142 quotes about Acting and Actors



You are not in business to be popular.
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We become actors without realizing it, and actors without wanting to.
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The actors today really need the whip hand. They're so lazy. They haven't got the sense of pride in their profession that the less socially elevated musical comedy and music hall people or acrobats have. The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.
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I don't get acting jobs because of my looks.
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Acting is a matter of giving away secrets.
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For an actress to be a success, she must have the face of 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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The face of Garbo is an Idea, that of Hepburn an Event.
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For the theatre one needs long arms; it is better to have them too long than too short. An artiste with short arms can never, never make a fine gesture.
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To grasp the full significance of life is the actor's duty, to interpret it is his problem, and to express it his dedication.
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Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse. It's a bum's life. The principal benefit acting has afforded me is the money to pay for my psychoanalysis.
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The hardest part has been maintaining a small head -- remaining down to earth. So many people try to make you more than you are. This business has changed a lot of good people and a lot of good families, and I don't want that to happen to me.
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A man who strains himself on the stage is bound, if he is any good, to strain all the people sitting in the stalls.
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One forgets too easily the difference between a man and his image, and that there is none between the sound of his voice on the screen and in real life.
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The actor searches vainly for the sound of a vanished tradition, and critic and audience follow suit. We have lost all sense of ritual and ceremony -- whether it be connected with Christmas, birthdays or funerals -- but the words remain with us and old impulses stir in the marrow. We feel we should have rituals, we should do something about getting them and we blame the artists for not finding them for us. So the artist sometimes attempts to find new rituals with only his imagination as his source: he imitates the outer form of ceremonies, pagan or baroque, unfortunately adding his own trapping -- the result is rarely convincing. And after the years and years of weaker and waterier imitations we now find ourselves rejecting the very notion of a holy stage. It is not the fault of the holy that it has become a middle-class weapon to keep the children good.
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From '86 until the summer of last year, wherever I went, people would say, You would have made a great James Bond! Weren't you going to be James Bond? You should have been, you could have been, you may have been. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. It was like unfinished business in my life. I couldn't say no to it this time around.
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When I was a fireman I was in a lot of burning buildings. It was a great job, the only job I ever had that compares with the thrill of acting. Before going into a fire, there's the same surge of adrenaline you get just before the camera rolls.
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I am acquainted with no immaterial sensuality so delightful as good acting.
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First of all, I choose the great [roles], and if none of these come, I choose the mediocre ones, and if they don't come, I choose the ones that pay the rent.
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Such is an actor's life. We must ride the waves of every film, barfing occasionally, yet maintain our dignity, even as the bulk of our Herculean efforts are keel-hauled before our very eyes. [On filming MacHale's Navy]
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The popularity of that baby-faced boy, who possessed not even the elements of a good actor, was a hallucination in the public mind, and a disgrace to our theatrical history.
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Until Ace Ventura, no actor had considered talking through his ass.
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The most difficult character in comedy is that of the fool, and he must be no simpleton that plays that part.
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The basic essential of a great actor is that he loves himself in acting.
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Actors search for rejection. If they don't get it they reject themselves.
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When an actor has money, he doesn't send letters, but telegrams.
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An actor is only merchandise.
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I really think that effective acting has to do literally with the movement of molecules.
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To see him act is like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning.
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Celebrity is death --- celebrity -- that's the worst thing that can happen to an actor.
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I am the Fred Astaire of karate.
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Somebody told me I should put a pebble in my mouth to cure my stuttering. Well, I tried it, and during a scene I swallowed the pebble. That was the end of that.
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You name it and I've done it. I'd like to say I did it my way. But that line, I'm afraid, belongs to someone else.
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The real actor has a direct line to the collective heart.
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I have often seen an actor laugh off the stage, but I don't remember ever having seen one weep.
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Some scenes you juggle two balls, some scenes you juggle three balls, some scenes you can juggle five balls. The key is always to speak in your own voice. Speak the truth. That's Acting 101. Then you start putting layers on top of that. [On his acting techniques]
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I'd prefer not to be the pretty thing in a film. It's such a bloody responsibility to look cute, because people know when you don't and they're like, They're trying to pass her off as the cute girl and she's looking like a bedraggled sack of potatoes.
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I find myself fascinating.
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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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Acting doesn't bring anything to a text. On the contrary, it detracts from it.
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She represents the un-vowed aspiration of the male human being, his potential infidelity -- and infidelity of a very special kind, which would lead him to the opposite of his wife, to the woman of wax whom he could model at will, make and unmake in any way he wished, even unto death.
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Mr. Clarke played the King all evening as though under constant fear that someone else was about to play the Ace.
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Show me a great actor and I'll show you a lousy husband. Show me a great actress, and you've seen the devil.
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The great actors are the luminous ones. They are the great conductors of the stage.
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The best actors do not let the wheels show.
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A good many dramatic situations begin with screaming.
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You spend all your life trying to do something they put people in asylums for.
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I'm an assistant storyteller. It's like being a waiter or a gas-station attendant, but I'm waiting on six million people a week, if I'm lucky. [On being an actor]
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The actor's popularity is evanescent; applauded today, forgotten tomorrow.
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I was born at the age of twelve on a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lot.
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If you have to be in a soap opera try not to get the worst role.
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An actor is a guy who, if you ain't talking about him, he ain't listening.
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Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.
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Acting is happy agony.
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More than in any 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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Acting on a good idea is better than just having a good idea.
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A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar -- you pretend it's not there.
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They are the only honest hypocrites, their life is a voluntary dream, a studied madness.
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We must overact our part in some measure, in order to produce any effect at all.
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They are, as it were, train-bearers in the pageant of life, and hold a glass up to humanity, frailer than itself. We see ourselves at second-hand in them: they show us all that we are, all that we wish to be, and all that we dread to be. What brings the resemblance nearer is, that, as they imitate us, we, in our turn, imitate them. There is no class of society whom so many persons regard with affection as actors.
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Acting is the perfect idiot's profession.
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The most minor gifts and not a very high class way to earn a living. After all, Shirley Temple could do it at the age of four.
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It's a business you go into because your an egocentric. It's a very embarrassing profession.
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If you give an audience a chance they will do half your acting for you.
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I never said all actors are cattle, what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle.
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You reach a point where you say you're not going to do juveniles any longer.
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I have tried to be as eclectic as I possibly can with my professional life, and so far it's been pretty fun.
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Talk to them about things they don't know. Try to give them an inferiority complex. If the actress is beautiful, screw her. If she isn't, present her with a valuable painting she will not understand. If they insist on being boring, kick their asses or twist their noses. And that's about all there is to it.
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Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation. It is the rarest thing to find a player who has not had his character affected for the worse by the practice of his profession. Nobody can make a habit of self-exhibition, nobody can exploit his personality for the sake of exercising a kind of hypnotic power over others, and remain untouched by the process.
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Actors often behave like children, and so we're taken for children. I want to be grown up.
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In civilized life, where the happiness and indeed almost the existence of man, depends on the opinion of his fellow men. He is constantly acting a studied part.
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Acting provides the fulfillment of never being fulfilled. You're never as good as you'd like to be. So there's always something to hope for.
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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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I want to do a musical movie. Like Evita, but with good music.
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An agent is a person who is sore because an actor gets 90% of what they make.
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Players, Sir! I look on them as no better than creatures set upon tables and joint stools to make faces and produce laughter, like dancing dogs.
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Actors are loved because they are unoriginal. Actors stick to their script. The unoriginal man is loved by the mediocrity because this kind of artistic expression is something to which the merest five-eighth can climb.
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I think every American actor wants to be a movie star. But I never wanted to do stupid movies, I wanted to do films. I vowed I would never do a commercial, nor would I do a soap opera -- both of which I did as soon as I left the [Acting] Company and was starving.
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I just stopped playing bitches on wheels and peoples' mothers. I have only a few more years to kick up my heels!
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I was sitting in the looping studio late one night, and I had this epiphany that they weren't paying me for my acting, for God's sake, but to own me. And from then on, it became clear and an awful lot easier to deal with.
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I don't do T & A very well because I haven't got much of either.
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The thing about performance, even if it's only an illusion, is that it is a celebration of the fact that we do contain within ourselves infinite possibilities.
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