Image Credit: Daniele Baker
We were lucky to catch up with Suzanne Savoy recently and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Suzanne, thank you for joining us today and sharing your experiences and acquired wisdom with us. Burnout is a huge topic these days and so we’d love to kick things off by discussing your thoughts on overcoming or avoiding burnout
I’ve been a full-time professional actor for close to forty years. My proudest achievement’s been putting my daughter through college on my acting income. I’ve worked with wonderful, iconic actors and directors: Steven Soderbergh, Joel Schumacher, Nicole Kidman, George C. Scott, to name a few. But there was a time about eight years ago when I was so disillusioned, I quit the business for a few months. Recurring roles on certain shows that were headlined or helmed by future “stars” of the #MeToo movement sent me home night after night with a crushed soul and a sense of feeling vaguely dirty. I’m a woman of a certain age, so nobody was putting the moves on me, but the culture on set was so destructive and sometimes downright nasty, it was pure misery. The best choice seemed to be to quit acting and find a job I could stand. Fortunately, after a couple of months I remembered something from my childhood that snapped me out of it. A little boy in the schoolyard had run up to me and asked to see my brand new rubber ball. Naively, I handed it over. Boy and ball were immediately off and I watched helplessly as he and his pals played a game I wasn’t invited to. Well, I’d be damned if I’d let that happen again!
The solution was to create my own content and retain control over my project: a solo show around the life and works of the first professional female French author, Christine de Pizan. Rather than pay royalties for existing translations, I taught myself paleography and did my own translations from Christine’s original medieval manuscripts. I reached out to renowned scholars for their input and expertise. The effort was absolute brain-candy. For seven years now, I’ve toured “Je Christine” to universities, scholarly congresses, and libraries in the US and Canada. Talk-backs after the show are fascinating, because audiences fall in love with Christine, widowed and without income at twenty-five, taking up writing to support herself and her children at a time when women generally had no voice. She fought for the fair representation of women, became an advisor to the royal family, filled her works with political commentary, and used the written word to fight for the liberation of France from the English during the Hundred Years’ War. She also wore a very cool hat–well, head-dress–which I have to admit is a lot of fun to wear. An added bonus is that when I work in film and TV these days, I’m treated with much more respect. Maybe it’s my own sense of accomplishment, or maybe folks are googling me and discovering that I’m a bad-ass creative force in my own right.
Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?
I’ve forged a living from doing whatever performance work comes my way: voice-overs, cartoons, informational videos, print work, stage roles, film, TV, commercials, and anything else my agent throws at me. My stock in trade seems to be Type A bad b#tches, from heiresses to judges, professors, lawyers, doctors, and even a cannibal grandma. They’re often pretty far from who I am in real life, but I grew up in a community of strong women in a convent school in Montreal, so it’s easy and fun to slip into those personas.
One of my favorite roles was playing Dennis Quaid’s closet-alcoholic wife in Steven Soderbergh’s miniseries “Full Circle,” streaming on MAX and Amazon Prime. Dennis and I discovered that we have a lot of friends and a revered acting teacher in common back in Houston, so we had a blast working together.
A pet side project is curating short story readings for adults at a library in Delaware, and my Youtube video series “Chemobean” shares tips on buying and styling wigs, hats and scarves after hair-loss from chemo. I lost my own hair during chemo treatments a few years ago, and I have a whole lot of wigs in my closet!
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
1. Don’t wait ’til you’re perfect. Great planning and good training are essential to doing a good job, but if you hold off on starting a project or a career because you’re not absolutely perfect, you may lose valuable on-the-job learning… or worse, you may never get started at all. Acting coach Bob Krakower says “Prepare to the point of availability, not to the point of perfection.” Learn to hear that inner voice that tells you when the time is right to dive in. It takes courage.
- Get the best advice from the best sources. I’ve been blessed with wonderful mentors. But I have had to sort out the chaff sometimes, too. Years ago, someone advised me, “You can’t start an acting career at thirty.” I agreed they were probably right. But I went ahead and did it anyway. It paid off.
- Be nice to the donut girl. That intern who brings you coffee and donuts today will probably be your producer or boss in six months. Just be respectful to everyone–we’re all here to do a job and contribute to the effort.
Oh, bonus number 4. Keep learning new skills. This keeps you interested, maintains your competitive edge, and improves everything else you do.
As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?
“Born to Win” by Muriel James and Dorothy Jongeward. I read it when I was in my twenties. It came out fairly early in the age of self-help books, but it’s aged well and remains a cornerstone in my personal and creative growth. Somehow in my youth I got the message that I was just a visitor in a world that belonged to everyone else. My only path to success was to learn what they already knew and follow the dots. This book was a huge eye-opener, assuring me from page one that my authentic self was my greatest strength, that the world belonged to me as much as to anyone else. News to me! It knocked down a lot of barriers I thought I had in front of me, and it still encourages me to make exciting artistic choices.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.jechristine.com
- Youtube: youtube.com/@suzannesavoy8235
- Other: imdb.com > suzanne savoy https://ent-nts.academia.edu/SuzanneSavoy
