Linney Coaching Young Actors, Aiding Salisbury Family Services

In Alaska, a decade ago, multi-award-winning actor Laura Linney discovered teaching. Invited to a playwriting program that included her father, Romulus Linney, who died last year, she was asked to give participants pointers on stage technique. And she was hooked. So Linney started contacting schools with theater programs wherever she was — usually colleges and universities, but often secondary schools, too — offering to help students. “I’ll meet with them, talk to groups, coach scenes, meet with faculty. I’ll do whatever they ask that I have time to do. “It’s my way of volunteering, of giving back,” she says. Linney worked with students in London during the summer while filming “Hyde Park on the Hudson,” in which she plays Margaret Suckley, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s distant cousin, to Bill Murray’s F.D.R. More recently, while in Boston taping introductions to Public Television’s “Masterpiece Theater,” she met students at Harvard and talked informally with faculty. Now Linney will coach high school students at a master class and fundraiser sponsored by Salisbury Family Services at Salisbury School on Oct. 29, at 5 p.m. Four students from area private and public schools will present five-minute scenes “off book” to Linney and an audience expected to exceed 250. Then she will work with the student actors to find a “different way of thinking.” (See article on selected students and their scenes online.) “Drama is alive, it keeps moving,” Linney says, speaking with controlled but obvious excitement about her craft. “Acting is more than just instinct,” she says. “You work at it constantly, and it’s a magic moment when you see young students start to think like actors.” Laura Linney’s Master Class presented by Salisbury Family Services will be at Salisbury School’s Seifert Theater, Oct. 29 at 5 p.m. A reception for the actress and students with wine and hors d’oeuvres will follow.Tickets at $45 per person or $200 if one of many dinners in private homes is included, are on sale at Johnnycake Books, 12 Academy St., in Salisbury. Call 860- 435-6677.