Quotes from Roger Rees

I was a skinny 17-year-old.

If you live in the States, you have to join a gym.

When it was announced I had won the Tony Award, I was in Bangkok doing a movie with Judi Dench. I remember coming back from the location to the Oriental Hotel and hearing someone yelling across the reception area, 'You've won the Tony!' It was wonderful and strange to be halfway around the world.

Sometimes the most excruciating experiences in rehearsals and performances yield the most beautiful work.

Some of the finest Shakespeare has been done recently by college theater programs. I'll tell you what these young kids have: They have a natural authority in Shakespeare. They feel a right to do it. And once they honor the humanity of it, the rhythm of the verse comes with it.

I've always thought like I'm really a 3-feet-high comic trapped in a leading man's body... but then I played Nicholas Nickleby, and suddenly I was heroic.

The shields were enormous. In 'Julius Caesar,' I died early in the scene and used to fall asleep under the shield until I was woken up by applause.

Gerry Schoenfeld told me 'Les Parents Terribles' was not going to sell, even though we had Kathleen Turner and Jude Law in the cast. So we called it 'Indiscretions.'

Now, of course, we know there has been an end to apartheid in South Africa, but what excited me was seeing it in the context of history.

More people saw me in one episode of 'Cheers' than would ever see me in a play.

I do one thing Gielgud didn't: I play the ukulele.

Everything happens every night for this audience, and it's a very special occasion to come to the theatre.

My neighborhood in South London was very Dickensian.

So, suddenly I was an actor. I don't remember being nervous. I learned to be nervous later.

You might be the best Hamlet of your generation in the bathroom, but unfortunately, you have to come out and do it on stage, and it's best to do it to people who would fill the house.

I was an art student when I was a boy, and as an art student you don't have to talk to anyone - you just have to paint really wonderful paintings. It's very unlike being an actor, where you have to talk all the time.

The Elizabethan mind wanted and demanded that one word could mean 50 things. What Shakespeare offers us is not ambiguity; it's choices.

I have a little studio in Chinatown, and I sometimes go there and rearrange my brushes. But I would have to stop acting altogether in order to become a painter. At the moment, I'm still interested and active as an actor and director. Besides, I rather think acting and painting are all part of the same creative urge.

It's a vain craft, acting.

What I strive to do is to make the theater experience something that people remember and recall rather than dismiss because it was less like their everyday experiences. So, I'm less interested in internal emotionalism and much more in making the audience laugh and cry by the devices that we use as theater actors.

You may be modest and un-egotistical in your life; I'm quite ordinary. But I play big egotistical parts.

I've often thought I'm a short music hall comedian stuck in a leading man's body.

Arthur Winslow is one of the great parts.

In the Victorian age, actors played Romeo until they were 60 or 70 years old.