Barbara Rosenblat Quotes

I know there's been a lot that's been said about animated voice work, as though it's 'you can do this in your jeans and there's no camera and no pressure there. It's no big deal. It's easy.' The truth is, it's really a great test: how deep is your ability is to access your imagination?

American actors who voice animated movies are so brilliant at it, because by the nature of American speak, it's full of energy and full of commitment. And as a British actor, we have to kind of learn that.

I always enjoy impersonating my characters in the first-person singular.

To me the voice has always been the way to start any character. Once I find that, I'm good to go.

The thing with being able to do accents is that it's still completely separate from being an actor.

The voice is always the starting place for me with a character.

The way a character sounds is so important to how you're going to play him.

An actor's job is to find variations of the same emotion in his being so that every time he expresses grief or joy, it doesn't look the same.

Voice acting is very interesting, I've done several animated projects, and you have to make the voice reflect the character and try and do as much with a word as you can with a look in a live-action film.

With voice overs... you're not thinking about the camera. So your voice becomes this thing that you can manipulate. And depending on the character you're doing, it's all concentration on your voice.

I had to change the shape of my own voice. It was quite hard to pull off and so once I had it, I stayed in Hitchcock's voice all day on set.

You don't have a face to work with, so your voice has to do all the work until you see the animation. So, a lot of it I had to pull back because it was too big.

I think singing and acting go hand in hand. Take an R&B singer: one song says, 'I love you,' the next is, 'Baby, don't leave me', the next is, 'If you leave me I don't care.' You have to drop in and out of different perspectives.

My dream role would be someone anything that Meryl Streep can do. 'Julia and Julia' - I thought that was beautiful. She just had the essence of her. To truly become someone, invoking emotions like happiness and sadness and everything in between, that's what I want to be able to do.

How do I act so well? What I do is I pretend to be the person I'm portraying in the film or play.

I have always like doing accents; I find it much easier to get into character for me.

I used to love watching Angela Lansbury and other people when they were doing voice-overs for Disney shows. You'd see them doing these wild gestures in front of the microphone. I used to think, 'Is that really necessary?' What you realize when you're doing it is that that's the only way.

Doing voices is like singing and remembering songs.

You've got to bring yourself to any character you do.

Doing voiceover is so much fun because you can play with the lines as much as you want. You can put a whole bunch of energy into it, jump up and down, whatever you got to do.

As an actor, it's important to feel for the character, as you will be watched by audience, and when you start feeling your character, you share a sense of happiness and achievement.

I would absolutely love to do something with Viola Davis or Meryl Streep. I just think both of those women fall so deep into their characters that you are no longer looking at the actresses, you are looking at the characters they embraced.

An accent always helps me ground a character. It also helps to remind me what age I'm playing.

The number one job of an actor is to be a character and never let the acting show.

I feel it's very important for an actor to believe in the character that he/she is playing and do full justice to it in order to convince others that you are the character you are portraying.