Top 100 Quotes About Acting On Stage
#1. My first love is acting on stage. A sitcom is a hybrid of stage and film.
Judd Nelson
#2. Acting on stage is a living organism you can never pin down, and I believe the audience feeds off that, too.
Hattie Morahan
#3. I mean, you know, while I'm acting on stage I'm ranking quite high, but in a room with Barack Obama I'm probably into negative digits. I never feel very famous ...
David Tennant
#4. Acting for screen is very different from acting on stage, and then obviously when you dance ... everything is a physical embodiment. But the discipline is the same approach. You have to take both things seriously; nothing well-crafted is by mistake.
Amanda Schull
#5. I reenact everything. I love to paint a picture for my audience. I'm a lot like Richard Pryor in that aspect. I do a lot of acting on stage, acting out and visualizing stuff. I love to do that. I'm into it so much, it just comes out of me.
Chris Tucker
#7. There's nothing more fun than acting on stage with a live audience and that immediate feedback.
Mary McCormack
#8. I began acting on stage when I was 7 years old. My first role was as Dorothy in 'The Wizard of Oz' at Chicago's Center on Deafness in Northbrook, Illinois.
Marlee Matlin
#9. We are all acting on stage and the world is our audience.
Antonello Fiore
#10. It was quite strange, because it's quite different from singing, although it's quite natural because you're used to performing or acting on stage.
Charlotte Church
#12. Acting on stage is still my favorite thing to do. And everyone who's been in musicals knows that there is nothing more fun.
Josh Radnor
#13. I'm a fan of making films. Whether I'm on stage or in front of a camera, one of my first loves is performing for the people. I'd like to do more acting.
Busta Rhymes
#14. I grew up in New York, so I fell in love with acting on a stage, not in front of a camera.
Kerry Washington
#15. My mom helped me get started when I was younger. I started with singing. An agent saw me singing on stage at the Palm Springs Festival, and recommended I get into acting, so I was like, 'Oh, okay.' I just started from there, singing and acting.
Vanessa Morgan
#16. On the stage one must not confuse the nature of a personality with the naturalness of a person.
Karl Kraus
#17. On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting, 'Twas only when he was off, he was acting.
Oliver Goldsmith
#18. A man who strains himself on the stage is bound, if he is any good, to strain all the people sitting in the stalls.
Bertolt Brecht
#19. Between 18 and 26 I acted professionally, on the stage and a little bit on television. Acting is okay, but it's quite pressurized. Then I went to England - I wanted to reinvent myself.
Jane Campion
#20. I'm not experienced enough, or certain enough of my acting on the screen to say to a director, "You are wrong, I am right. I will only do it this way." I could never feel that, I wish I could be absolutely certain. But on the stage, it's different. I know where I am on the stage.
Ian McKellen
#21. You've got to love acting and that's true for me. I love the idea of getting on stage and getting in front of a camera.
Warwick Davis
#22. That's what I always enjoyed about acting, the real adrenalin rush. My heart - still before I go on stage - crashing out of my chest. That's thrilling to me.
Billy Crudup
#23. Acting is a sport. On stage you must be ready to move like a tennis player on his toes. Your concentration must be keen, your reflexes sharp; your body and mind are in top gear, the chase is on. Acting is energy. In the theatre people pay to see energy.
Clive Swift
#24. There are moments on stage when everything comes together. Then the kid in the front row coughs.
Connie Brockway
#25. Acting is not as difficult as you may think. People are born natural actors
and play many parts on the stage of life. Everyone is constantly in front of an
audience - or performing monologues when alone.
Bryan Michael Stoller
#26. I ain't acting when I'm on stage. That's why all the little love bugs who'll come and see me at Lovebox love me. They know it's the real me.
Lil' Kim
#27. Acting, to me, is being given the freedom and ability to play, and that's - that's what I love most about it. I feel very comfortable in playing, whether it be in front of a camera or on stage.
David Wenham
#28. I'm too impatient to wait for things to happen to me. If I should be out of work for two months I would go crazy. So as soon as I'm free, I start writing. While it is necessary for me to write, I know that if I go too long without acting on the stage I don't feel well.
Erland Josephson
#29. I attend film school, my background is acting and directing. But the acting does best, I like to work on the stage.
Tommy Wiseau
#30. There was only one elective at my college for acting, but thank God for that elective because we had a great teacher who introduced me to the Meisner technique for acting. Once I read that book, I said, 'Wow, if I could do that and have that honest moment on stage, that would be amazing.'
Nestor Carbonell
#31. I can do everything with ease on the stage, whereas in real life I feel too big and clumsy. So I didn't choose acting. It chose me.
Ingrid Bergman
#32. I never went to stage school or anything like that. It was always plays, productions at school and things like that. The thing for me with acting was it was the only thing I could fully concentrate on. I loved playing sports. I didn't really love studying.
Ed Speleers
#33. There was something strangely naked about it, like we were on a stage set, playing our parts to an audience of eyes out there in the wood.
Ruth Ware
#34. Being on stage is a seductive lifestyle. My advice to aspiring actors is think twice. People sometimes go into acting for the wrong reasons - as a shortcut to fame and fortune. If these goals are not attained, they feel a bitter disappointment.
Chris Sarandon
#35. When I first did 'The Lord of the Rings,' I was acting on the set with the other actors, but then I had to go back and repeat the process on my own to do the physical capture on a motion capture stage.
Andy Serkis
#36. My wife says that stage acting is like being on a tightrope with no net, and being in the movies, there is a net - because you stop and go over it again. It's very technical and mechanical. On stage you're on your own.
Eli Wallach
#37. When I was younger, people used to say you only really prove yourself as an actor on stage. And I disagree with that. Some of the finest acting I've ever come across has been for film.
Clive Owen
#38. There's something about being in a house with an audience, and having that immediate feedback. I started acting because of that energy; it's what feeds me on stage and informs my choices.
Daniel Dae Kim
#39. I think I always knew I was going to somehow be on a stage. I was quite an extrovert, as a child. And I did a lot of music, when I was younger, so I thought I was going to go into music, but I fell into acting, in a really weird way.
Eve Hewson
#40. I learned acting by doing it. And although I had never taken an acting class, it didn't take long to learn how to be on the stage. All you have to do is to be humiliated in front of an audience a few times. If you don't like being humiliated publicly, you learn how to act.
Ron Vawter
#41. In my career, I've had kind of a strange trajectory as an actor. I started out doing movies and theater and stuff, but then I had a terrible problem with stage fright as an actor on stage, and I quit stage acting for a long, long time.
Fred Melamed
#42. 'Johnny' was always a lone wolf when he got on stage. Him against the world, whereas suddenly, when I got into acting, people were relying on me.
Johnny Vegas
#43. On stage I just have to be myself. In acting you have to be so many other people.
Kumail Nanjiani
#44. Ladies and babies, and mortgages, for that matter, can all wait. Acting has done a strange thing to me, though. I often sit there, thinking, 'I love this, but I wouldn't put my daughter on the stage.'
Eddie Redmayne
#45. Whenever I get on stage, I feel safe and in control. Life can be so uncertain, but on stage, I always know how a drama or crisis is going to end. Acting is a great comfort blanket and has gotten me through countless personal crises. I am a firm believer that the show must go on.
Kate O'Mara
#46. I think on-stage nudity is disgusting, shameful and damaging to all things American. But if I were 22 with a great body, it would be artistic, tasteful, patriotic, and a progressive religious experience.
Shelley Winters
#47. When I'm acting, I'm in a different place, singing is the last thing on my mind, and when I'm on stage, there's no acting at all involved, not even presentation, it's just who I am.
Harry Connick Jr.
#48. The inner life of the [imagination], and not the personal and tiny experiential resources of the actor, should be elaborated on the stage and shown to the audience. This life is rich and revealing for the audience as well as for the actor himself.
Michael Chekhov
#49. Anyone who goes on the stage is a show-off, aren't they? Acting's weird.
Celia Imrie
#50. I think the motion picture industry is a stupid business and I despise acting the scenes in short snatches, one at a time. I hate this film work. I am disgusted with myself. On the stage I could never play a part unless I felt it with all my heart and soul.
Conrad Veidt
#51. There is probably some great acting that goes on in movies from people who have never been on a stage, but if you are in for the long haul, you'd be missing an enormous part of what being an actor is if you're not part of theater.
Justin Kirk
#52. I wouldn't go up on a stage now if you paid a thousand dollars for one minute of acting. It's a nasty experience. You're up there all by yourself. You're so damn exposed.
Elia Kazan
#53. I love theater work because of the immediate effect your performance has on the audience. And I love the repetition; I love getting on the same stage for more than a month and reciting the same lines, trying to make a small or large step towards an improvement in my acting.
Alfred Molina
#54. I don't see my dancing or acting as two separate things. I don't define them separately, so I can't say one has helped the other, It's all the same thing. More than anything I love being on stage and performing.
Bebe Neuwirth
#55. I've always loved acting, even from when I was a child. But when I got on stage, I realised I couldn't act my way out of a paper bag. I was wild and full of unharnessed energy, but I was around all these seasoned performers like Rita Cullis. It was as if they were all in slow motion.
Claron McFadden
#56. We can see the film stars of yesterday in yesterday's films, hear the voices of poest and singers on a record, keep the plays of dead dramatists upon our bookshelves, but the actor who holds his audience captive for one brief moment upon a lighted stage vanishes forever when the curtain falls.
Daphne Du Maurier
#57. I was never a villain on the stage. I always played strong, sympathetic types. My first stage role with a speaking part, believe it or not, was as a priest. It wasn't until I began acting in films that the producers and directors saw me primarily as a bizarre villain.
Conrad Veidt
#58. I love being on stage or in front of the camera. My work brings me a lot of joy. It helps me figure out who I am. I'm really lucky that I get to make a living at acting.
Dana Delany
#59. Acting time is like flight time: You can work on a simulator, you can rehearse, but unless you're really in front of the camera or on a stage - that's when you really learn how to work it.
John Kapelos
#60. Though I acted in hundreds of productions, appeared at the Guthrie Theatre and on Broadway in Amadeus, I discovered in my thirties that I didn't really like stage acting. The presence of the audience, the eight shows a week and the possibility of a long run were all unnatural to me.
Fred Melamed
#61. I loved being on stage, but I told myself that if I didn't get into RADA, I wouldn't pursue an acting career. I did get in, though, and that was that.
Oona Chaplin
#62. I would be an actress for the rest of my life just because it's really relaxing. Writing is hard work, and stand-up is so stressful before you get on stage, but acting is a complete ensemble experience.
Kristen Schaal
#63. Art is violent. To be decisive is violent ... To place a chair at a partial angle on the stage destroys every other possible choice, every other option.
Anne Bogart
#64. All I have to do is be me on stage. But acting, I have to be someone else, and walk how they would walk and blink how they would blink. I used to talk about it bad like, 'Aw man, that person made $10 million a movie?' But now I understand why they do. I get it now.
Jill Scott
#65. Totus mundus agit histrionem. (All the World's a Stage.)
[Motto of William Shakespeare's Globe Theatre (f. 1599) and its acting company, The King's Men; taken from the first play to be performed on the new stage.]
William Shakespeare
#66. It's like a Master Class in Acting for three hours. I go to work and I learn so much and do so much. I'm privileged. I'm privileged to be on stage with them. That's all I can say. They're extremely generous. There are no egos in the room at all.
Sean Mahon
#67. On certain social occasions, otherwise dignified and serious men will begin behaving unconsciously like players on a stage, performing as they talk, acting as they gesticulate. The cause is invariably a woman.
Jed Rubenfeld
#69. My first acting experience was a non-speaking role as a robot. My costume was a cardboard box covered in tinfoil, but I was so shy I refused to go on stage.
Jessica Raine
#70. The trick is not to become somebody else. You become somebody else when you're in front of a camera or when you're on stage. There are some people who carry it all the time. That, to me, is not acting.
Ernest Borgnine
#71. I would rather do many small roles on TV, stage or film than one blockbuster that made me rich but had no acting.
Miranda Richardson
#72. I don't believe in acting. I think that people in life act, but when you are on the stage or, in my case, also on screen, you have to be true.
Luise Rainer
#73. There's a very fine line between underacting and not acting at all. And not acting is what a lot of actors are guilty of. It amazes me how some of these little numbers with dreamy looks and a dead pan are getting away wit it. I'd hate to see them on stage with a dog act.
Joan Blondell
#74. When my turn on the program comes, I am not nervous at all - because all this is happening out of time, out of space. I am, for a moment, a figure of my own fantasy, and I play my appointed role as if I were in the movies.
Eva Hoffman
#75. I'm trying to think how I impressed my wife. We had an on-stage kiss, and I really went for it. Because I liked her. Usually you can get away with it being just technical, but it was a problem when I ended up kissing my wife on the set. I'd say I stopped acting and kissed her on set.
David Walton
#76. I'm always thinking I'm messing up. I did a lot of classes. I can't stand being on stage or the only one talking in a room, so class really helped me deal with that. It doesn't really get any easier, but it helps you focus on the acting.
Travis Fimmel
#77. An acting assistant stage manager in a theater in Canterbury, a rep theater. A small wage but just enough to get by on, and I made props and I walked on, and I changed scenery, and I realized that I just loved it.
Jeremy Irons
#78. Actors and actresses make magic,' I said. 'They make things happen on the stage; they invent; they create.
Anne Rice
#79. The actor must be full of passion. If he's too cool he's better off as the manager of a company, not someone who appears on the stage.
Stella Adler
#80. I would rather do a play because it's instantaneous. You go on the stage, and you know whether it's happening or not. Somebody asked me 'What is acting?' And I said, 'Acting is listening.' And if you ain't listening, nobody's listening.
Charles Durning
#81. My experience of singing, as an actor, was that there's a different creative feeling of freedom. The acting thing is a bit more defined and cerebral. I can see why people would want to cross over. If you have so much freedom on stage then perhaps you want to be confined a bit, and vice versa.
Orlando Bloom
#82. I have been taking classes and I'm familiar with stage, but I'm not as familiar with acting on camera.
Kevin Richardson
#83. For me, comedy is constantly presented as this fake casualness, like a guy just walked on stage going, 'This crazy thing happened to me the other day.' And he's in front of 3000 people, and he's acting like an everyman, and he's getting paid so much money.
Bo Burnham
#84. It was when I was on stage that I realized that acting could be such a brilliant job.
Domhnall Gleeson
#85. It's a career that's enticing because you go on stage, for example, and people clap. You get that affirmation, but you can't go into acting for that because it's really your own self-belief that's going to get you through.
Miranda Otto
#86. As a stand up, and often in acting, there is no place for the most intense feelings. Rage, genuine sorrow, naked hope ... These things don't fit on a comedy stage and if you act you'll get to express them once in a while. Music is a place for the intensely personal.
Hal Sparks
#87. Acting is ephemeral. You can't hang it on a wall. You can't throw it off. And you can't bring it out of a closet. It's there one night and it's gone the next, at least with stage acting anyhow.
Charles Durning
#88. Does a man who is acting on the stage in a female part forget that he is a man? Similarly, we too must play our parts on the stage of life, but we must not identify ourselves with those parts.
Ramana Maharshi
#89. I think if I were to go back on stage I might be in great danger of acting.
Ben Kingsley
#90. If I do a film and have to get naked, that tends to dictate how often I go to the gym. Acting in 'Richard II' on stage was a huge physical workout, so I ended up more toned than I normally am.
Eddie Redmayne
#91. I was convinced that acting was for fools. I was on the stage when I was eight with my father, he was playing one of those Greek blind guys that sees things and warns people, whilst I was in a blue skirt. I think there were 5,000 people in the theatre, it was ridiculous.
Rutger Hauer
#92. When I started performing, I decided that if in five years I couldn't earn as much money acting as I could as a teacher, it would be unrealistic for me to continue on the stage.
Pauline Collins
#93. I lose myself in my performances so I wouldn't say that I ever act on stage. I don't find it to be an acting drill for me. I just find it to be something very real that comes from a very gut-driven, honest place.
Christina Aguilera
#94. I am learning to be more vulnerable and open on stage. This comes with the development of my acting abilities.
Ben Heppner
#95. What's the best part of acting? It's the indescribable feeling of being someone you are and someone your not, all at the same time. Acting is finding a character that's in you, forgetting yourself, and then bringing out this whole other person. Character is all that matters when you're on a stage.
Chris Coppernoll
#96. It was in India that I started my acting career, courtesy of my parents, long before I set foot on stage in England. They headed a company of travelling players performing Shakespeare up and down the land.
Felicity Kendal
#97. No acting, no production, could take the place of that moment when you come out in the dark on to the stage and the drummer plays four beats on the hi-hat and then lights and music. It just takes your breath away. No words can do what music can.
Ken Stott
#98. You learn a lot about acting and being physical and being on stage, but there is technical stuff on camera that you can't learn until you do it.
Finn Wittrock
#99. I have done this - made the sad prince laugh. Made his grieving parents smile. None but me. Think you only kings have power? Stand on a stage and hold the hearts of men in your hands. Make them laugh with a gesture, cry with a word. Make them love you. And you will know what power is.
Jennifer Donnelly
#100. I've never been a really big fan of theatre. I don't know why. It's so much for effort. It's much more difficult for me than stage acting just because of the pressure that's piled on you and you have to learn the entire performance by heart.
Callan McAuliffe
