Quotes About Acting

I have played old ladies since I was 17 years old, and very convincingly. I've always looked funny and was too tall to play the leads and so had to play the grandmothers.

If a great role comes along, and you are too tall to play it, then I think the role is too small for your talents.

I don't think I'm leading lady material, and I was always the wrong shape. I was never tall enough. But it was more lack of confidence. I shunned doing straight parts. I didn't think I was a good enough actress, so I thought I might as well do something they were supposed to laugh at.

Theatre is such a joy because it's a group effort. Everyone has to move in tandem. It was lovely to be able to carry that over into 'Barry.'

If you ask an actor what he'd prefer to act on, he'd probably say a tangible, real set, or even better, a real location out on a mountainside or by a river. It's just easier because you don't have to imagine anything.

Accents are very tangible, blessedly, and if you have to do one, it's a way of getting into character. I can read it through a few times and pretend I know what I'm doing!

I don't do so much acting work now, as there aren't the parts except for 'Tango'. So if I didn't have the cabaret work, I don't know what I would be doing.

I sit on the end of the bed, trying to look as nonlethal as an extra from Night of the Living Dead can.

She screws up her face in a parody of deep concentration.

There's a part in the movie where you can see right through the acting, where you can tell that I'm about to burst into tears, right before I burst into tears.

There's a part in the movie where you can see right through the acting, where you can tell that I'm about to burst into tears

Acting might bring on emotional exhaustion, but writing tired your brains out. Writing led to depression and insomnia and walking around all day with a haggard look.

Class is much more than Marx's definition of relationship to the means of production. Class involved your behavior, your basic assumptions, how you are taught to behave, what you expect from yourself and from others, your concept of a future, how you understand problems and solve them, how you think, feel, act.

Acting per se, like all art, is a process of abstracting, of retaining only significant detail. But in impersonation any detail can be significant.

Strategy] is more than a science: it is the application of knowledge to practical life, the development of thought capable of modifying the original guiding idea in the light of ever-changing situations; it is the art of acting under the pressure of the most difficult conditions. HELMUTH VON MOLTKE, 1800–1891

Strategy] is more than a science: it is the application of knowledge to practical life, the development of thought capable of modifying the original guiding idea in the light of ever-changing situations; it is the art of acting under the pressure of the most difficult conditions.

It was interesting, how much of adult life consisted of pretending.

It is not enough to discover the secret of a play, its thought and feelings—the actor must be able to convert them into living terms.

The actor does not live, he plays. He remains cold toward the object of his acting but his art must be perfection.

If you speak any lines, or do anything, mechanically, without fully realizing who you are, where you came from, why, what you want, where you are going, and what you will do when you get there, you will be acting without imagination. That time, whether it will be short or long, will be unreal, and you will be nothing more than a wound-up machine, an automation.

On the stage do not run for the sake of running, or suffer for the sake of suffering. Don't act "in general", for the sake of action; always act with a purpose.

You wanna know what I'm feeling? Lemme tell you, bébé. Amusement. You're acting like we got some kind of choice in this matter. You're just as screwed as I am—because we're both too far gone for the other.

Going into my 20s, I was uncertain, trying to figure out what my relationship to acting is.

My husband acts and I have such respect for those that do it well, that I wouldn't even try to pretend I can act.