There are acting coaches all over America who are terrified that Cranston native Howard Fine’s book, Fine on Acting: A Vision of the Craft (Havenhurst Books; $24.99) will become the best seller it deserves to be. Not because he will put them out of work but because he’s going to make their work much harder to do.

During his 25 years as a teacher and director, the Cranston East High School alumnus has developed a technique that is useful and exciting and will forever rob the art of acting of its air of mystery. Acting coaches will find it much more difficult to convince their students that there are aspects of being an actor that can’t be learned by mere mortals and that they must rely on the acting coach for the rest of their career.

“I spend my time trying to convince actors that good acting is grounded in common sense,” Fine said, in a telephone interview from Los Angeles last week. “There is really nothing very esoteric about it. It’s based on the idea that good acting is simply based on human behavior. It’s not an acting ‘trick.’”

But don’t be fooled into thinking acting is easy just because it is simple. Fine regards hard work and preparation as essential to acting and he has not much patience with actors who don’t know that constant reading and learning, especially about the person or profession you expect to portray, is the foundation of a successful performer. In other words, acting is hard work.

In his book, Fine explains his belief that most acting teachers come in two extremes; “those who tell you to ignore technique and just ‘say the lines’ and those who tend toward the metaphysical, speaking in glittering generalities.”

Fine argues that the former might as well be “selling tonics and elixirs,” while the latter “leave you feeling inspired without any idea of how to practically apply the information.”

Neither extreme advances actors in their craft, he says.

“My goal as a coach has always been to be concise and clear,” he explained. “And that is the approach I took writing this book.”

Many actors in Hollywood, where Fine has established a successful studio and school, have been impressed and enthusiastic about Fine’s approach.

Emmy Award-winning actor Michael Chiklis, the star of The Shield and movie portrayer of The Thing in two Fantastic Four movies, wrote the forward for the book. Chiklis, a Lowell, Mass. native who has been a steadily working actor in television and films since 1989, is an enthusiastic student of Fine’s.

“You’ve purchased this book because you either aspire to be an actor or want to be a better one. Either way you’ve made a wonderful decision. Howard Fine is a great teacher. His philosophy and approach to the craft of acting are the most helpful, encouraging and practically applicable I’ve ever encountered.”

Fine’s book covers essentials for actors, including sections called; “The Common Mistakes,” “Rehearsal,” “Auditions,” “Stage vs. Television,” “Film Acting” and “Comedy vs. Drama.” Fine also offers insightful advice for challenging situations most actors don’t think of until they are in the middle of them, such as playing opposite a bad actor, dealing with nerves, memorizing lines, working with a bad director and being “emotionally blocked.”

The book is a testament to the long distance Fine’s career has reached in a relatively short time. But don’t skip the beginning to get right to the instruction or you will miss an exceptional back-story. You will have to buy the book for the details, but the broad strokes of Fine’s life are a testament to the cultural and ethnic diversity of people who, for one reason or another, end up moving to Rhode Island.

Fine’s genealogical footnotes read like a drama by themselves. His father was a G.I. from the Bronx who survived the invasion of Normandy and then was sent to Shanghai just in time to see that Chinese city liberated from Japanese occupation.

Fine’s mother was a holocaust survivor whose family bribed their father out of Buchenwald and Hitler’s Germany when that was still possible.

“So, my grandmother, Julia, sold everything and got him out of the concentration camp,” Fine says at the beginning of his book. The family was eventually reunited in Shanghai. Fine’s mother got a job at the Army’s Post Exchange when his father hired her and began to escort the female employees home.

“Dad told me that he would deliberately drop her off last every night and they gradually fell in love,” wrote Fine. “He married her in Shanghai in December of 1945.”

Fine said the whole of Julia’s family eventually came to the United States and she succeeded in talking Max Fine out of his father’s dairy business and into moving to Cranston. The family operated a gas station and auto repair business on Reservoir Avenue but Howard knew he was not destined to stay in the family business.

“I used to work part-time pumping gas, and I enjoyed talking to the customers,” said Fine, “but I had absolutely no talent for fixing cars.”

Fine was lucky to find a mentor in one of his teachers, Donald Babbitt, who was a disciple of Uta Hagen and used her book, Respect for Acting, in his teaching. Babbitt also took the kids to New York, to meet Hagen and her husband, Herbert Berghof, who ran the HB Studio for actors. It proved to be an important connection for Fine, who, through a series of happy accidents, ended up in New York in 1983 and found himself, at the age of 24, the acting department head at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy, the youngest department head in the school’s history. And that was before his good friend and actor David Coury hit the lottery for $2 million and they both decided California was the place they ought to be, and moved to California where Fine discovered that it was teaching that he really liked to do.

After establishing himself as a teacher with a waiting list, he opened his own studio. The Howard Fine Acting Studio in Hollywood has a list of students, past and present, that would top anyone’s A-list of Hollywood stars, including Brad Pitt, Will Smith, Bradley Cooper, Justin Timberlake, Lindsay Lohan, Salma Hayek, Simon Baker, Amanda Bynes, Gerard Butler, Jennifer Connelly, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Val Kilmer, Sela Ward, Sophia Bush, Jason Priestley, Kerry Washington, Amy Smart, Jared Leto, Wilmer Valderrama, Brooke Shields and Daryl Hannah. Not to mention Garry Shandling, Alexa Vega, Heather Locklear, Geri Halliwell, James Belushi, Diana Ross, Jon Bon Jovi and Josh Groban.

Fine explains that, for many stars, the fame comes before the acting and it is only later that they decide they should be actors as well.

Fine is much too diplomatic to name some of the less accomplished students he has had but he is quick to acknowledge the ones that impressed him.

“Jennifer Connelly,” the fine actress who has earned a Golden Globe and Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, “She has an aliveness that you can see right away. I would say that she is very alive and all five senses are glowing in her.”

After mentioning Connelly, Fine said he would not mention any more of his best students – not because they don’t deserve a mention – because he is afraid he may forget one.

“That’s what makes this work so satisfying,” he said. “To see someone with talent just open up and reveal it is what I look forward to.”

Fine is perfectly content to teach but, with a growing reputation, you have to expect more attention and he has been getting that, as a guest on reality shows or as an analyst of public performances outside of the theater. The Huffington Post asked him to analyze Bobby Jindal’s Republican response to Barack Obama’s speech last February. Fine was not impressed, but not necessarily because he disagreed with what he was saying:

“He thought of the effect he wanted to have on the audience. He wanted to come across as likable and friendly. He wanted the audience to think that he is a good guy, so he adopted a general demeanor of kind and empathetic. This is why he came off as condescending. No matter what he talked about, the pose was the same. He was trying to project his idea of a warm and friendly guy. Therefore he came off as patronizing.

“Chances are that he didn't write the speech. He needed to find a way of making the words come from him. In order to do this he would have had to contact sources within his own life experiences and opinions that are in agreement with what he was saying. His feelings and expressions needed to travel freely. Instead he locked himself into a false demeanor.”

So, maybe there are some performers that even Howard Fine can’t help - but you could never say he didn’t try.