Quotes on Actors

An act cannot be defined by the end sought by the actor, for an identical system of behaviour may be adjustable to too many different ends without altering its nature.

If you write interesting roles, you get interesting people to play them. If you write roles that are full of nuance and contradiction and have interesting dialog, actors are drawn to that.

It is very, very, very difficult for an American actor who wants a film career to be open about his sexuality. And even more difficult for a woman if she's lesbian. It`s very distressing to me that that should be the case. The film industry is very old fashioned in California.

Yes, I can play younger than my age. But I can play characters older than I am, too. I'm not an actor who can just play the kid.

A director must push his actors to the utmost limit to get everything possible out of each scene - without being corny or sentimental or going overboard.

We discover that we do not know our role; we look for a mirror; we want to remove our make-up and take off what is false and real. But somewhere a piece of disguise that we forgot still sticks to us. A trace of exaggeration remains in our eyebrows; we do not notice that the corners of our mouth are bent. And so we walk around, a mockery and a mere half: neither having achieved being nor actors.

All these actors who died before I was born, all the theaters and the artistic movements - all that stuff fills you up and makes you feel like you're the inheritor of all this information and of all its passion.

There's this little box that African-American actors have to work in, in the first place, and I was able to rise above that box. I could have done a bunch of movies where I stayed as the Axel Foley or Reggie Hammond persona. But I didn't want to be doing the same thing all the time. Every now and then, you crash and burn, but that's part of it.

The first work of the director is to set a mood so that the actor's work can take place, so that the actor can create. And in order to do that, you have to communicate, communicate with the actors. And direction is about communication on all levels.

You can't just tell actors, especially young ones, to 'act happy' and expect them to do it. They must in some essential way be happy.

It was an accident, although I've been involved in some kind of theatrical function or other since I was a child - in school, music, athletics. To me, acting is the most logical way for people's neuroses to manifest themselves, in this great need we all have to express ourselves. To my way of thinking, an actor's course is set even before he's out of the cradle.

Listen, acting is not surgery, it's entertainment. You're doing something to hopefully move people, to make them laugh, to transport them. But actors are vulnerable, and the reason we're vulnerable is that we're always trying to recreate human behaviour.

I got knockback after knockback at auditions. Just before ‘Mulholland Dr.’ my agent told me I was so intense I was freaking people out. She told me I was a brilliant actor but the feedback was that I made people feel uncomfortable because I was so nervous and intense. I just sat there and blubbed. My mum was staying in LA at the time and I went to her and said: ‘I just can’t do this. I’m not cut out for it.’ She just said: ‘Don’t believe a word people say about you. Forget them.’

Actors are agents of change. A film, a piece of theater, a piece of music, or a book can make a difference. It can change the world.

The ideas of the great playwrights are almost always larger than the experiences of even the best actors.

If the scene bores you when you read it, rest assured it WILL bore the actors, and will then bore the audience, and we're all going to be back in the breadline.

An Actor is an interpreter of other men's words, often a soul which wishes to reveal itself to the world but dare not, a craftsman, a bag of tricks, a vanity bag, a cool observer of mankind, a child and at his best a kind of unfrocked priest who, for an hour or two, can call on heaven and hell to mesmerize a group of innocents.

My kind of director is an actor-director who writes.

Getting sober was one of the three pivotal events in my life, along with becoming an actor and having a child. Of the three, finding my sobriety was the hardest thing.

I am the luckiest old broad on two feet if the truth were known. It's - but it all goes back to 'Mary Tyler Moore,' 'Golden Girls,' all those - actors love to take the credit. We couldn't do it without the writers.

Some of the most intense affairs are between actors and characters. There's a fire in the human heart and we jump into it with the same obsession as we have with our lovers.