Very few concepts in cinema studies have drawn as intense and long-lasting debates as David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson’s formulation of the Classical Hollywood Cinema.[1] These debates have prominently revolved around historiographical questions of style and spectatorship and, more specifically, around the approaches to narrative and editing techniques.[2] In this article, I revisit the debates about the notion of classical cinema in order to call attention to its implications on studies of the history of film acting – a subject that has thus far remained in the margins of these debates. My focus here is on ideas about film acting that emerged in Hollywood cinema of the silent era, a period that saw the formulation of the principal traits of the so-called classical style.