Lindsay Lohan’s Body Language In Liz and Dick Was Wooden with Monotone Voice

 

Lindsay Lohan may have been a precocious  child actress who made scenes seem believable when she appeared in Parent Trap and Freaky Friday. However, as an good adult actress in  her Liz and Dick performance, she needs a lot of work in the acting department in my view . Her performance was one dimentional,  stiff and mechanical in most places. It was devoid of natural emotion which made the lines she recited unbelievable .

In other places when she did invoke emotion, it was completely over the top. In fact her facial expression and fake tears were so over the top in places that it looked comical. . It as like watching a beginning actress perform  her first role .’’

The lack of vocal inflection amplified the wooden performance. There was also  no chemistry between her and the fellow who played Richard Burton  There was way too much kissing for so little chemistry on screen. This made it very uncomfortable for the viewer to watch.

In my view, Lindsay has  clearly lost her  acting “chops”.   It is no wonder why. Acting is not like riding a bicycle where you can get on and ride after decades of not riding. Acting , like it does for athletics, requires steady practice and skill. She may have been a natural actress as a  child. But as an adult she needs practice,  skill and  formal training. It is a different ball game for a child actress and an adult actress. She simply does not have the skills and it showed.

Instead of spending years in courtrooms and in the tabloids she needed to spend them in an acting class so that she would never have done such a sloppy over the top and wooden performance as she did in the suicide scene which turned out to be comical.

 

She clearly relied on cigarettes as props in almost every scene. It was an acting crutch. The focus was on the cigarette and not on her. Yes we got that people of that era smoked but not all the time.

 

SLOPPY SPEECH PATTERN

 

Besides the mechanical acting which any beginning actress could have performed in my view, her speech pattern also did not lend itself to being credible. She was sloppy in her cadence and did not articulate her words.

Also several times in the script she used the term “screwed” as a  colloquialism. This

term was not part of the slang back in the 1960’s. No one used the term “screwed. ”For this gaffe I blame the writers .  I also blame the writers on their lame dialogue. No one speaks like they wrote. It was awful. Lindsay’s monotonous uninflected  delivery of these awful lines didn’t help matters either.

Elizabeth Taylor had impeccable diction and Lindsay’s rapid paced delivery of her lines destroyed the illusion of Elizabeth Taylor.

 

 FRIGHTENING VOICE QUALITY

 

Whenever she laughed in various scenes  you could hear  breathiness and a raspiness. It sounded like a smokers laugh. It was not pleasant to  hear.

The quality of her  voice is also of concern to me as a former voice and speech consultant who worked with countless actors to help heal their vocal pathologies.

Her voice is hoarse and husky. It does not fit the voice pattern of a 20 something young woman. It makes her sound considerably older and harsher.  This voice quality if often  heard when there is  vocal pathology often associated with too much drinking , or smoking or drugging and misuse of the voice.

When people sound like that on a consistent basis it can often  be a sign of  a physical issue from vocal nodules, vocal polyps,  contact ulcers on the vocal folds to even throat cancer. Now I am not saying Lindsay has throat cancer. I am saying that with an voice like that,  she desperately needs to see an ear nose and throat physician for a major medical checkup.

 

While I take pity on Lindsay for her Toxic parents who  constantly appear to “sell her down the river “ in order to get publicity  for themselves by taking from their daughter’s limelight, ,the public is not so forgiving when it comes to acting.

Countless  actors have Toxic families but it doesn’t interfere their acting. In my view, her family issues  clearly have clearly  affected her acting skills. She needs to spend  every day in acting class or with a private acting coach to get some skills if she wants to be a serious actress . Most important f all she needs in invest in  a voice and speech coach.