When Melbourne-born actor Madeline Li began studying acting at the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney in 2021, she was already armed with some advice from her Chinese paternal grandmother.
Go to the park with a notebook, her nainai said, and observe everyone. Write down their gestures. See how they talk to one another.
Li’s grandmother herself had been an actor, too, studying at the Central Academy of Drama in Beijing.
“When I showed an interest in acting, she started giving me tips,” Li recalls, seated now in a theatre dressing room in outer Melbourne in a blue denim jacket, two years after her NIDA graduation.
