Acting School Quotes

#1. If I could go back to my first year of acting school, I'd probably say: 'Relax. Stop taking yourself so seriously.'

Seth Numrich

#2. I didn't go to film school, I went to acting school.

Charles S. Dutton

#3. At acting school people didn't speak like me. It was all received pronunciation - 'ow now brown cow.'

Ray Winstone

#4. I grew up in Bellport, Long Island where I attended Gateway Acting School and met Robin Allan. She was the school's director who took me under her wing and was the one who told me that I could do this for real.

Brendan Dooling

#5. I've never gone to acting school and I never will, so I'm learning about the business from the people who are in the business. It doesn't seem like I work at all. And the unknown is always exciting.

Jonathan Rhys Meyers

#6. I went to acting school, but only for nine months. If you're an actor, you know, don't really need to learn how to do it.

Patrick Macnee

#7. I've done 480-odd films, have my own acting school, won awards, etc. and now host a successful TV chat show - what else can I ask for? Yes, of course, every journey has its ups and downs, but that's part of life.

Anupam Kher

#8. After going to theater school, and then subsequently dropping out, I would say that when I first went to Chicago and learned long-form improv, that was a far better acting workshop than any acting school I've been to.

Thomas Middleditch

#9. I've been to acting school and I think that at the end of the day, when you just focus on the work and you're comfortable with who you are, that at some point someone's going to recognize your talent and give you an opportunity.

Viola Davis

#10. I didn't grow up wanting to be an actor, and I didn't go to acting school.

Paul Schneider

#11. I went to a dentist for a toothache, and it turned out his kids were in an acting school. We talked about it, and I decided to enroll at the same school. I was 14. I guess you could say I just got lucky.

Nolan Gerard Funk

#12. To be at acting school, it was kind of the first time you felt the freedom to be as much of yourself as you wanted. People weren't going to judge you.

Michael Imperioli

#13. I went to acting school in New York City for two years. I studied with Stella Adler.

Judd Nelson

#14. I never went to acting school. I started in the circus, music hall, I was in a group, did kids' bits. I've always had this kind of insecurity being uneducated.

Rupert Graves

#15. I never went to school. I never went to acting school because I was so scared.

Ursula Andress

#16. I'm not someone who went to acting school - I was just out of the gate, doing it.

Natasha Lyonne

#17. I'd had an early stint in acting school, and there was something satisfying about becoming a character, about being inside another mind that you had to create out of yourself. As I moved toward a life in writing, I found many of the things I'd learned in acting school still applied.

Michael Redhill

#18. I did theatre a lot when I was a kid. Then I went to acting school in New York. I did a lot of behind the scenes in college. I wanted to learn while I had the time. I studied theatre and film in different capacities.

Justin Bartha

#19. You know, back in acting school they always teach you, 'Make bold choices and look for activities that are interesting.'

Mickey Rourke

#20. The government gave me enough money to go to acting school.

Tony Curtis

#21. Sometimes when I'm not working, I go and teach at an acting school, and quite selfishly, that makes me feel more inspired to do things myself.

Chris Geere

#22. Somebody said something really smart: It's like you end up being the defense attorney for your role. Your job is to defend their point of view. You're fighting for what they want. You learn that in acting school - it's Acting 1A: 'What do you want? What's in the way?'

Annette Bening

#23. Clark Gable once said to me, "'Acting school?' [If you go,] I'll kill ya!"

Mickey Rooney

#24. A big moment for me was when I did a play that was a new adaptation of Dostojevskij's 'Crime and Punishment,' and I played Raskolnikov. It was actually the first thing I did when I got out of acting school.

Joel Kinnaman

#25. I wanted to go to acting school, and I did a few modeling jobs to pay for acting school. I never aspired to be a model. I met lots of photographers, and I learned a lot about light - as a source of love and illumination, light as a gift of love. On film, that's a massive contribution.

Jacqueline Bisset

#26. I never went to acting school, so improv was my training. Just being quick on your feet helps in everyday life.

Ben Schwartz

#27. I loved getting classical training in terms of acting. I would've stayed in acting school for the rest of my life if I could have. It was this amazing period of my life where everything was so safe.

Dane DeHaan

#28. I've been training as an actor for six years. Nobody goes to acting school for six years. I mean, the college course is only four years! I absolutely trained.

LL Cool J

#29. I knew, starting in 10th grade, I wanted to be in theater and an actor. I went to acting school in Siberia, but there was no future there - and I was consumed with ambition.

Andrey Zvyagintsev

#30. I learned a lot of good things in my school. I've audited a lot of other schools, and I guess after a while I got a little tired of the acting school atmosphere.

James Franco

#31. I didn't go to acting school.

Justin Chatwin

#32. To be a great actor, you really don't need to go to acting school or learn dance classes or work on your body. You have to be intelligent. You have to draw on a lot of emotions that you go through in life that you can tap into once you work on a set.

Ranbir Kapoor

#33. Two young actresses I admire are Emma Stone and Emma Watson, because they are intelligent, talented actresses and have a great sense of humor. They have learned to balance what they love in life - acting, school and everything else.

Kara Hayward

#34. Jim Dean and Elvis were the spokesmen for an entire generation. When I was in acting school in New York, years ago, there was a saying that if Marlon Brando changed the way people acted, then James Dean changed the way people lived. He was the greatest actor who ever lived. He was simply a genius.

Martin Sheen

#35. I got involved with an acting school and studied for a couple years. They used to have improv exercises that you would work on and you would do improvs.

Barry Levinson

#36. Growing up in Sweden, I decided pretty early on that I wanted to go to acting school.

Helena Mattsson

#37. Once, Naseeruddin Shah told me that the wafer shop was the best acting school that I could have attended. And I completely agree. I observed every customer very minutely and picked up some quirk or the other. Later, I used those experiences while playing different characters.

Boman Irani

#38. I didn't know how capable I was until the people around me in acting school would say I was good.

Jason Mitchell

#39. I started going to acting school in my senior year in high school, and I remained in acting school through four years of college.

Dane DeHaan

#40. I started going to acting school when I was 14, and I would always have my own take on things.

Barbra Streisand

#41. I didn't go to acting school, but I've been observing my fellow man for 66 years now, and I would think that's the best school there is.

Wilford Brimley

#42. I was an amazing bartender and a great waiter. I think, in a way, that was my acting school.

Nick Frost

#43. I grew up in a financially insecure place because I knew that my parents were following their dreams which has pros and cons. It was actually my mom who encouraged me to go to acting school because I was really afraid to put all my eggs in that basket.

Zoe Lister-Jones

#44. My background is a small town with no movie theater. So ... I always pictured myself onstage. I went to acting school and learned all the skills. I left early because I did my first movie and discovered that I really loved the minimalistic work with the camera.

Franka Potente

#45. I had spent my childhood making up adventures in my head. Then I realized when I went to acting school that there were adventures written down, and you could learn lines, and you could do the adventures for real, not just in your head.

Nancy Marchand

#46. I talk about race a lot. It's been my work ever since I came out of acting school. But it's true that in a way talking about race is a taboo. Because so many of our debates about race have to do not with race but with what we are willing to see, what we will not see and what we don't want to see.

Anna Deavere Smith

#47. I've been very blessed, I think, or what do you call it ... mmm ... lucky to get at this stage what I have. It's not like I've come from acting school and done work at an academy or something. I feel I've been given a very huge chance and opportunity.

Katrina Kaif

#48. The thing about me is I have a great little acting school. I teach about 125 students.

Luke Ford

#49. I mean, the acting school I went to, we did have a social experience, but you know, when it's a bunch of actors, it's everyone self-consciously having a social experience rather than just having a social experience.

Adam Scott

#50. Twelve to 15 years of acting school, and I am being a bird.

Joe Pantoliano

#51. Coming from theater, and having been to acting school, and done little, small Australian independent movies, a lot of the time, it's always about character.

Jacqueline McKenzie

#52. I was going to be in an acting school in London, and then I promptly got thrown out of an acting school in London. Well, it wasn't that I got thrown out as much as I was not invited back, which is the same thing, just more polite.

Chris Eigeman

#53. I'd never been to acting school, so I never thought I'd get this far.

John Ratzenberger

#54. I was failed in all other aspects of filmmaking and was completely bankrupt because my dreams were higher than realities. So I started my acting school in a small room with 12 students to prepare future actors and actresses.

Anupam Kher

#55. It was always my intention to direct. I went to film school. And then I wanted to know how to work with actors, so I went to acting school. And then by the end of that, I caught the bug.

Benn Northover

#56. Through theater and acting school, I found a way to articulate myself.

Adam Driver

#57. When I got out of acting school, I was lucky to have gotten any job at all. A lot of people hiring African American actresses - it was right after 'Roots,' and for society, not me, it was great. Nice richly dark-skinned people was the fashion, and I was not.

Anna Deavere Smith

#58. It's so funny, you go to acting school thinking you're going to learn how to be other people, but really it taught me how to be myself. Because it's in understanding yourself deeply that you can lend yourself to another person's circumstances and another person's experience.

Lupita Nyong'o

#59. She didn't need to go to acting school to learn that the essence of acting is to act like you're not acting.

George Burns

#60. I'm just looking for things to steal [on working with great actors]. It's like going back to acting school. When you're around people that do it well and you get your head out of your ass, you can really learn something.

Benjamin Walker

#61. Drama school, you know, I own an acting school, Actor Prepares.

Anupam Kher

#62. Acting school was summer camp, and I needed concentration camp. I had so many different ideas swirling between culture and how to tie things together.

Ajay Naidu

#63. There's a whole catalogue of actors that never went to acting school.

Dennis Farina

#64. I didn't go to acting school, so it was great to be able to rehearse for a month or two, to workshop, and be with a director who even gave me acting exercises.

Charlotte Gainsbourg

#65. When I went to acting school, the kids that got the best grades were the kids that could cry on cue. But it didn't really translate into careers for any of them, because the external is the easy part.

Albert Brooks

#66. I like working one-on-one with someone, and I think that to go to a school of acting isn't really my thing.

Stella Maeve

#67. Acting and singing were just a hobby, but getting into drama school made me realise I could actually do it for a living.

Birgitte Hjort Sorensen

#68. I went to drama school at NYU for serious acting. So I was doing Chekov and Sam Shepard plays.

Casey Wilson

#69. I left the Gaiety School of Acting in Dublin in 2004, and I did five years of theater after that.

Aidan Turner

#70. With big, emotional roles it's very easy, especially if you've grown up in the American school of acting, to exploit your own pain. You have to be careful about that, because 9 times out of 10, your pain is not appropriate to the character.

Laura Linney

#71. I only took a high school acting class because there was no other class I wanted to take. I loved it, but I was always against acting as a profession. I didn't like the monetary fluctuations I saw.

Josh Brolin

#72. I always enjoyed writing. I did playlets in high school, I did radio shows in college. That's one of the reasons I went down to Second City, because you could do acting and writing.

Dan Castellaneta

#73. It was easy for me to leave acting for school, because I wasn't really in it as an adolescent for fulfilling reasons.

Anna Chlumsky

#74. I left school and couldn't find acting work, so I started going to clubs where you could do stand-up. I've always improvised, and stand-up was this great release. All of a sudden, it was just me and the audience.

Robin Williams

#75. In high school, my goal was to be a writer for SNL, then I got into the acting.

Illeana Douglas

#76. My parents are the ones who really help me be grounded. I still go to school, I still do fun stuff with my friends; for the most part, I am a normal kid. It just so happens that I do some acting too!

Joshua Rush

#77. High school is just horrible in general. So, I think it was a good time for me to have stopped acting. I got to be normal in high school.

Jodie Sweetin

#78. I was bullied from grade one to six. Even middle school was tough for me. Everyone had these pre-existing friendships, and I was the new kid, who was acting, so that didn't help much either. It was really tough.

Devon Bostick

#79. I've learned by watching films that inspired me and people who inspired me like Robert Redford and Paul Newman. I love old school acting. I love subtlety, and I also love being spontaneous, and that's really what works for me.

Alex Pettyfer

#80. School allowed me to have outlets so that some of the pressure was taken off the acting. Every role in every movie, I used to live or die by. Once I had these new outlets, I relaxed a lot more.

James Franco

#81. 'She's Gotta Have It' and 'School Daze,' I really didn't know what I was doing. And the biggest indicator of that was the acting. 'Do the Right Thing' was like the first film where I really felt comfortable working with actors.

Spike Lee

#82. I can tell that fame is probably the most unadorable thing about acting. High School Musical is what got me here today and I'm very grateful - but the fame part isn't so fun.

Zac Efron

#83. I wouldn't apply myself at school. I was quite bright, but I didn't do much with it, and I thought acting was dressing up and shouting for a living.

Michelle Gomez

#84. The acting training in school was great, but it was mostly fun being young and in New York. Because my upbringing was so transient, New York ended up being my home. I've been living in New York longer than I have anywhere else in my life.

Pedro Pascal

#85. My experiences and training back at drama school were very enlightening. I always believe in improving, be it kathak or my acting skills, and would want to experiment more when it comes to work.

Jiah Khan

#86. Acting still rings my bell as much as it did in high school. Plus, I can now indulge my interests as a producer as well. My work is more fun than fun but, best of all, it's still very scary. You are always walking some kind of high wire.

Tom Hanks

#87. At the end of drama school, I made a contract with myself: I'd try acting for five years. I was 26. I had already spent eight years working in restaurants and gas stations. So I had seen enough small businesses to understand that that's what acting is: a small business.

Hugh Jackman

#88. When I came into the industry I started with acting and I did drama during junior high and high school. I fell into dancing as a hobby, but whenever you need work, you try out different things. So I booked a lot of jobs for dancing and it kept rolling and rolling.

Harry Shum Jr.

#89. I loved doing school musicals [as a kid], I even started at an early age to write little plays for the school to perform. I was not just keen on that, it was during that time, during the school period then from an early age, that I began to dream about acting.

George Ogilvie

#90. I used to spend a lot of time at football training, but that time was later spent in amateur acting classes and my local youth theatre, in plays at school and after-school clubs. That filled the void.

Sam Claflin

#91. Funnily enough, when I was leaving school and they asked you what you were going to do, and I just liked acting, that's never what I would say. I would always say I would go into business, even though I didn't really know what was meant by that.

Kylie Minogue

#92. I dropped out of school and I never took acting classes.

Alice Englert

#93. I've only been acting since 2009 and I learn more and more with each job. I think I prepare and I'm very focused and I have a good work ethic that I learned in school.

Jenny Slate

#94. I have great respect for actors like Jodie Foster and Natalie Portman who went to school the entire time they were acting. All I did was one small little independent film, and I realised I couldn't balance both lives.

Nikki Reed

#95. I make two movies a year to take care of the butcher and the baker and the school fees. Then I try to write, but it's not that easy. Acting is what's easy.

David Niven

#96. I remember having friends in high school that did the theater department stuff, and I always wanted to try it but never had the guts to. I was the class clown but could never really build up the courage to try it. I took one acting class and really enjoyed it.

Robert Buckley

#97. I really love school, but I'd love to continue acting jobs if I can.

Georgie Henley

#98. I joined an acting class in my junior year in high school. I'd always wanted to try it.

Rainn Wilson

#99. I tried acting, liked it, and stuck with it. I saw it as the way I would keep that promise to myself of getting back at those who had made my school life a misery.

Anthony Hopkins

#100. Balancing school, acting, and a social life can be difficult.

Emily Osment