Not an actor?
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LANE COUNTY EDITION
NW BOOMER & SENIOR NEWS • JUNE 2015
Linda Burden-Williams says we all can benefit from learning more about ourselves
By VANESSA SALVIA BOOMER & SENIOR NEWS
Actress and acting coach Linda Burden-Williams, 63, is stylish and vivacious. With her dark hair in a smooth bob and dressed in black leggings, black boots, a white jacket, purple and white socks and a purple-patterned scarf, she looks and acts decades younger. “Sixty-three doesn’t seem so old to me now,” she says with a laugh. She played bass guitar in high school in Marysville, Washington, and after graduating in the early 1970s, went out on the road with an allgirl rock band called Iron Maiden. “We were playing rock ‘n’ roll at the same time and the same clubs that Heart was playing,” she says, “but we didn’t have our original songs yet.” Despite those accomplishments, Burden-Williams just didn’t feel like herself. “In my head I felt way bigger than what I was doing,” she says. “It just seemed limited. I didn’t know how to get out of my box.” Burden-Williams grew up shy and reserved, the result, she says, of excessive spanking and punishment as a very young child. “My dad spanked me too hard,” she says. “I remember sitting in a hallway going, ‘Now I know what I have to do to be safe. Just do everything they say.” She submerged her own emotional wants and needs, and began what she calls “building a false life.” In 1981, someone told her about an acting class where she might learn about herself. “I said, ‘That’s interesting, I’ll try it,’” she says. “I went there one day and I went, ‘Oh my God, I found home.” Through acting BurdenWilliams found a safe place to express herself in deeper, richer ways than playing music allowed. “With my music I was just playing my bass and I loved it but I wasn’t using my voice, my body, my mind, my emotions as much,” she says. “When I found acting it was a safe place to find out who I was.” The teachers thought she wouldn’t last. “I was shy
Submitted photo
Acting coach Linda Burden-Williams (above) believes that acting helped release her from emotional burdens and that everyone can benefit from acting, even if they don’t want to be actors (page 1). and I had no concept of what an actor did,” she recalls.
Hollywood She’s been acting now for 30 years and has taught acting to countless students through her own school, In Focus Acting. Acting helped her recover from that childhood trauma.
“I started acting because of the therapeutic value of it,” she says. “Children can suffer a lot and it can be very painful and they can keep that all their life and that’s why acting was so important — to realize that it is a past event and I don’t have to live it over and over but if I do choose to live it over I
can use it in my acting.” She met her husband of 36 years, Gary Williams, on the road. They bought a place in Veneta and their son, Garrick, went to school in Elmira. Burden-Williams took him to Los Angeles off and on, where she homeschooled him while she auditioned. Her first feature film role was in
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the 1990 science fiction movie “Class of 1999” with Malcolm McDowell and Stacy Keach. Other credits include the movies “Physical Graffiti” and the TV shows “ER” and “The West Wing.” She says she wasn’t a natural at acting. She had to work on it because of her history of
See ACTING p. 3
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