Quotes from Melissa Leo

I am a smoker, I'm ashamed to say. I had given it up for many years, then picked it up again. It's a horrible habit. I struggle with myself all the time. And I love to smoke.

I haven't had a lot of experience with glamour. I've never had to mask myself, as many now not-so-young actresses have had to do. Female actors in that regard have a different lot in life than male actors.

Acting, it's hit or miss. Make them laugh, make them cry; hopefully they have a little entertainment.

I live in the country, and I live a fairly natural, holistic life. Sometimes I get put up in hotels where they use chemical sprays to clean things, or there are chemicals used that I stay away from.

I'm not particularly fond of the hybrid writer-director or actor-director.

Well, I don't think of myself as a feminist at all. As soon as we start labeling and categorizing ourselves and others, that's going to shut down the world.

Why do we have to pretend we're not in the sales game? I didn't sign on to be a salesman. I signed on to be an actor.

The climate informs the character.

You have to let the costume inform you.

Ever since Marilyn Monroe was transformed from one of the prettiest girls you could ever hope to see into an icon, everyone has been trying to repeat that icon. And now the entire industry is filled with, and by and large run by, wannabes.

I love acting. I really do. I think that's maybe the one thing that is known about me.

You know, when I got started on television in the '80s, you would go to the costume department, and if you were a female they put you into a skirt. And you had a pocketbook, usually a shoulder bag.

An actor has to be very, very careful, as one of the most wonderful props - and actors love props - is a cigarette. There's so much to do with it: you can bring it up to your face, play with the smoke. It's just the greatest - ever since I was 16 and in acting school in England, I've been playing around with cigarettes.

I do wish everyone would call me Leo. It's not that I don't like Melissa. But the more I hear it called out, the worse it sounds.

I do get a fair amount of scripts; I got 'Frozen River' kinda just that way. I have a hard time turning my back on anybody who says they have something for me.

To play someone when the character masks their own emotions, doesn't understand their own emotions, has no release for their own emotions, and yet is full of emotion - that is a much harder character to play than someone who has somewhere to put it.

To get the hippie out of certain characters is probably the most difficult thing for me. I was not a hippie by choice but by birth.

I think the funny thing about acting for me - and I hold it in a very holy, spiritual way - not to be overly fundamentalist about it, but it's that important to me - is that it is an ancient healing art.

There were not enough women like Kay on TV and now there are none.

I think this notion of acting and glamour is getting in everybody's way.

I always wanted to play a nun, and to play the Reverend Mother was a thrill of a lifetime for me. But, generations back, my family were not churchgoers, which is an unusual thing in the United States.

I mean, the unfair treatment of women and black people and Indians and other groups, that's real. Mistreatment of other people because 'I'm better than you are' is such a sad part of the world.

I think there has only been one time in my entire career that I've ever gone back to shoot a scene. And it was a scene that, when we were shooting it, we knew that it wasn't working. We knew there was a disagreement between the actor and director. So, we went back.

The power of television - it's so present in our lives, we don't even know how powerful it is.