A beautiful conversation. What you pointed out about her eyes is correct. This goes to show how much of a collaborative art is screen acting. The director has to conceive the shot correctly, the DP has to frame and light it properly for those eyes to pop out on the screen that enabled an actress of her caliber to play out even entire scenes only through her eyes. The actor also needs to know how to act for the camera rather than just acting.
I think the actors from her generation started out very young and none of them has any training in the craft of acting. Some has inborn talent and some develop a bunch of stock expressions over the course of the career. The ones with inborn talent, with the help of the great directors who mold that talent, develops a technique of their own and they become masters of their craft and in time are able to give great performances on their own and it’s also very effortless for them. The other bunch is always depended upon the directors to mold their stock expressions into some semblance of a performance.
Sarita is very much like Sridevi (and Mohanlal, who started out when he was 18 years old and had no training in acting) . The directors who mold them are pretty much the same : K Balachander, Bharatiraja, Balu Mahendra etc (Mohanlal’s talent was groomed by the likes of Fazil and Padmarajan). That’s why they cannot fully articulate their process, they can just do it without thinking too much about it. And they can pretty much switch on and switch off and do three schedules a day playing different characters and never get them mixed up.
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