Lake Bell Quotes

I worked with an amazing dialect coach named Jill McCullough. We did Skype sessions while I was shooting "No Escape" in Thailand, actually. So three times a week I would have long, two-hour sessions with her just working on the nuance of the accent, which I had had a huge background in because I went to drama school in England for four years.

John Cassavetes was a year ahead of me but we met there. What you do when you are at a school for drama, you do a play as opposed to a final. Anyone who wanted to come could just come. So he came, and I can't remember the name of the play, of course, it was a long time ago.

There is a lot of hype about drama school, I think. If you're an actor in England, that's just the way to get into it but I've been so incredibly lucky in that I was brought up in to it. I still might go to drama school, if I wanted to do theater work, definitely. It's a completely different type of training.

The drama school was in Oxford - and it's funny to think of it, but in those days when I started out the University was nearly all male. And they certainly weren't mixed.

I went to drama school but it was very hard to get work until I was made assistant stage manager.

I dreamt of becoming a ballet dancer. I studied with the Royal Academy of London for 11 years, and that did not pan out, but my love for being on stage was born there. And then, I actually went to drama school in Paris, France. That's where it first started.

I was always quite good with accents - I always had quite a good ear - so from the age of about 13, I used to do a lot of voiceover and dubbing for foreign films.

I've done a few American accents. I've maybe passed a test. But I don't know if it makes things easier or not.

I had the great fortune to work with John Houseman at Juilliard.

Dialect was my biggest fear. So, I spent a long time working with dialect coaches just trying to get American down. I think it's very important and very easy to misinterpret.

I have always loved doing accents. I have lived with my parents in a number of countries, including Italy and Jamaica.

I think drama school really teaches you how to annunciate; you're conscious that people might not understand you if you speak too fast and too Welsh.

I left drama school and went straight into a 10-week film for which I was paid £75 I might say, which for 1962 was one heck of a lot of money.

I grew up doing plays - I went to a stage school after school - and it's always something that I've wanted to do, but, in a weird way, if you do television and film and you didn't go to drama school and don't have a theatrical background, it's hard to get your foot in the door. In the same way that it is for theater actors to get into television and film. There's a weird prejudice that goes both ways.

The headmistress was a very well-respected theater teacher. She taught me what stage left and stage right were, what a director was, and what all these things meant, which was something I had no concept of. She sent me off to drama school, at age 18, and I stayed there for three years. Before I knew it, I was working on a TV show.

When you're at drama school you spend so much time working on amazing texts and analyzing them, digging into them, and figuring out why it happens, why you are being asked to say what you're saying, and what the words mean. But then when you start working, most of the stuff would just fall apart if you subject it to that kind of scrutiny.

I think a lot of people who go to drama school have this ease with the text and they all have five monologues that they know by heart, and I never had that. I've done Chekov and I've done Moliere and I've done classic stuff

I was quite straight-laced. I was quite academic until I was about 14 and then I went to boarding school where I had the opportunity to continue to be very academic, but got less interested in it and became more involved in acting. And then when I was applying for universities I used a couple of places on my UCAS form to apply for drama school without telling anyone... but didn't get into drama school. But that was the most rebellious thing I did.

You don't have to necessarily go down the drama school route, or have connections in the industry. You can just make it.

When I first started out, it was very, very difficult to even get in the room with directors or casting directors because they would see that I hadn't been to drama school and wouldn't want to see me. Now, I feel like it's changing. We have this new generation of a lot of writers, directors and actors who are just breaking through, and they're doing it for the passion.

I went to drama school with John Schwarz and Mike's his younger brother, so he tends to just hang out, that's it. So we're a pretty tight bunch of guys, they do whatever they do and they're my brothers basically.

All the craft skills that I have, I feel like I developed and honed in drama school. It's the most important thing for me.

When I was a freshman in high school, my drama teacher, an incredible, inspirational genius, the guy who got me into acting, he encouraged me to get the lead in a musical. They didn't have any guys.

I used to dance a lot when I was younger. And I didn't want to stop doing it. I auditioned for drama school and then, luckily, I got my first job. There was never really a particular moment, more like moments of "I love this," or scripts that you read, or films that you watch, or plays that you see, that make you want to keep doing it.

I think I have a very strange, hybrid accent, and I've worked very hard to get a solid American accent, which is what I use most of the time.