Changing Roles

Your writer David Gritten seems unaware of it and Michael Caine may prefer forgetting (“Still Making It Look Easy,” Dec. 13), but Caine did play an American at least once before, in Otto Preminger’s melodramatic Southern extravaganza “Hurry Sundown” (1967).

Since this was another step in the fine tradition of British actors playing American Southerners, cf Vivien Leigh, it deserved at least a mention.

LEO BRAUDY

Los Angeles

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In his excellent article, Gritten describes Michael Caine as “an artist who conceals his art.”

We struggling actors lucky enough to have studied under the tutelage of the late Harold Turney, founder of the Los Angeles City College drama department, heard it another way, equally valid: “An actor’s best technique is thetechnique of not showing a technique.”

Mr. Turney hated Method acting!

THOMAS MADDOX-VIZE

Santa Ana

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With Caine portraying a Yank in “Cider House Rules,” a Jewish director casting Joe Mantegna as a Jewish father in “Liberty Heights,” Jodie Foster playing a British woman in “Anna and the King” (with Chow Yun-Fat as a Siamese) and Emily Watson an American in “Cradle Will Rock,” it would seem that cross-cultural creativity is alive and well in Hollywood.

Is there a lesson in this? Perhaps it’s that people may be influenced by this blindness to ethnicity and nationalism and “get” the idea that broader-based thinking doesn’t imply a threat to one’s own group.

JULES BRENNER

Hollywood