ABSTRACT
There are various reasons why one might need to do this. It may be a simple question of your availability and a confl icting commitment – whether work or family. The length of contract, the amount of money on offer and the suitability or size of the role may also be factors that come into play after you have auditioned. You may also want to change direction (moving from musical theatre to acting roles, or do more television work than theatre, for instance) or hold out for a regular role in a television series, rather than doing one or two episode parts. In order to do this, you may have to turn down the type of work that you are usually offered and wait patiently for what you want. This can be both daunting and fi nancially diffi cult, but can pay dividends in the long run. Stars sometimes sit ‘looking at the wall’ for months on end until the right career-advancing script or project comes their way, declining all other offers in the meantime.
No matter how you feel about an offer (fl attered, insulted, affronted or otherwise), it is always important to be pleasant, thanking everyone when declining – something taught to me by a big name from television, who did so on a daily basis – as you never know when you might need the people again, or indeed where they
