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Actors
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“... the first prerogative of an artist in any medium is to make a fool of himself. ”
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“At the end, Schwarzenegger makes his ritual preparations for the climactic showdown, decking himself out in leather, packing up an arsenal of guns, and, as he leaves his apartment, copping a quick look of satisfaction in the mirror. It's his only love scene.”
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“Meryl Streep just about always seems miscast. (She makes a career out of seeming to overcome being miscast.)”
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“Even her eyelashes acted.”
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“... an actor can remember his briefest notice well into senescence and long after he has forgotten his phone number and where he lives.”
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“Movie actors are just ordinary, mixed-up people — with agents.”
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“Actors cannot choose the manner in which they are born. Consequently, it is the one gesture in their lives completely devoid of self-consciousness.”
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“Good actors sparking each other make for the wild fire that lights up the theater.”
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“... we in the theater are paradoxes. Our agonizing shyness is equalled only by the tremendous need for acceptance.”
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“... a struggle with shyness is in every actor more than anyone can imagine.”
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“An actor is not a machine ... Like any creative human being, I would like a bit more control so that it would be a little easier for me when the director says, 'One tear, right now,' that one tear would pop out. But once there came two tears because I thought, 'How dare he?'”
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“An actor is supposed to be a sensitive instrument. Isaac Stern takes good care of his violin. What if everybody jumped on his violin?”
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“You're always running into people's unconscious.”
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“Goethe said, 'Talent is developed in privacy,' you know? ... There is a need for aloneness which I don't think most people realize for an actor. It's almost having certain kinds of secrets for yourself that you'll let the whole world in on only for a moment, when you're acting.”
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“Scratch an actor and you'll find an actress.”
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“[Arnold Schwarzenegger] has so many muscles that he has to make an appointment to move his fingers.”
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“Doing a scene is like opening a bottle. If it doesn't open one way, try another — perhaps even give it up for another bottle?”
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“I always felt I was a nobody, and the only way for me to be somebody was to be — well, somebody else. Which is probably why I wanted to act.”
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“Catherine Tramell [her character in Basic Instinct was big and fabulous. But you want to know something? I ain't her. Smart people know I'm not her, but even smarter people know I can be her if I need to be.”
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“Actors are cave dwellers in a rich darkness which they love and hate.”
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“All actors are terrified — they just learn how to control it.”
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“How long an actress lives professionally depends on her stamina, the extent of her masochism, her imagination, and her yearning for recognition or approval.”
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“... acting is a wild ride, shared in the company of other actors.”
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“I seldom meet actors, they are to me bright strange fishes swimming in an element alien to me; I feel that to meet them is to See Life.”
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“Stars bitch and moan. Actors act.”
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“Authentic stardom ... is a gift which, if it is to have any permanent significance, must be bestowed by a public rather than a manager. ”
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“A flair for publicity does not necessarily mean a flair for acting.”
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“An actress' best friend is a body which responds instinctively to thought.”
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“Actors are as anxious about the state of audiences as aviators are over weather conditions.”
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“... the audience is the controlling factor in the actor's life. It is practically infallible, since there is no appeal from its verdict. It is a little like a supreme court composed of irresponsible minors.”
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“Every other species of talent carries with it its eternity; we enjoy the work of the poet, the painter, the sculptor, only as thousands will do after us; but the actor — his memory is with his generation, and that passes away.”
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“Writers and painters have a medium that can foster self-effacements. Actors haven't. An actor can't hide himself behind paper or canvas. If you're not there your art's not there. That's why we actors are often such self-centered objects.”
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“Singing is like going to a party at someone else's house. Acting is like having the party at your house.”
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“Actors may know how to act ... but a lot of them don't know how to behave. ”
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“W.R. always said to me, 'Never read any bad reviews about yourself. Read only the good ones.' ... I'd rather read the bad ones than the good ones anyway, because at least there are more of them.”
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“Without discipline and detachment, an actor is an emotional slob, spilling his insides out. This abandonment is having an unfortunate vogue. It is tasteless, formless, absurd. Without containment there is no art. All this vomiting and wheezing and bursting at the seams is no more great acting than the convulsions of raving maniacs.”
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“Without wonder and insight, acting is just a trade. With it, it becomes creation.”
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“Temperament is something that is an integral part of the artist. Not temper, temperament. There is a vast difference.”
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“I may not have been wearing a mink coat, but I was traveling with a dog. That should have made you think I was an actress!”
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“Wave after wave of love flooded the stage and washed over me. This was the beginning of the one great durable romance of my life.”
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“We movie stars all end up by ourselves. Who knows? Maybe we want to.”
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“The real actor, like any artist, has or finds a direct line to the collective heart.”
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“People stood on their chairs, cheering and waving. And it was all for me! Waves of love flooded the stage and washed over me. I started to cry. The sweetness of such a moment is impossible to describe. One is both lover and beloved. ... I'd found the one true, enduring romance of my life.”
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“Above all, ignore the audience.”
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“... an actor is exactly as big as his imagination.”
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“... acting is the conveyance of truth through the medium of the actor's mind and person. The science of acting deals with the perfecting of that medium. The great actors are the luminous ones.”
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“Perhaps society should give actors the same sort of protection it gives to those who follow a religious life. Actor/priest was originally the same job. The theater is left wing magic and theology is right wing magic.”
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“I may not be a great actress but I've become the greatest at screen orgasms. Ten seconds of heavy breathing, roll your head from side to side, simulate a slight asthma attack and die a little.”
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“It's not whether you really cry. It's whether the audience thinks you are crying.”
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“Until forty-five I can still play a woman in love. After fifty-five I can play grandmothers. But between those ten years it is difficult for an actress.”
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“Playing Shakespeare is so tiring. You never get a chance to sit down, unless you're a king.”
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“Frankie [Avalon] ... was interested in eating everything so it didn't eat him first.”
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“[On 'Steel Magnolias' director Herbert Ross:] He told me I couldn't act. This was not news to me, and I told him so. 'I'm not an actress, I'm Dolly Parton. I'm a personality who has been hired to do this movie. You're the director. It's your job to make me look like I'm acting.'”
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“[On her role as Cleopatra:] If someone's dumb enough to offer me a million dollars to make a picture, I'm certainly not dumb enough to turn it down.”
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“I, along with the critics, have never taken myself seriously.”
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“Some of my best leading men have been dogs and horses.”
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“Imagination, industry, and intelligence — 'the three I's' — are all indispensable to the actress, but of these three the greatest is, without any doubt, imagination.”
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“Applause is an instinctive, unconscious act expressing the sympathy between actors and audience. Just as our art demands more instinct than intellect in its exercise, so we demand of those who watch us an apppreciation of the simple unconscious kind which finds an outlet in clapping rather than the cold intellectual approval which would self-consciously think applause derogatory. I have yet to meet the actor who was sincere in saying that he disliked applause.”
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“Show business is like riding a bicycle — when you fall off, the best thing to do is get up, brush yourself off and get back on again.”
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“[To her agent:] You people book me so seldom that every time I work it's called a comeback.”
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“Insecurity, commonly regarded as a weakness in normal people, is the basic tool of the actor's trade.”
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“I look like a discouraged beetle battered by the rains of a spring night. I look like a moulting bird. I look like a governess in distress. I look — Good Lord, I look like an actress on tour, and that speaks for itself.”
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“Every actor has a natural animosity toward every other actor, present or absent, living or dead.”
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“There is always a half-malicious curiosity amongst actors to witness the shortcomings of a novice. They invariably experience strong inclinations to prophesy failure.”
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“... five stages in the life of an actor. ... 1. Who's Mary Astor? 2. Get me Mary Astor. 3. Get me a Mary Astor type. 4. Get me a young Mary Astor. 5. Who's Mary Astor?”
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“We were worse name-droppers than people who dropped our names. Another actor was a 'best friend,' 'know him very well,' 'died in my arms,' 'gave him his first break in that picture of mine.'”
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“A painter paints, a musician plays, a writer writes — but a movie actor waits. ”
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“[Acting advice to Helen Hayes:] If you cry, they don't.”
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“The least glimmering or shade of acting, in man or woman, is a sure motive of envy in the rest; and, if their malice can't persuade the town's-people into a dislike of their performance, they'll cruelly endeavor to taint their characters ... ”
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“Believe me, nothing is so calculated to lose you audience sympathy as too many tears. Move your listeners all you can but let them do the crying.”
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“Oh, those wonder-filled evenings when acting enables me for a short moment to have more life.”
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“One of the things I like about my profession, and that I find healthy, is that one constantly has to break oneself to pieces. Wounds do not have a chance to fester.”
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“Life experiences become acting experiences, which in turn become life experiences.”
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“I've always wanted two lives — one for the movies, one for myself.”
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“In a theater you can fool everyone past the tenth row if you're good, but on the screen you can't really fool anyone for a second.”
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“... other artists — poets, painters, sculptors, musicians — produce something which lives after them and enshrines their memories in positive evidences of their divine mission; but we, — we strut and fret our hour upon the stage, and then the curtain falls and all is darkness and silence.”
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“[At age 6, touching her eyelashes and asking the director about her crying scene:] Do you want tears just to here, or do you want all-the-way-down tears?”
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“I'm less confident now than I've ever been. In this peculiar craft, confidence is something you spend a lifetime losing. I used to be frightened only one night a week but now I'm frightened of every performance. I mean really frightened.”
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“If, as an actor, you allow yourself to be cocooned from the boring pin-pricks of day-to-day existence — like standing in a queue at the butcher's or any of the other dreary little events that we all have in our daily lives — you begin to lose your lifeline to what people are. And if you lose that, you eventually lose the ability to act.”
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“... comedy ... is much harder to do than drama. It's not true that laugh and the world laughs with you. It's very hard to make a group of people laugh at the same thing; much easier to make them cry at the same thing. ... That's why great comic acting is probably the greatest acting there is.”
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“The good writer and the good actor are always searching for what is essential. It is a never-ending task because what is essential is always elusive and, therefore, fascinating.”
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“Being an actress has something in common with being a housewife. They both look terribly easy to someone who hasn't done them. And the easier it looks, probably the better you are doing your job.”
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“Acting is not about dressing up. Acting is about stripping bare. The whole essence of learning lines is to forget them so you can make them sound like you thought of them that instant.”
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“There are very few persons who would think of inquiring into the private life of the newspaper dealer at the corner, or the druggist, or the doctor, or even a Mah Jong partner, but the moment one belongs to the theatrical profession, the public usually feels cheated unless it knows one's inmost thoughts of love.”
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“If audiences like you, you don't have to be an actress.”
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“I've made so many movies playing a hooker that they don't pay me in the regular way any more. They leave it on the dresser.”
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“On the stage you try to act real. On the screen you try to be real.”
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“I never go out unless I look like Joan Crawford the movie star. If you want to see the girl next door, go next door.”
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“Well, we can skip childhood because I didn't have any. Not one goddam moment on the Good Ship Lollipop.”
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“... we even believed our own publicity.”
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“We were so totally owned by the studio we could have had 'Property of MGM' tattoed on our backsides without raising the slightest objection.”
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“I didn't know the odds were so stacked against me. I went for TV shows and never got them. But I kept glued to the pursuit. I was the biggest fool in town, but ultimately I was the biggest fool in town with a job.”
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“I wouldn't do nudity in films. To act with my clothes on is a performance; to act with my clothes off is a documentary.”
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“[On Lisa Kudrow:] She's like the best kind of jazz there is. You don't know what note she's going to hit and it's always a surprise.”
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“Acting is standing up naked and turning around very slowly.”
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“[To reporter who telephoned with news of her Oscar:] If you are joking me, I will get up immediately and kill you wherever you are.”
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“The best role is always ahead.”
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“Being a sex symbol has to do with an attitude, not looks. Most men think it's looks, most women know otherwise.”
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“... customary interruptions are not only gratifying and cheering, but they are also really necessary in order to gain breath and voice to carry one on through some violent exertions; though after all it must be confessed that silence is the most flattering applause an Actor can receive.”
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“I want only dead actors. That way there'll be no jealousy.”
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“[On Marilyn Monroe:] I think my response to her death was the common one: it came to me with the impact of a personal deprivation but I also felt it as I might a catastrophe in history or in nature; there was less in life, there was less of life, because she had ceased to exist. In her loss life itself had been injured.”
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“Acting requires absorption, but not self-absorption and, in the actor's mind, the question must always be 'Why am I doing this?,' not 'How am I doing it?'”
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“I had to learn that a good actor, like an iceberg, reveals only a small part of his ability on the surface. You suggest; you don't serve on a platter. You hold back. You don't expose it all to view. That's the way to put the audience's imagination to work.”
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“I was born at the age of twelve on a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lot.”
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“I made it as a star dressed. If I haven't got it dressed, I don't want it.”
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“I found out that acting was hell. You spend all your time trying to do what they put people in asylums for.”
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“If I weren't doing what I'm doing now, the actress thing, the star business, if you want to call it that, whatever it is, I'd be in an asylum. I'm sure of it.”
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“[To Lauren Bacall:] Nervous? Why are you nervous? If they could do what you do, they'd be onstage and you out front.”
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“Stage fright, me? Never! I figure if those people out there in the audience could do what I do, they'd be up there on the stage instead of me.”
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“I always say about acting: the audience doesn't come to see you, they come to see themselves. So if you're able to give them an experience where they feel, 'Oh, my gosh, that's me, that's my story, they know!' then you've done your job.”
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“... acting for me was the gospel, the love of the spoken word.”
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“Acting isn't a profession, it's a way of living ...”
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“If a scene isn't well written they'll drop your neckline to fill the void.”
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“The bad thing about being with an actor is that the role he's in stays with him all the time. The good thing about being with an actor — well, I can't think of any good thing.”
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“Acting is a way of living out one's insanity.”
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“I got all the schooling any actress needs — that is, I learned to write well enough to sign contracts.”
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“You know, when I first went into the movies Lionel Barrymore played my grandfather. Later he played my father and finally he played my husband. If he had lived I'm sure I would have played his mother. That's the way it is in Hollywood. The men get younger and the women get older.”
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“I like being very busy. I think that's the definition of stardom, really. It's energy. It really is.”
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“I think it's interesting that when you play a lesbian, people ask you if you're a lesbian, but if you play a serial killer, nobody asks you if you're a serial killer.”
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“I mean, the question actors most often get asked is how they can bear saying the same things over and over again night after night, but God knows the answer to that is, don't we all anyway; might as well get paid for it.”
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“First one works alone through the mind, then before the public through experience.”
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“He adored displays of temperament by his actors, fatuously believing them to be a sign of genuine talent.”
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“... there was no such thing as a small part, only small actors.”
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“Poor old David, thought Nicholas, watching Salieri's valet sidling across the boards with that constipated cringe that afflicts people who loathe acting and are coaxed onto a stage.”
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“Fundamentally I feel that there is as much difference between the stage and the films as between a piano and a violin. Normally you can't become a virtuoso in both.”
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“For an actress to be a success, she must have the face of a Venus, the brains of a Minerva, the grace of Terpsichore, the memory of a Macaulay, the figure of Juno, and the hide of a rhinoceros.”
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“All the things that are negative in me as a person — the incompetence and despair and weakness and pain — are like a gift from God in a performer. If you don't hide them and if you stop lying to yourself about what you are and are not, there is a ring or a tent or a stage where you can take them and use them to make something beautiful.”
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“... maybe a certain amount of narcissism is as essential to an actress as muscles are to a football lineman.”
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“Statistically, it would be insanity to go into the theatre for money. According to the statistics, you should just stay home. The odds are just incredible.”
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“The key to every actor is deep, deep insecurity.”
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“Acting is being susceptible to what is around you, and it's letting it all come in. Acting is a clearing away of everything except what you want and need — and it's wonderful in that way. And when it's right, you're lost in the moment.”
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“Raving mad is quite easy. You just chew up the scenery or something. It's quiet mad that's hard.”
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“Movie actors were outcasts admitted to none of the good clubs, seldom invited into the swank homes — and apartment houses featured signs reading: No dogs, children, or actors!”
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“[On the set of Mommie Dearest, of Faye Dunaway:] Yes, you may enter Miss Dunaway's dressing room, but first you must throw a raw steak in — to divert her attention.”
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“It's much easier to make people cry than to make them laugh.”
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“The stage is actor's country. You have to get your passport stamped every so often or they take away your citizenship.”
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“I give myself to my parts as to a lover. It's the only way.”
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“Acting is not being emotional, but being able to express emotion.”
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“I identify myself as an actor, because I feel like you don't go to the doctress, you go to the doctor; it doesn't matter what the gender is. I think actresses worry about eyelashes and cellulite, and women who are actors worry about the characters we are playing. A separate category is another way of making us a special-interest group.”
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“Acting is like sex. You should just do it and not talk about it.”
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“Acting is the developing of one's own personality, too, you know. That's what the public buys in a star, shall we say, the personality thing.”
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“Every now and then, when you're on stage, you hear the best sound a player can hear. It is a sound you can't get in movies or in television. It is the sound of a wonderful, deep silence that means you've hit them where they live.”
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“Many people with a wild desire to act prove failures on the stage, their inclinations are greater than their powers. Rarely is it the other way ...”
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“I always wanted to be a movie star. I thought it meant being famous and having breakfast in bed. I didn't know you had to be up at 4:00 a.m.”
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“The actor must know that since he, himself, is the instrument, he must play on it to serve the character with the same effortless dexterity with which the violinist makes music on his. Just because he doesn't look like a violin is no reason to assume his techniques should be thought of as less difficult.”
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“More than in the other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic.”
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“Two of an actress's greatest assets are love and pain. A great actress, even a good actress, must have plenty of both in her life.”
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“Being an actor is such a humiliating experience because you are selling yourself to the public, your face, your personality, and that is humiliating. As you get older, it becomes more humiliating because you've got less to sell.”
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“My stage fright gets worse at every performance. During the overture I hope for a theater fire, typhoon, revolution in the Pentagon.”
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“Men still assume I must be like the girl I played in 'Emmanuelle.' John Wayne was never accused of killing people during his free time, but I'm forever stuck with the image of 'Emmanuelle.' The truth is, I should have got an Oscar for that role because I'm nothing like that woman.”
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“If there wasn't something called acting, they would probably hospitalize people like me.”
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“I am an actor; I don't understand actress. You don't call doctors 'doctoresses' or 'doctorettes,' you call them 'doctors.'”
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“An actress can only play a woman. I'm an actor. I can play anything.”
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“As for auditions, there is no solution — it is best to think of them as a form of madness because one can't kill hope and one knows the percentages.”
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“We're harmless megalomaniacs, fanatic in our devotion to a profession which rarely rewards us with a livelihood. Since we court public display we're the foes of privacy. The glass house is our favorite residence.”
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“For acting, darlings, is the world's most perilous trade. Compared with actors, steeple jacks and deep-sea divers lead snug and placid lives.”
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“I detest acting because it is sheer drudgery.”
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“... romance is overrated as a career builder, for it is at the box office and not on the casting couch where one ultimately succeeds. Sex whispers, but money talks.”
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“An actor's life is the shadow of a cloud, the echo of a sound, the memory of a dream, nothing come of nothing. The finest actor does not create, he is but a translator of another man's work.”
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“[On acting with William Charles Macready:] He growls and prowls and roams and foams around the stage, in every direction, like the tiger in his cage, so that I never know which side of me he means to be, and keeps up a perpetual snarling and grumbling so that I never feel sure that he has done and that it is my turn to speak.”
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“[On location in the Mojave desert for endless weeks for Cecil B. DeMille's Ten Commandments:] Who do you have to sleep with to get off this picture?”
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“It is not good for an instrument to be strung too high; and it seems to me that the actor (an instrument of many strings) is constantly tuned up to concert pitch.”
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“As half of a poem lies with the reader, so half of an actor's effects lies with his audience, and often the best half.”
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“Despair is your friend in show business. I don't believe you can act if happiness is your lot. It's the ups that keep you living and the downs that mete out talent.”
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“By the time you know how to act, you're too old to do it.”
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“Acting is the use of human experience with talent added ...”
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“I didn't mind playing a maid the first time, because I thought that was how you got into the business. But after I did the same thing over and over I resented it. I didn't mind being funny but I didn't like being stupid.”
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“Don't use your conscious past. Use your creative imagination to create a past that belongs to your character. I don't want you to be stuck with your own life. It's too little.”
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“You can't be boring. Life is boring. The weather is boring. Actors must not be boring.”
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“There are only three ages for women in Hollywood — Babe, District Attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy.”
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“I knew how third-rate I was. I could actually feel my lack of talent, as if it were cheap clothes I was wearing inside, But, my God, how I wanted to learn, to change, to improve! I didn't want anything else. Not men, not money, not love, but the ability to act.”