It took me two years to walk around a chair with ease; it took me another two years to learn how to laugh onstage - and I had to learn everything.
Laurence OlivierRead
What is the main problem of the actor? It is to keep the audience awake, and not let them go to sleep, then wake up and go home feeling they've wasted their money.
Interpretation
An actor's primary challenge is to engage the audience throughout a performance.
Laurence Olivier highlights the fundamental responsibility of an actor, which is to captivate the audience's attention and ensure they are fully immersed in the performance. If an audience becomes disengaged, it can lead to dissatisfaction, making them feel that their time and money have been wasted. This emphasizes the importance of skillful acting and storytelling in the realm of performance art.
In practice
A theater director might share this quote while discussing the importance of engagement in a rehearsal.
It took me two years to walk around a chair with ease; it took me another two years to learn how to laugh onstage - and I had to learn everything.
Work is life for me, it is the only point of life - and with it there is almost religious belief that service is everything.
I don't know what is better than the work that is given to the actor - to teach the human heart the knowledge of itself.
Acting is an everlasting search for truth.
I'd like people to remember me for a diligent expert workman. I think a poet is a workman. I think Shakespeare was a workman. And God's a workman. I don't think there's anything better than a workman.
Nine books have been written about me, and there's not a word of truth in any of them.
The artist is the hand that, by touching this or that key, sets the soul vibrating automatically.
Man is made to create, from the poet to the potter.
If I create with my heart almost all my intentions remain. If it is with the head - almost nothing. An artist must not fear to be himself, to express only himself. If he is absolutely and entirely sincere, what he says and does will be acceptable to others.
We do not make photographs with our cameras. We make them with our minds, with our hearts, with our ideas.
In many ways, my entire graphic novel career was a long diversion. Originally, all I wanted to do was to be an underground cartoonist and maybe bring out a groovy underground mag.
My first poem was a bolt from the blue … it broke a spell of disillusion and suicidal despondence. ... it filled me with soul satisfying joy.
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