Lilli Palmer Quotes

A discerning eye needs only a hint, and understatement leaves the imagination free to build its own elaborations.

An actor should be able to create the universe in the palm of his hand.

Actors are able to trick themselves into treating anything as if it's fantastic. It's a kind of madness really.

That was the beginning of modern acting for me. You don't have to tell a camera everything. It gets bored if you do and wants to look elsewhere.

I trained as a theater actor and you had a bare stage and you had to pretend, one prop and you are in the middle of 8th Ave. and traffic is just going by.

Actors, after all, dream.

A lot of actors, whatever movie you're working on, you make up a back story just for your own, to work off, even if the audience doesn't have it revealed to them. I think it's important that the audience makes up their own mind.

As an actor, the only thing you have is your instinct and your imagination.

By attracting attention to yourself, you distract people from the movie. Ideally, you like a movie to speak for itself. You don't describe a song before you sing it or tell about a painting before you show it. You don't reveal the recipe before you serve the dish. You taste it.

There were a couple times with close-ups where I tended to overact. I would use more of my face than I needed to. I learned how to be more subtle.

The thing I don't want to do as a film composer is reiterate. I prefer to subtextualize or to underline rather than to say, 'This is what you should be feeling.'

A true masterpiece does not tell everything.

Acting is bad acting if the actor himself gets emotional in the act of making the audience cry. The object is to make the audience cry, but not cry yourself. The emotion has to be inside the actor, not outside. If you stand there weeping and wailing, all your emotions will go down your shirt and nothing will go out to your audience. Audience control is really about the actor

One can never produce anything as terrible and impressive as one can awesomely hint about.

I'm someone who started in the theater and really couldn't stand repeating the show. My favorite part of acting is the five or six weeks of rehearsal that you get. I like doing previews; I like the opening week because my friends and family come, and then after that, I don't want to do it anymore.

I probably became an actor because of my vivid imagination, and doing voice-over really sort of takes me back to that.

Film has become a very passive experience, but with theatre, there is a contract made with the audience, where they participate. That's why my parents' puppet theatre was such a special place - people used their imaginations. It's a muscle that needs using.

Ultimately, we're actors: I'm putting on a costume, so we're playing pretend.

When you're even on a regular movie set, you still have to suspend your disbelief. You're working there with only 3 walls of a room, and you're in costume, and you have a camera 6 inches from you and have a crew of 75 watching you. So even there, you have to crank up your imagination.

Actors incorporate certain emotions from our own lives in order to create characters, and emotions come from experience.

Any actor worth his salt is looking for truth, the core of truth of the particular situation he is portraying, of that play. The playwright, the actors and the audience, that's what we're all there seeking. When it's working, time is destroyed. Sometimes 'Moon,' a play of four hours, would go by in a snap of the fingers.

To give a successful character portrayal on stage or on film, the part has to be played inside of you.

Acting is a symbiotic process, it is an amalgamation of many many things put together and when there is a call for action, that's when you surrender and the moment of truth comes out, that's when you perform. That is the process for every good actor.

Anytime I feel like I am beginning to explain the plot or characters too much my stomach churns. I like stories that let the characters speak for themselves and don't give you all the information.

I love reading and learning. With acting, I get to put all that into my work and still get to do my homework and imagine I can do all these different jobs.