Freeing the Natural Voice

Knowing how to connect language with breath and voice is a golden key to hang on the chain of the actor's craft!

Linklater's groundbreaking original Freeing the Natural Voice sold more than 100,000 copies. Now, revised and greatly expanded this edition has been eagerly adopted by Linklater students, selling 30,000 copies to date. Emphasizing the use of imagery and imagination in developing the art of the voice, this book incorporates exercises developed over the past three decades that have stood the test of repetition, reliably producing results when practiced conscientiously and with understanding.

The logical progression of exercises is designed for professional actors, student actors, teachers of acting, teachers of voice and speech and anyone interested in vocal expression.

The emphasis of the work is on the removal of the physical and psychological blocks that inhibit the human vocal instrument and its objective is a voice in direct contact with emotional impulse, shaped by the intellect but not restricted by it.

This book presents a lucid and multi-leveled account of the human voice in the context of performance - expressive theatrical performance and the performance of everyday communication.



Kristin Linklater is one of the best-known teachers of voice production for actors in the world of actor-training. Having trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (with Iris Warren) she has been based in the United States since 1963 and has spent most of her professional life teaching in theatre companies and actor-training programs throughout America and Europe.


In the 1960's and 70's she worked with the Festival Theatre Stratford in Canada, the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and with the leading experimental theatre groups of the time including Joseph Chaiken's Open Theatre and Andre Gregory's The Manhattan Project in New York and Peter Brook's Centre de Recherche in Paris. She was Master Teacher of Voice from 1965 to 1978 at New York University's Graduate Theatre program and then spent the next 12 years teaching and acting for Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, MA. From 1990 to 1996 she was Professor of Theatre at Emerson College in Boston and from 1997 to the present she has been Professor of Theatre Arts at Columbia University in New York where she has served Chair of the Theatre Division and is currently Co-Head of Acting Concentration.


Since 1965 she has conducted teacher-training programs that rigorously train teachers how to teach her methods. Designated Linklater teachers now teach in all major actor-training programs in the U.S. including Yale School of Drama, the Tisch School of the Arts, CalArts, Boston University, the University of Washington, Syracuse University, and Dartmouth.


The original 1976 Freeing the Natural Voice became the leading text in the field selling 100,000 copies of the US edition The new Freeing the Natural Voice has been eagerly adopted by Linklater students and has already sold 30,000 copies.


Linklater is much in demand as a lecturer and workshop leader and has led workshops in Germany, France, Belgium, Italy, Denmark, Australia, New Zealand, the U.K. and Russia as well as regularly in New York and elsewhere in the U.S. Her work is at the center of voice study at the National Theatre Academy in Seoul, South Korea, and her book has been translated into German, Russian, Italian, and Spanish.


She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and grants and funding from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2011, Linklater won the Lilly Award recognizing extraordinary contributions made by women to the American Theatre.


As a respected actress in her own right Kristin Linklater is recognized as one of the rare breed of teachers who can both ''do" and teach. She is inspirational, demanding and dedicated to the release and development of voices that tell the truth and reverberate with the necessary passion to bring the stage to life. Kristin Linklater has not only revolutionized the training of actors' voices but has made a major contribution to the whole field of actor-training. And, yes, that fabulous actor Hamish Linklater received his voice training from his mother.