Acting Quotes - Page 2

Working in the theatre has a lot in common with unemployment.

There are some great roles - mostly in Shakespeare's tragedies which no one can play at full strength from beginning to end. One simply hopes that one can hit the peaks as often as one has the strength.

Peggy Ashcroft

Acting is not being emotional but being able to express emotion.

Kate Reid

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

Jean Anouilh

Every actor in his heart believes everything bad that's printed about him.

Orson Welles

Actors are the only honest hypocrites.

William Hazlitt

Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.

Alfred Hitchcock

Film-making has become a kind of hysterical pregnancy.

Richard Lester

A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.

Kenneth Tynan

To begin an ethnographic project with a goal, with an object of research and a set of presumptions, is already to stymie the process of discovery; it blocks one's ability to learn something new that exceed the frameworks with which one enters.

J. Jack Halberstam

In the movies you get even; in life, diplomacy is best.

Lee Marvin

Out of perverseness, I jumped on the subway and went down to a sound stage on Fourth Street to watch the shooting of Kay Doubleday's big strip scene in Mad Dog Coll, a gangster film that can still, to my embarrassment, be seen occasionally on late-night TV... Kay Doubleday was in my class at Lee Strasberg's; it was in the interest of art, I told myself, to watch her prance down a ramp, singing and stripping her heart out.

Brooke Hayward

TV stars are cool. Even if their characters are less than admirable, they come across as somehow sympathetic, maybe even neighborly. They are, after all, people you invite into your home every week. If you don't like them, you won't watch them.Movie stars, by contrast, are hot. They have to blaze so fiercely that they fill a screen forty feet high and demand the attention of a crowded theater.That's why very few TV stars have graduated successfully to features. It requires not only different skills but a different personality. You have to go from amiable to commanding.Likewise, some movie stars are simply too big for television. Jack Nicholson is riveting on-screen, but you wouldn't want him in your living room week after week. The television simply couldn't contain his personality.

Walter Jon Williams

Ultimately, you have to not worry about people thinking you should have played him differently. You're the one playing the part so it has to be yours.

Ewan McGregor

The beautiful thing about it is that no two directors or actors work the same way. You also learn not to be afraid of discussion and conflict.

Ewan McGregor

Starting with a party scene for 600 cast and end up singing on top of a giant elephant...does it get any better than this?

Ewan McGregor

I'm not a film star, I am an actress. Being a film star is such a false life, lived for fake values and for publicity.

Vivien Leigh

Taking decision and acting out our decisions leads to increase

Sunday Adelaja

An actor is just a part of a movie, but director - he is the movie.

Amit Kalantri

[on Martin Freeman playing Bilbo Baggins] It was great. I got to hang out with him, and I kept a straight face for a bit and then I started giggling because I know Martin, I don't know Bilbo. For Martin to be sitting there playing Bilbo is amazing. He's going to be amazing, he's going to be fantastic in this film.

Benedict Cumberbatch

Acting is illusion, as much illusion as magic is, and not so much a matter of being real.

Laurence Olivier

We gotta be willing to let it hurt. You know, all this notion that acting is “yeah it’s pretend” and yes we enjoy it and yeah we can have a good time with it. But if you wanna LAND, you wanna make an impact, you want those FUCKERS TO REMEMBER YOU! Then you have to let it hurt sometimes. You gotta get there because that’s all an audience ever wants. Is for you to open up your chest and show them that you have a fucking heart. That’s all we want. A heart. A human being. Not an affectation.

Kevin Spacey

Nothing unusual was noted during the voyage, in fact everything ran smoothly until Security alerted Biscay about the stiff in cabin 407. Nobody heard or saw anything suspicious. None of the passengers were missing or acting suspiciously. No airlock doors were opened or any transports allowed since their last stop four days prior. There were no notorious names on the passenger list, nor any unsavory persons among the ranks of his crew. In fact, the ship’s commander had never even seen a dead body in real – um, life before. And yet, almost magically, there it was.

Christina Engela

I know my career is going badly because I'm being quoted correctly.

Lee Marvin

It seemed that I performed better sober than drunk. Who knew?

Craig Ferguson

I've learned to get really good at this - say one thing when I'm thinking about something else, act like I'm listening when I'm not, pretend to be calm and happy when I'm really freaking out. It's one of the skills you perfect as you get older

Lauren Oliver

I don't understand', I say,'why they care what I think, as long as I'm acting how they want me to.''You're acting how they want you to now', he says,'but what happens when your Abnegation-wired brain tells you to do something else, something they don't want?

Veronica Roth

[the only acting advice he would give] What is acting but lying and what is good lying but convincing lying?

Laurence Olivier

The further you get away from yourself, the more challenging it is. Not to be in your comfort zone is great fun.

Benedict Cumberbatch

It's a big spooky place when you're in it alone. It's like you can hear all the whispers of all the voices of all the actors who ever played here. Kind of creepy. Like a church can be creepy when it's empty. You ever been in a church after hours?

Benjamin R. Smith

There was so much to learn and it was all fun. But the best part was getting a laugh from an audience. That was like drowning in candy.

Hal Holbrook

I had a dream about you. We were actors in a horror movie and I was hunting you down with a knife. When I finally cornered you the director yelled "Cut".... What? I can't be blamed for following instructions.

Georgia Saratsioti

Her friend - and her partner on the stage. You will not believe me, but making love to Kitty - a thing done in passion, but always, too, in shadow and silence, and with an ear half-cocked for the sound of footsteps on the stairs - making love to Kitty and posing at her side in a shaft of limelight, before a thousand pairs of eyes, to a script I knew by heart, in an attitude I had laboured for hours to perfect - these things were not so very different. A double act is always twice the act that the audience thinks it; beyond our songs, our steps, our bits of business with coins and canes and flowers, there was a private language, in which we held an endless, delicate exchange of which the crowd knew nothing. This was a language not of the tongue but of the body, its vocabulary the pressure of a finger or a palm, the nudging of a hip, the holding or breaking of a gaze, that said, You are too slow - you got too fast - not there but here - that's good - that's better! It was as if we walked before the crimson curtain, lay down upon the boards and kissed and fondled - and were clapped, and cheered, and paid for it!

Sarah Waters

He was cut from the scene like a case of the runs from a can-can routine.

Jack Bunbury

I don't think about a role as positive or negative. If I can play it convincingly, then I feel satisfied as an actor

Kunal Karan Kapoor

Anyone can act if he has the will to do so, and anyone who says he wants to but doesn't have the knack for it suffers from a lack of will, not a lack of talent.

Melissa Bruder

Talent is an accident of genes, and a responsibility.

Alan Rickman

Think slowly like a snail, act fast like a cheetah.

Aarifa the biggest animal lover in the world

It is impossible to get rid of the bondage of slavery, if we do not start acting as free citizens of our country

Sunday Adelaja

MOST PEOPLE think acting is make-believe. Like it’s a big game where people put on costumes and feign kisses or stab wounds and then pretend to gasp and die. They think it’s a show. They don’t understand that acting is becoming someone else, changing your thoughts and needs until you don’t remember your own anymore. You let the other person invade everything you are and then you turn yourself inside out, spilling their identity onto the stage like a kind of bloodletting.

Mindy Mejia

I see an actress smoking a cigarette in an old Fred McMurray movie. She’s clever and beautiful and manipulative. I feel envy. I suddenly wish I smoked cigarettes and was as clever and beautiful and manipulative as she. I want to be that way at the restaurants I visit, as I’m walking to my car, with certain friends who might understand. The actress has played her part well; she’s made me want to emulate her base desires if only for a while. Does that make me impressionable, a fool, or someone who will recognize the deepest secrets of her heart?I fight hard to stay young—to keep the lines from further etching my face and hands and breasts, presumably to trick the world into believing I am young. I’m an actress playing a part. I’m afraid to tell the truth. I fear losing those younger or becoming those older. In the presence of youth, a sort of unseen age-osmosis occurs within me. The years drop away and I don’t want to leave. It’s utterly selfish but I don’t care. After all, I’m no older than they—I’ve just been so longer. I was nineteen only yesterday and they don’t retire nineteen-year-old actresses.

Chila Woychik

The best author is a dead author, because he's out of your way and you own the play. Take what he has given you and use it for what you need.

Stella Adler

The imagination is closer to the actor than real life-more agreeable, more comfortable.

Stella Adler

Be innocent, wise and ninety-five.

Stella Adler

It was a relief to inhabit someone else's life for a while, to get her personal issues for a brief respite. In a play, she knew exactly how all her character's problems would be resolved. No matter how the cast performed, the end turned out the same. No questions, no worries, no unknowns.

Alexandra Robbins

No actor is a success unless he feels inside himself, as long as he lives, that he is good.

Stella Adler

You'll never really be great unless you aim high.

Stella Adler

If you can't take both sides, it means you can only play yourself.

Stella Adler

When most dullards hear the words 'the theater,' they envision a twelve-screen multiplex where disaster porn entertains the culturally witless for 90 minutes at a time. Pfaugh. The word 'theater' has grandeur. Power. Back to its ancient Grecian origins, it means 'the seeing place.' A stage upon which actors and actresses use fiction to show us truths.

Mark Waid

I knew exactly when the fever had struck. I had been reading Hamlet in an English class at school. Everyone else stumbled, puzzling over the strange words. Then it had been my turn, and the language had suddenly woken in me, so that my heart and lungs and tongue and throat were on fire. Later, I understood that this was why people spoke of Shakespeare as a god. At the time, I felt like weeping. Somebody had released me from dumbness, from utter isolation. I knew that I could live inside these words, that they would give me a a shape, a shell. I had no idea, then, that I would never play Hamlet…. I’m an actor, and in a good year I earn eleven thousand pounds for dressing up as a carrot.

Amanda Craig

Physicality is the basis of performance.

David Petersen

In the language of an actor, to know is synonymous with to feel

Konstantin Stanislavski

I'd found my niche: cat-owning, stalker-y secretary. And I played the same part again and again and again.

Felicia Day

In his madness he became a terrifying actor!

Luigi Pirandello

I think I'm an actor because I have very strong imagination and empathy. I never studied acting, but those two qualities are exactly the qualities that make for an activist.

Susan Sarandon

You are the actor. Your body brings in something, call it presence, and it happens by degrees. Arms, chest, haunches and thighs, calves and feet. The body, firing synapses, in between and in the gray matter. On and off. The billions of cells, the body mechanisms, the busy regulating, the adjusting, the retinas contracting and expanding, body secreting, beating, moving, breathing and pulsing. Your being registers here. Swallow. Inhale. Open mouth to press air out to touch the flesh in the throat to make sound. You are the actor. A thing of flesh and feeling. Perfect because you aren't.

Richard Maxwell

At once, it’s clear I cannot gush. We try me playing cocky, but I just don’t have the arrogance. Apparently, I’m too “vulnerable” for ferocity. I’m not witty. Funny. Sexy. Or mysterious By the end of the session, I am no one at all.

Suzanne Collins

I've been very lucky at what's happened in my career to date, but playing something as far from me as possible is an ambition of mine - anything from a mutated baddy in a comic book action thriller, to a detective. If anything, I'd like Gary Oldman's career: he's the perfect example of it. I've love to have a really broad sweep of characters - to be able to do something edgy, surprising and unfashionable.

Benedict Cumberbatch

...if the actor gave his performance without knowing that he was in a play, then his tears would be real tears and his life a real life. And whenever I think of this pain and joy that rise up in me, I am carried away by the knowledge that the game I am playing is the most serious and exciting there is.

Albert Camus

A Film has the potential to kindle such a spark of inspiration in an individual that it can alter the course of human progress.

Abhijit Naskar

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Acting Quotes - Page 2

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