Celebrity and personal growth - Amanda Bynes on insecurity and comedy

The Inner Actor

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Celebrity and personal growth – Amanda Bynes on insecurity and comedy

Amanda Bynes in 'Hairspray'

Escape into comedy

Amanda Bynes began professionally acting at the age of seven, and at age thirteen became the star of her own tv series The Amanda Show.

Bynes says she understands the feeling of being an outsider, one of the themes of the film “Hairspray” – in which she plays Penny [photo].

“I grew up having terrible acne and feeling insecure,” she once told an interviewer. “I was tall and skinny. I didn’t feel pretty at all, and guys didn’t even like me. That’s why I got into comedy.”

[Interview mag., July 2007; photo from "Hairspray"]

Highly self-critical

Many talented comedians and comic actors acknowledge there is a dark side to being funny.

“Deep, deep depression is the flip side of comedy. Casting agents don’t realize it but in order to be funny you have to have that other side.” Parker Posey [From the page: Comedy]

Many talented people – even highly gifted and accomplished, with Academy Awards etc – often have insecurities, impostor feelings and other anxieties, maybe in part because of high sensitivity.

Lesley Sword, director of Gifted and Creative Services [in Australia] finds that gifted children are “highly self critical and over reactive to the criticism of others. They express dissatisfaction with themselves; they see what ‘ought to be’ in themselves… They have a vision of perfectionism that they measure themselves against and they can become despondent sometimes even depressed, at their perceived failure.”

[From my post Anxious thinking about our abilities, and article Being Creative and Self-critical.]

Fortunately, there are many ways to deal with anxiety, including self-help programs: see
Anxiety Relief Products / Programs

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