Pine On Acting
2 min readComing from an acting family gave Chris Pine an idea what lay ahead for him if he chose to follow in the footsteps of his parents.
As reported by The Independent, when Pine decided to be an actor, his mother (Gwynne Gilford,) warned him not to expect things to be easy. “My mother gave me the talk about how it’s not all wine and roses,” explained Pine. “I knew that, of course, because I grew up in an acting family and I saw my dad through good years and bad years. So I knew that it wasn’t all going to be great.” Pine’s father Robert, best-known to fans of CHiPs for his portrayal of Sgt. Joseph Getraer in the late 1970s and early 1980s, has been acting since the early 1960s.But Pine wanted to be an actor. He applied to and was accepted by the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, but the money wasn’t there. It was time to go to work. “I didn’t have enough money and I didn’t know if I wanted to go into that much debt as paying for it was going to have to come out of my own pocket,” said Pine. “So I figured I’d just let my ego take a pat on the back with the knowledge that I got in and just try to break into the industry another way.”
Pine did just that and he realizes how lucky he has been. “I’ve been blessed,” he said. “There is no correlation between hard work and success in acting. I had a conversation with J.J. Abrams and he said something that resonated with me, ‘if it were to be taken away tomorrow, you want to know that every second you did what you loved and wanted to do.’ That is the truth, it can so easily be taken away.”
When offered the part in Star Trek XI, Pine was also offered a part in White Jazz, based on a novel by James Elroy, which was to star George Clooney. Pine chose Star Trek XI and lucked out in having made the right choice, as Clooney pulled out of White Jazz and the project was shelved.
To read more, head to the article located here.