Jean Shelton: the influential Bay Area acting coach who taught Danny Glover
While some actors onto the scene seemingly burst out of thin air, most others go through the rigorous process of acting school, where the wheat is invariably sorted from the chaff. One particular wheat sorter was Jean Shelton, the Bay Area acting coach who taught Danny Glover.
Shelton passed away last year at the age of 94, but before that, she was the fearsome head of the Jean Shelton Acting School. Reportedly, Shelton would sit with a new prospective student armed with a packet of cigarettes and explain the importance of self-discovery within the acting world.
Chris Phillips, Shelton’s son, explained the rigour with which his mother approached her work. “Literally in one minute, the myth that a student’s star quality would carry them would disappear, and a lifetime journey of hard work would be made clear,” he said (via The San Francisco Chronicle). “They’d get it right away that this was not a game.”
Danny Glover felt that Shelton was the most significant influence on his acting career. “She had such a passion for acting, and somehow she transferred that to me,” he said. “She always said, ‘protect your gift.’ Whenever people speak about acting teachers, her name is on my lips.”
Interestingly, there was no competition date or graduation ceremony at the school. You merely learned as you went, applied for jobs, either got them or didn’t, and either returned to classes or carried on with your career. Glover was fortunate enough to do both.
Shelton was such an influential figure in the Bay Area acting scene that Melanie Griffith portrayed her teaching an acting class in 2017’s The Disaster Artist. After all, Tommy Wiseau – who the film was based on – also reportedly studied under Shelton. Wiseau had once said: “You know, my background is actually in – I don’t know if you’re familiar with Jean Shelton? Jean Shelton, she was my teacher. She actually opened to me acting. What I mean [by] ‘open’, I only understood because of her.” He then went on to explain how Shelton approached her teaching methods (in a very roundabout, Tommy Wiseau way): “I just thought you just say the words or whatever. That’s what [an] actor thinks. But that’s not it! You have to be someone else.”
Wendy Phillips, Shelton’s daughter, also gave her respect for her mother’s methods following her death. She said: “My mother’s brilliance is that she distilled the heady aspect of method acting to a doable form so that the scared newbie who came down the hall and up the stairs would find themselves acting within a few short weeks.” While Shelton has passed on, her spirit will remain strong in the actors she taught.
Check out a scene from A Hatful of Rain, filmed at the Jean Shelton Acting Lab in San Francisco below.
