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Lady luck favours Shamaine
A DIRECTOR was once asked why he was in the habit of casting stage actors in his projects. Speaking in Pilipino, the director answered: “It's nice to have talents who are not as expensive [to hire], but are just as good, in some cases, even better [than the big stars with huge talent fees].”
- PUBLISHED: Wed 28 Nov 2007, 11:14 AM UPDATED: Sun 5 Apr 2015, 12:40 AM
- By:
- Aprylle Liabres (Contributor)
Pressed for a reply, stage actress Shamaine Centenera-Buencamino smiles and says she's not offended by that comment. Shamaine has appeared in several mainstream projects on ABS-CBN; two of the more recent are the daytime soap opera Prinsesa ng Banyera, where she plays Rafael Rosell's mother, and the primetime drama Ysabella, in which she had a recurring role as the lawyer of antagonist Victoria Amarillo, played by Coney Reyes. The mainstream projects pay better, of course - with better visibility; more people know her because they watch her regularly on television which they don't have to pay to see, unlike a theatrical production - but even so, Shamaine insists that her heart remains with the theatre.
She considers herself a stage actress first and foremost. “That's where I started,” says Shamaine. “I'm more used to acting onstage. Acting onstage and acting on television are different; they require different degrees of intensity. It's different when you're acting for the stage. Onstage, you really need to exaggerate your movements. Acting for a camera is different. It's more restrained, because it's done mostly up close. Plus in theatre, you only get one take. After that, it's over until the next show. In television, you can shoot one scene again and again and again; you can have as many retakes as the director thinks or feels is necessary.”
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Shamaine is just one of a handful of theatre veterans who are finding their way to mainstream television. Aside from her, there's Irma Adlawan-Marasigan, who played the mother of Anne Curtis in Maging Sino Ka Man and Susan Africa, who starred as the soap opera-obsessed mother of Bobby Andrews in Walang Kapalit.