Quotes About Acting

O! what a rogue and peasant slave am I.

Good now, play one sceneOf excellent dissembling, and let it lookLike perfect honor.

William Shakespeare

To put an antic disposition on.

My hope is that I can characterize something with enough emphasis that it is very different from myself, the actor. If

My boy, that was a TV show. I used a stunt double. I always use a stunt double. Except in love scenes. I insist on doing those myself.

When aren't we acting?' he asked in his diary. 'When aren't we concealing? Would you like me to have been a fly on your wall yesterday? Did you do nothing shameful? Of course you did. The version of ourselves that we present to the world bears no resemblence to the truth. If we knew the truth about each other we could take noone seriously. There isn't one of us who could afford to be caught. That's all life is. Trying not to be found out.

It's not a struggle, but sometimes when you're gone for a month or two, you start to miss your friends. I love acting so much that it fills that gap of being sad about not being able to see my friends.

It's also a question of finding good material and interesting roles. I'm not the only actress out there, and good parts just don't fall into your lap that easily. But I like most of the films I've made recently and so I'm pretty positive about the future.

I didn't want to be famous. I just wanted to earn enough money to have a nice life and enjoy acting.

Who me? God, no, I'm terrible . . . " Then, just as an experiment, I say, "And, besides, I don't think I'm good-looking enough to be an actor." Oh, that's not true! There are lots of actors who aren't good-looking . . .

Then, towards the end of the meal, Anthony Hicks leant across the table towards me and looked me straight in the eye. 'I want you to remember', he said, a touch fiercely, 'that we, the audience, can and will smile with Poirot.' Then he paused. 'But we must never, ever, laugh at him.' There was another pause. 'And I am most certainly not joking.' I gulped, before Rosalind said, equally forcefully, 'And that is why we want you to play him.

It wasn't a good idea to work on 'Naked' in the first months of a marriage. I was living apart from my wife in a flat overflowing with books I was reading for the part.

The best thing I ever learned from my dad was he knew he wasn't the best of singers, but he always knew he was a great entertainer, and I always thought that was a good concept to bring along, that ultimately acting is an entertainment art and you have to be aware of the fact that you want people to be excited to be watching you.

Feminism was supposed to chase away all of those embarrassing vulnerabilities. At least, you were supposed to be aware that acting helpless was something shameful. So was the tendency to hide your own fear behind the toughness of bad boys, if you had that. I had that. I'm being honest here. The

I'd like to be an American Catherine Deneuve. She plays beautiful, sensitive, deep parts with a little bit of intelligence behind them.

the role of the Do-Gooder is not what actors call a fat part.

I always seem to get parts where I play the sports professional - and that's not me at all!

A good actor must never be in love with anyone but himself.

Real acting is never personal.

intelligence, the most plastic and at the same time the most durable structural equilibrium of behaviour, is essentially a system of living and acting operations.

I can walk into a room and create a good ambience. I was taught all about this back when I studied acting. One of the things they would teach you is how to send out positive signals when you enter a room. I am glad I learned this.

They could play married, both happy and unhappy, like no other acting couple have ever played married. They're the Lunts of the American marriage movie.

When I'm acting, I'm two beings. There's the one monitoring the distance between myself and the camera, making sure I hit my marks, and there is the one driven by this inner fire, this delicious fear.