The Book of Tells (Peter Collett)[unlocked]

THE BOOK OF TELLS
completed what he was saying. Here the eyebrows acted
as a pair of full stops, or rather exclamation marks, allowing
Croucho a moment of triumph and giving the
audience the opportunity to be appreciative.
A few British actors have also used their eyebrows to
good effect. The pre-war actor Basil Rathbone's eyebrows
were virtually typecast for the role of superciliousness.
Roger Moore's trademark tell is the single raised eyebrow
- actually his left eyebrow - which he regularly enlisted in
order to appear quizzical, seductive or all-knowing in his
roles as the Saint and James Bond. Whenever a villain
needed to be put down or a pretty lady needed to be
impressed, his eyebrow would spring into action, sometimes
even upstaging Roger Moore himself.
Smiling Tells
How people smile at each other can provide useful clues
to their power relationship. 10 Darwin noticed that smiling
and laughter often occur together. He concluded therefore
that they have the same origins, and that smiling is just a
weak form of laughter. This idea seems very convincing,
especially when you consider how easy it is to shift
between smiling and laughter, and how close happiness is
to amusement. In many languages the words for smiling
and laughter even have the same root.
However, this theory has been challenged by the discovery
that chimpanzees have two quite distinct facial
expressions that correspond to human smiling and
laughter - a 'submission face' where the lips are retracted
and the teeth are exposed, and a 'play face' where the
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