Quotes About Acting

I wanted to be a classical actress. I plodded along. I went to junior college in San Francisco, I was in a Repertory Company. My hero was Eva Le Gallienne, who was a great theater actress at the turn of the century who created her own company, and she wrote these hilarious autobiographies at the time.

I knew at the time that that wasn't the part I would be doing, they just wanted a screentest so they could have a look at it to show to the directors and producers. Then they wrote a part for me or maybe they already had it in mind, I don't know.

I've got a role in the new Billy Bob Thornton movie that Billy Bob wrote and is going to direct called 'Jayne Mansfield's Car.' I only have four scenes, but I have as much dialogue as anybody in the movie.

As a child, I was fascinated by the stories of Dickens acting out everything in front of the mirror as he wrote it down. Later, when you approach his work as an actor, you notice how sayable the dialogue is.

I'm a big fan of Woody Allen. I used to love the fact that he wrote his own screenplay and acted in the movie.

The worst storyline I've ever been involved in I wasn't involved in, because I was clever enough to get pregnant with my second child and they wrote me out and they replaced me with Christine Jones. And thank God - that was the worst storyline.

I wrote a script. I actually enjoyed writing it more than acting. It's about the Irish rebellion of 1920, which is a fascinating period and place for me.

And now it looks like I'm probably going to shoot a movie that I wrote. I got the money to do it, and I would star and all, because of being on Howard.

It was some great times and some great moments... I'm proud to be a WWE alumni. If it wasn't for my time there, there's no way I'd be excelling at Fox and acting.

'Smallville' gig was another one of those things I got through WWE. At that point, I had absolutely no aspirations to pursue acting.

We went through this month camp, learning how to bump and hit the ropes. I just fell in love with WWE and sports entertainment. It was the perfect world of the merge in sports, action, acting, and entertainment. I felt like I finally found my place.

Obviously, being WWE Champion was my main goal in life, but when I started acting, the main thing I wanted to do was play a superhero or supervillain.

At 15, I refereed my first match, and I was training at my dad's school even prior to that, so the only thing that I was concerned about - I guess the only thing that made me reluctant and was the reason I was in L.A. and the reason I went to acting school - was I thought maybe I wasn't big enough - physically big enough - to compete with WWE.

It was acting, and WWE is the longest-running weekly episodic program in television. Sure, there are story lines that are better than others.

One day, when I'm unable to physically perform, would I want to pursue more of an acting career? Eh, maybe. But I think my home is with the WWE, being on the road and wrestling in front of a live audience.

I'm chomping at the bit for more movie roles as long as it doesn't interfere with my WWE schedule.

When I first started out acting, I didn't have anything to lose. I had another career. If I fell on my face, I could say, 'I'll see ya,' and go back to working.

My favorite play that I did was at Yale. It's called 'The Island.'

I wanted to write plays. I was at Yale graduate school at the time for English literature, not for acting... I liked the idea of collaboration, and I thought if I'm gonna write plays, I should learn something about speaking the lines that I might try to write.

I guess I stopped acting when I was 18 and didn't pick it up again until I was 21. That wasn't the plan, though. When I first started at Yale, the plan was to do a movie each summer.

One of the reasons why I went to the Yale School of Drama is because I felt that I was acting off of instinct, but sometimes that is not reliable. When you're not feeling it, what do you do? So, going to grad school was about getting the tools to just use my instrument to the best of my ability.

I was an English major at Yale, but I did do undergraduate theater there. And I went to the graduate school for acting.

I remember I was up for the role of Jim in 'Huck Finn,' and because I went to Harvard and Yale, they didn't think I would be able to play a slave. I said, 'Oh, please.' I had to go in there and prove to them that I wasn't too intelligent to play a slave.

I did some acting in high school and then a little more in college, and it just was the thing that I felt that I wanted to do more than anything else. And then I was fortunate enough to audition for and get into Yale Drama School right after college, and I spent three years there.