William Shakespeare Quotes

One time, I had to do Edgar in 'King Lear' and Owl in 'Winnie the Pooh' on the same day.

I am really not of the school of naturalism. I like style, and you can use more style in theater than in film roles. I love to sink my teeth into a part.

I never thought I'd be right to play a Juliet-like character.

The only time I've played a real baddy was when I was Regan in 'King Lear.'

I was not the young heroic model for 'Hamlet.' I tended to play those characters that orbited around them: the rogues and the rat bags and the idiots and the fools and the clowns that sway the plot somehow from a tangent.

I love the wilder, more outlandish characters that are hard to make believable. Those are the ones I want to play.

I love David Suchet. I'm obsessed with Poirot. Then I saw him in 'The Importance of Being Earnest,' where he did Lady Bracknell, and he was amazing - he did it like a dinosaur, like a velociraptor.

Playing Mark Antony in Julius Caesar was the most thrilling thing I've done. You get these speeches that were written for men, and you're running around like an action hero, climbing scaffolding and beating people up. It was very freeing.

I remember one play [when I was kid] was about this murderous mad scientist, and my whole part was to be the guy who got thrown into a vat of acid as the curtain went up. I was very pissed off at these older kids; they'd outsmarted me.

There's something really incredible about watching what someone else does with a role that we know: the Hamlets or the Henry Vs or the Othellos or the Cleopatras that we've seen on stage.

Yul Brynner's performance in "The King and I," . . . can no longer be regarded as a feat of acting or even endurance. After 30-odd . . . Mr Brynner is, quite simply, The King.

I always wanted to do dramas. Ever since I was young, I wanted to be in a role where I could play a prostitute or a drug addict, because it's nice to be able to portray someone who is so far from you, which I love.

One particular night I was at the theater. I was not scouting for a project, but I was touched by this play by Évelyne de la Chenelière. I was touched by the character. I thought it was a rich character that could be rich enough for a movie.

I changed my major to English and I went off to Fort Collins. And within the first couple of weeks, I noticed that they were having auditions for a production in their theater department. They were going to stage Jean Anouilh's Becket, which was a film I loved, with Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton. So I went down and auditioned, and I got the role. I got the Peter O'Toole part. So here I was, a 19-year-old playing King Henry.

I've always been an actress, entertaining my family was the start. I'm a goof ball among many of my cousins and siblings.

At first I thought I would have to put on an English accent and try a sort of affected Shakespeare thing.

Remember that you are an actor in a play, and that the Playwright chooses the manner of it: If he wants you to act a poor man you must act the part with all your powers; and so if your part be a cripple or a magistrate or a plain man. For your business is to act the character that is given you and act it well. The choice of the cast is Another's.

I could never have thought, "I wanna play a two-headed woman." That just never would have occurred to me, in a million years.

Movie acting is harder than doing a play. You have to be entertaining but completely natural, like Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant. They weren't doing anything. Do you have any idea how hard that is? That's how good they were. It's crazy hard to be convincing and real. It's the most subtle, hardest thing there is.

Sort of what you do in drama school when asked to play something way out of your reach. Anyway, we used to laugh a lot about that. I used to say I'm not going to act old, Penelope. I'll just be myself.

Acting is hard work. At times, it's very energizing and enervating. It's childish. It's also responsible. It's illuminating, enriching, joyful, drab. It's bizarre, diabolical. It's exciting.

All actors are whores. They want only one thing: to seduce you.

[Reviewing a production of Uncle Tom's Cabin] The dogs were poorly supported by the cast.

Central to being an actor is pretending, and the adventure of it all. That's why you become a junkie for different kinds of situations.

It was the challenge of that that I found daunting, but also engaging and interesting [to play Maigret].