Quotes About Performance

To be perfectly honest, drama is a lot simpler than comedy.

If you're known as a dramatic actor it helps you a lot. Even though to me it's simpler, it leaves a deeper impression on the public.

I just wanted to be in show business. I didn't care if I was going to be an actor or a magician or what. Comedy was a point of the least resistance, really. And on the simplest level, I loved comedy.

This game, it seems when you play it the best, is when you're not really thinking a lot and just reacting and keeping it at its simplest point - just see it and hit it.

Sometimes, I find that just the simplest, cleanest things that are intelligently performed are funniest to me.

Really, coaching is simplicity. It's getting players to play better than they think that they can.

Doing film and television demands a kind of simplicity. If you think something differently, the camera will pick it up.

'Richard III' is a really difficult play to film - it's involved, often obscure. I felt it absolutely necessary to do more simplification than I've ever done before.

Baseball is so hard as it is. For me, if you simplify it, it takes a little bit of the weight off, rather than trying to figure out all these other things. It's just peace of mind.

Scoring can be simply a matter of confidence. Sometimes it happens easily.

An operetta is simply a small and gay opera.

If anyone boos you offstage, that is simply applause from ghosts.

You can be moved by a performance on set, but when you see it on screen, it does nothing. Yet there will be someone you simply didn't notice on set that on screen: bam!

The bottom line is, when it comes to an actor and his performance, whether nominated or not, it simply has to do with whether that character had enough resonance with the audience. You know, to the filmgoers. And that something that you can't control.

Don't think. Act. We can always revise and revisit once we've acted. But we can accomplish nothing until we act.

Warfare is theatre, I have said, and the essence of theatre is aritifce. What we show, we will not do. What we don't show, we will do.

The professional loves her work. She is invested in it wholeheartedly. But she does not forget that the work is not her. Her artistic self contains many works and many performances. Already the next is percolating inside her. The next will be better, and the one after that better still.

Henry Fonda was still throwing up before each stage performance, even when he was seventy-five. In other words, fear doesn't go away. The warrior and the artist live by the same code of necessity, which dictates that the battle must be fought anew every day.

End first, then beginning and middle. That's your startup, that's your plan for competing in a triathlon, that's your ballet.

The professional loves her work. She is invested in it wholeheartedly. But she does not forget that the work is not her. Her artistic self contains many works and many performances. Already the next is percolating inside her. The next will be better, and the one after that better still. The

Let me say this about courage under fire. In my experience, valour in action counts for far less than simply performing one's commonplace task without cocking it up. This is by no means as simple as it sounds.

I've read a dozen different versions of Stanislavski's famous Three Questions, i.e. the queries an actor must ask him- or herself before playing any scene. Here's my version: Who am I? Why am I here? What do I want? The second two are pretty easy. It's the first that's the killer.

The professional shuts up. She doesn't talk about it. She does her work.

This doesn't mean that the professional doesn't throw down a 360 tomahawk jam from time to time, just to let the boys know he's still in business.