trying to solve the mysteries. What they discover horrifies them beyond words.

The Count of Sainte-Hélène: A Balzacian Melodrama takes place in 1817-1818 in Paris, during the Bourbon Restoration when Louis XVIII had been placed on the throne of France at the decree of the Congress of Vienna after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. This play is based on one of the most sensational cases solved by the first great detective in history, Eugène-François Vidocq, the ex-convict who became head of the French Sûreté (the Security Service of the French police). An altogether extraordinary individual, he was an acquaintance of Victor Hugo, who based both Jean Valjean and Inspector Javert in Les Misérables on Vidocq; and a friend of Balzac, whose character Vautrin is even more closely inspired by and modeled on Vidocq than Hugo’s characters are. Interludes of the Hear: A Play about Marcel Proust, his life and loves, was inspired by my love for that author’s most famous book, In Search of Lost Time. The play goes back and forth in time, as the Student interviews Céleste Albaret, Proust’s housekeeper and general factotum, for his doctoral dissertation. When I read the book, I felt it was as if he were talking directly to me. I am sure many readers have had the same experience. Proust’s penetrating picture of the society of his day in pre-World War One France, and of Paris during the war itself, and his amazing, psychologically insightful portrait of each of his characters, his understanding of psychology that in some ways parallels that of Sigmund Freud, makes his book still relevant in today’s world.

The First Time I Saw Paris: Memories of Dreams Come True recounts the author’s first trip to Paris in the summer of 1963 between his Junior and Senior years as a French major at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ, in Part One of the book. He had been awarded a Carnegie Foundation Fellowship to spend three months abroad doing research for them on a particular topic that had won him the fellowship, from May through July, with Paris as his main destination. Afterwards, he was to write a paper about his findings for the Carnegie Foundation. He was thrilled to be going to Europe for the first time, and especially excited at the prospect of visiting the city that he had long dreamed of and that is the center of French culture, history, literature, and art. It was a fantastic, eye-opening trip. Part Two recounts other memorable trips to Paris, throughout France, to the USSR in 1985 and to Greece in 1994, as well as to other European countries.