Top 100 Quotes About Stage Acting
#1. Movie acting is about covering the machinery. Stage acting is about exposing the machinery. In cinema, you should think the actor is playing himself, if he's that good. It looks very easy. It should. But it's not, I assure you.
Michael Caine
#2. Stage acting is a very difficult thing - and I've learned a lot and have a long way to go.
Ralph Strangis
#3. People talk about the difference between radio acting, TV acting and stage acting, but I think it's all the same. For instance, when I played Vultan in 'Flash Gordon,' I put as much energy into it as I would with 'King Lear' - it's all part of the same thing.
Brian Blessed
#4. The foundation for film acting is stage acting.
James Lipton
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. There's no doubt that I owe a lot to my training of stage acting.
Denis Lavant
#8. 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
#9. 'Ice Age' felt like stage acting. You'd write a sequence, and sometimes you'd submit pages, but other times, I would actually perform it for the directors and producer in my office.
Jason Fuchs
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. Acting is something I did when I was a kid. I do act sometimes in friends' projects, but when I do, it's just for fun. It is actually a hobby for me now. I do still love stage acting, but the day-to-day process of being an actor is so exhausting and so taxing.
Mara Wilson
#13. 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
#14. Stage acting is for me the basic form of acting. If you make films all the time, you have so few possibilities to rehearse. And it's important to rehearse, because it gives you the possibility to try things which are not good!
Erland Josephson
#15. Actors and actresses make magic,' I said. 'They make things happen on the stage; they invent; they create.
Anne Rice
#16. Acting is something that I always wanted, but I never paid attention to the notion that it might actually work out. You have all sorts of ideas about what you want to do - at one stage, I wanted to be a jockey - but this is the one that's a big deal.
Olivia Thirlby
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. I studied movies for many years, but I am professionally an actor because I, my background is actually a stage actor and acting.
Tommy Wiseau
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. Character actor' is a technical term denoting a clever stage performer who cannot act, and therefore makes an elaborate study of the disguises and stage tricks by which acting can be grotesquely simulated.
George Bernard Shaw
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. If you get a chance to act in a room that somebody else has paid rent for, then you're given a free chance to practice your craft.
Philip Seymour Hoffman
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. When I connect to my soul, project it into another # character , and then bring it to the stage or to a film
that has always been for me the great joy of # acting . It's been as if my soul kind of leaps out of my body and is able to be free and dance around.
Kyra Sedgwick
#32. Women are directly fitted for acting as the nurses and teachers of our early childhood by the fact that they are themselves childish, frivolous and short-sighted; in a word, they are big children all their life long - a kind of intermediate stage between the child and the full-grown man,
Arthur Schopenhauer
#33. 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
#34. Acting on stage is a living organism you can never pin down, and I believe the audience feeds off that, too.
Hattie Morahan
#35. 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
#36. The stage is a magic circle where only the most real things happen, a neutral territory outside the jurisdiction of Fate where stars may be crossed with impunity. A truer and more real place does not exist in all the universe.
P.S. Baber
#37. In a close-up, the audience is only inches away, and your face becomes the stage.
Marlon Brando
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. Happiness was useless to me. It was heartache that filled my purse. What happy man has need of Shakespeare?
Jennifer Donnelly
#41. I hadn't really thought about doing any acting at all post-'Center Stage.'
Sascha Radetsky
#42. 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
#43. When I started acting, my whole focus and intention was to work as a stage actor in a company where you're asked to different roles - do a comedy, do a tragedy, etc. I haven't had any reservations about jumping from one type of genre to another.
Kyle MacLachlan
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. My first love is acting on stage. A sitcom is a hybrid of stage and film.
Judd Nelson
#47. 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
#48. With acting, you do want to get every job, and you're trying to get every audition, but then you reach a certain stage where you start to kind of gravitate toward the stories and the people that have a similar heartbeat.
Jason Clarke
#50. Then back to the stage, and the acting. The bright lights, the rehearsed lines. The applause, the falling curtain. Leaving who one was for a brief time, then returning. But the self that one returned to was never exactly the same as the self that one had left behind.
Haruki Murakami
#51. 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
#53. Acting in a stage play is like working the evening shift in an office.
Arthur Smith
#54. I deal in a very artistic way of what interests me and marks my passion, and I try to - whether its good or not - am in love with acting and the stage and characters and the ability to reach and to touch people, so that's where, I guess, that's where my heart will reside, by and large.
Angela Bassett
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. Stage fright and acting blocks are just unfocused or misplaced energy. Everything is possible if you know how and where to focus to invite inspiration ... Inspiration is a sensation in the body. It can be invited upon your will and willingness to experience it taking you over..
Marjo-Riikka Makela
#58. I think I know where my life went wrong. For all the world's a stage and I'm a lousy actor!
Greg Curtis
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. I am learning to be more vulnerable and open on stage. This comes with the development of my acting abilities.
Ben Heppner
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. I think if I were to go back on stage I might be in great danger of acting.
Ben Kingsley
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. Now supposing I had the part of a young woman to give out, one that wanted some excellent acting. If I were to go to the stage for my actress I would have to take a matured woman, one who would act splendidly, but who would look too old for the requirements.
D.W. Griffith
#72. It was when I was on stage that I realized that acting could be such a brilliant job.
Domhnall Gleeson
#74. 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
#75. I have been taking classes and I'm familiar with stage, but I'm not as familiar with acting on camera.
Kevin Richardson
#76. The acting that one sees upon the stage does not show how human beings comport themselves in crises, but how actors think they ought to. It is thus, like poetry and religion, a device for gladdening the heart with what is palpably not true.
H.L. Mencken
#77. I came from the stage so it was a different kind of acting, or a different arena of acting, and I just loved to do it as a kid. It's really gratifying to get to create these different characters and to get to create different voices and to get to wear different clothes.
Freddy Rodriguez
#78. I love acting. I love stage work, more than anything. It's just live. It's right there in front of you. If you make a mistake, they know it and you know it. I won't do anything where I feel like I'm just making a fool out of myself. By doing that, I'm able to rise to my highest potential.
Mike Tyson
#79. 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
#80. I wish the stage were as narrow as the wire of a tighrope dancer so that no incompetent would dare step upon it.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#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 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
#83. Acting has been my passion from the minute I started. I was pretty young when I wanted to be a doctor, but when I started doing theater work as a freshman in high school, the first time I hit the stage I was like, If I can do this every day, life won't get any better!
Sophia Bush
#84. 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
#85. I grew up in New York, so I fell in love with acting on a stage, not in front of a camera.
Kerry Washington
#86. 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
#87. I am coming to the end of acting. I have a list: another stage production, maybe one or two more movies, one more season of American Horror Story ... and then that is it for me. Because I think that's enough. I want to go out with a bang ... or should I say, a scare?
Jessica Lange
#88. Coming from sitcom television and coming from music you burn up every single second. You don't leave anything there. You burn it up and you pass out when you walk off stage, so I took that concept into acting.
Will Smith
#89. 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
#90. You can be in an acting class all you want, but you don't fully learn until you get off that stage and in front of a camera.
Nicholas Lea
#91. 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
#92. What method acting is for the stage, mezzofiction is for the page.
Fierce Dolan
#93. 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
#94. I attend film school, my background is acting and directing. But the acting does best, I like to work on the stage.
Tommy Wiseau
#95. Any acting is a stretch of the imagination. That's your job. Acting is truth in imaginary circumstances. Acting with green screen or a motion capture stage, you're striving for absolute truth in absolutely imaginary circumstances.
Sam Worthington
#96. We are all acting on stage and the world is our audience.
Antonello Fiore
#97. I went to college at NYU for acting, since acting was my dream from very young. I did a lot of hip-hop courses while I was there. I helped co-write a hip-hop production for the main stage of NYU, but I never touched rap.
Gina Rodriguez
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
