Quotes from Nigel Hawthorne

I live in the country, and I have a very happy life. I just do the job and go home.

I don't want to hear that Harry Belafonte is out there. It forces me not to see the audience as an anonymous mass.

I went into acting because I was hiding from myself, and although acting has become more of a habit now, I think I am still hiding.

I really don't like talking about me - me as me, that is. Me in relation to what I do is another matter. But me as me is boring.

If I hadn't done 'Shadowlands,' which was a sort of emotional release for me as a person as well as an actor, it might have been less easy to have done 'George III.'

On the stage you can get away with imposing the emotions on yourself, but with film it really has to come from inside. It's much more intense.

I'm not looking at any stage stuff at all. I'm going to give that a break for a while, if not forever, because I've done a huge amount of stage stuff and if the possibility of working in pictures comes along, I'd be silly if I didn't grab it.

There is nobody on earth who could totally impersonate Jack Lewis, because you may look like him from the front or from the side, you may sound like him, but there'll be all sorts of aspects of you that will be very dissimilar to the man.

Just as Jack Lewis could go through a whole life without meeting someone that he loved, so you can go through whole career on the stage, never meeting a play that says the kind of things you feel deeply about!

Jennifer Aniston was a lovely girl, very unspoilt.

I had my doubts about 'Yes, Prime Minister' being successful in the U.S. because your system of government is so different than ours. But the show does seems to have a very good audience in the states.

One of the things about George III is that he was aware that the monarchy was slipping away. There was revolution in the air all over Europe. Because of the unpopularity of his predecessors, one of the things he wanted to do was to establish some sort of credibility to the monarchy.

My whole career has been a struggle for dignity and justification, to prove that I'd made the right decision to be an actor in the first place.

People still talk about 'Yes, Minister.' Americans, too; they love it. It was a happy period for me and it did change my life.

I can't grumble. I've been very content with the way things have gone. I may have minor quibbles as we all have, but I'm still working at 70.

I would never have told my father a lie. We were brought up to be very truthful. I would never lie today. It's impossible.

I really ran away in 1951 from South Africa, where I lived with my mother and father - who was a doctor - to come back to England to find myself, then hide what I found.

We've had other things come up in their place, but I don't think' anything beats morals.

It's like the Boy Scouts' motto, be prepared. You've got to be ready when the moment is offered. If you're not, you can actually screw it up for life.

In my mornings I can do what I like - go to art galleries, museums and things, go to lunch with people.

I would never shortchange an audience. I believe in doing every single performance with as much integrity and concentration and feeling as I can muster.

I've been a homosexual all my life. My partner and I don't want to stand up and say we're gay, because we think that's wrong.

The Hollywood machine is unfamiliar to me and unfriendly.

I was quite a plain boy. I stayed in work and eeked out a living, bit parts on TV, walk-ons in films, repertory companies.