Top 100 Quotes About Stage Actors
#1. The crossover wasn't happening. TV actors were TV actors, and film and stage actors were a whole different thing. And now there's just a lot of crossover.
Christine Lahti
#2. There are so many stage actors on TV but you wouldn't know they were stage actors. And film and TV actors are going to the stage as well, so the crossover is great now.
Matthew Morrison
#3. I love stage actors. There's something special about all people who have to do a performance eight shows a week, and musical people, especially, are so much fun.
Kelly Bishop
#4. I'm a Navy brat. You find that a lot of stage actors are Army or Navy brats, because they have the ability to make a big impression, make friends, and then leave just a few months later.
John Michael Higgins
#5. Stage actors are usually much more conscious of speaking up and making sure that everyone can hear in the back of the theatre; a film actor probably thinks of that a little less.
Clint Eastwood
#7. Unlike the people you see in Mathew Brady's photographs from the Civil War, the men and women of the Revolution seem more like characters in a costume pageant. And it's a pageant in which the performers are all handsome as stage actors, with uniforms and dress that are always costume perfect.
David McCullough
#8. I love stage actors. The pool of world class actors that have done theater [is big], there's a higher opportunity of grabbing somebody from that pool.
M. Night Shyamalan
#9. Stage actors look down on movie actors, movie actors look down on TV actors, and TV actors look down on ... mass murderers ...
George Clooney
#10. You can always pick out stage actors at the Oscars: they know how to walk.
Ian McKellen
#11. Actors and actresses make magic,' I said. 'They make things happen on the stage; they invent; they create.
Anne Rice
#12. Do you believe that our stories were written from before that we are but actors performing on the stage called life with neither rehearsals nor retakes, the dialogues of our own and a fleeting audience or are you someone who pens down his own story?
Chirag Tulsiani
#13. This whole creation is essentially subjective, and the dream is the theater where the dreamer is at once: scene, actor, prompter, stage manager, author, audience, and critic.
Carl Jung
#14. 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
#15. The advice that I usually give to young actors is that if you can create a character for the stage and keep that character fresh for at least 6 months that means you're doing the show eight times a week.
Joe Morton
#16. I also sort of find the idea that not only do actors want to please when they're onstage, I find actors really want to please off stage a lot of the time, don't they?
Jeffrey Combs
#17. 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
#18. When you're on stage, you build strong relationships with the actors, but it's a story you tell with the audience - you have to include them, you have to respond to them, they have to understand the narrative.
Romola Garai
#19. I've just never been the kind of actor that things have stayed with. I've never needed to carry a character off stage.
Morgan Freeman
#20. That an author takes a bow is not humility but presumption. What does the paleface want on the stage afterwards? But before the performance he had even less business there
and paying him royalties is equivalent to cheating the actors.
Karl Kraus
#21. A theater is such a revealing form of art, such a transparent and good actors, they're such powerful individuals. I always kind of dreamt that one day I will open my mouth on stage.
Mikhail Baryshnikov
#22. As actors, we're all encouraged to feel that each job is the last job. They plant some little electrode in your head at an early stage and you think, 'Be grateful, be grateful, be grateful.'
Daniel Day-Lewis
#23. In contrast to the inorganic thereness of lifeless matter, living beings are not mere appearances. To be alive means to be possessed by an urge toward self-display which answers the fact of one's own appearingness. Living things make their appearance like actors on a stage set for them.
Hannah
#24. For the record, if you're not a stage actor, climbing onto Broadway and tackling something like David Mamet is not an easy thing to do.
Jeremy Piven
#25. Brain-imaging studies of drug users at that stage show that viewing a film of actors pretending to use drugs activates dopamine pathways in the brain more than does watching porn films. This
Robert M. Sapolsky
#26. There is a difference when you work with actors who have worked on the stage. When we're out there in front of an audience eight times a week, you can't do it on your own.
Karen Allen
#27. I always think the great parts outlive the actors that play them and that's a stage tradition, that goes back hundreds of years and it should be that way.
Hugh Jackman
#28. Many an actor does the stage more ham than good.
Evan Esar
#29. Excellence in life, is like a play. For your real life play, the quality of the actors you bring on your life's stage, determine your success. Always choose the best, most excellent actors.
Mark LaMoure
#30. He felt as if he had left a stage behind and many actors.
He felt as if he had left the great seance and all the murmuring ghosts.
He was moving from an unreality that was frightening into a reality that was unreal because it was new.
Ray Bradbury
#31. It always bothered me when people came off stage and were told how great they were. They weren't, really, in my opinion. It was then I started thinking that, contrary to conventional wisdom, film was the artful medium for the actor, not the stage.
Jack Nicholson
#32. Film is mostly a visual medium, and so the director has much more control in terms of painting pictures and painting a performance. For theater, the director does everything he can and then says, 'Out you go,' and the actors are in charge of that stage every night.
David Lindsay-Abaire
#33. People have an idea that the preacher is an actor on a stage and they are the critics, blaming or praising him. What they don't know is that they are the actors on the stage; he (the preacher) is merely the prompter standing in the wings, reminding them of their lost lines.
Soren Kierkegaard
#34. I love the Warner Brothers lot. There is so much history there. They've done such a smart thing. They have signs outside of each stage which tell you what movies and TV shows were shot inside. So cool ... you can almost feel the ghosts of actors past.
Valerie Azlynn
#35. It used to be that you kind of got pigeonholed into one thing - you're either a stage actor or a TV actor or a movie actor. Today, there's a lot of crossover with film actors doing television, which never happened before, so those lines are a little bit more blurred than they used to be.
Aaron Tveit
#36. Once, and only once, I walked on stage and my mind went utterly blank! I had no idea why I was there! My fellow actors had to rescue me. I was very young and new to the business, so I'm glad it didn't give me stage fright for the rest of my life!
Laura Donnelly
#37. When real actors are approaching their work, we could be on a little stage somewhere, doing community theater. It's all the same. They're just trying to make the scene work. They're just trying to do the best they can and figure it out.
Kurt Fuller
#38. Would you go to see a brilliant actor who's been framed for something that he didn't do, and put him on a stage and say he's going to do Hamlet for you, and why don't you enjoy it? That's a hell of an analogy, but it's about the same thing.
Jerry Stiller
#39. The staff, stage managers, ushers all behaved as if they respected the actors.
Estelle Parsons
#40. It's easier to be more vulnerable in a smaller environment. It's hard to expect your actors to be able to open up in that way and stay with the level of focus needed when there's so many people on stage.
Sadie Calvano
#42. Many people are actors on a stage of their own illusions.
Steven Redhead
#43. The basis of all reasoning is the mind's awareness of itself. What we think, the external objects we perceive, are all like actors that come on and off stage. But our consciousness, the stage itself, is always present to us.
Trey Parker
#44. It is so rare as an actor to be allowed the chance to revisit a role and to go back to a character that you already built, and lived inside, and understood. To take it further to another stage is a huge privilege.
Tom Hiddleston
#45. I like to learn the lines and not get any precontrived things in my head about the part. Just get on stage and see what the other actors are doing, and respond to them as honestly as I can.
John Mahoney
#46. Regardless of what comes and goes on the stage, the stage is always just there. The people of the world are all actors, but if they own the stage, they become the masters. As masters, they will always be able to act on the stage.
Woo Myung
#47. If you're an actor, a real actor, you've got to be on the stage. But you mustn't go on the stage unless it's absolutely the only thing you can do.
Edith Evans
#48. What I found out about stage is that there is such a camaraderie between the actors.
Angela Watson
#49. Actors on stage, you can go from playing a myriad of roles, from Shakespeare to a Eugene O'Neil drama, and it's the norm. I came up in a world where you're supposed to be able to do three things very well. Act, sing, dance, paint, do something. The emphasis was on versatility.
Rocky Carroll
#50. When I write a play, my whole intent at bottom is to get the audience to be in the cast, to get that audience on stage with the actors and to get them thoroughly involved in what's going on.
Jules Feiffer
#51. I could not separate myself off stage from myself on stage, as so many actors can.
Kate Smith
#52. I would like to be able to be both a film actor and a stage actor - to be an American actor in the style of a lot the English actors who do films. They are these wonderful actors who can do everything.
John Glover
#53. From a very young age, I wanted to get up on stage whenever I went to the theatre - the actors just seemed to be having so much fun. One of my worries about theatre, in fact, is that the actors are quite often having more fun than the audience.
Olivia Williams
#54. Working for Disney for the last eight and a half years, people come and go - production staff and actors. I stepped onto the sound stage and it was a literal time warp.
Jacob Young
#55. 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
#56. Actors are always grabbing each other on stage, looking in each other's eyes, making a moment so private, the audience doesn't know what they're doing.
Edward Herrmann
#57. Britain produces great actors because they learn on stage so know their stuff when they get on a movie set.
Jerry Weintraub
#58. The actor doesn't merely command the stage, he seems to own it by divine right.
Frank Rich
#59. There are a lot of actors - I'm probably one - who are most at home when they're on stage.
Ian McKellen
#60. He became a solitary, belonging to that tragic class of active men prematurely deprived of activity; swimmers barred from the water or actors banished from the stage.
John Le Carre
#61. 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
#62. The first time I had got an offer to come to Hollywood, I turned it down. I said, 'No, I'm an actor of the stage.'
Kirk Douglas
#63. There's so much energy that's needed, for every stage of the process, so I don't want to do something that I'm bored by with characters that I don't like or actors that aren't going to surprise you.
Julian Jarrold
#64. I never had any classes or went to theatre school like a lot of actors, so all of my training has been on stage with different directors. That was a pretty good school room.
James Denton
#65. Sony could have $50 million and a sound stage and A-list actors and never make the same film. The constraints on this film became the essence of this film, became the power of this film.
Joshua Leonard
#66. Well, Mom and Dad are both actors, and I've spent a lot of time watching my mom on stage and a lot of time on set with my dad, so it was very much a part of my growing up.
Eleanor Tomlinson
#67. The only thing we are as actors are messengers. That's all we are. Correct? We are delivering the playwright's intention through the concept of the director. And I come on stage; if I feel confident in the role, then I give it away.
Patti LuPone
#68. I played a role. That is what actors do. But I played it too well. I went too far. And by the time I wanted to stop, to take a bow and leave the stage, it was too late.
Jennifer Donnelly
#69. We were on stage. We were supposed to speak our dialogues. But at times, a smile says more than words ever can!
Avijeet Das
#70. Actors and preachers are people who stand up on stage and have no problem talking and they have no problem saying, "Listen to me. Follow me. I know what I'm talking about."
Patrick Fabian
#71. Now what else is the whole life of mortals, but a sort of comedy in which the various actors, disguised by various costumes and masks, walk on and play each ones part until the manager walks them off the stage?
Desiderius Erasmus
#72. When we talk about climate, we need to do everything we can to set the stage before the actors come on. And they may only have one chance at success. We should keep thinking: How do we maximize that chance of success?
David Titley
#73. I was sort of trained in drama. I went to theater school. I started on the stage. Comedy is absolutely an essential part of what we do as actors. But I think in the grand scheme of things, comedy was born from tragedy. First there was tragedy and then there were the comedies.
Alex O'Loughlin
#74. My stage fright gets worse at every performance. During the overture I hope for a theater fire, typhoon, revolution in the Pentagon.
Hildegard Knef
#75. The stage is actor's country. You have to get your passport stamped every so often or they take away your citizenship.
Vanessa Redgrave
#76. I love Back Stage. I have lots of theater friends and actors who depend on Back Stage.
Anurag Kashyap
#77. The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver. No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops.
Joseph Weizenbaum
#78. I've always known actors because my parents are actors on stage and so I lived in a very creative environment when I was a kid. All my life.
Marion Cotillard
#79. This power that I'm supposed to have over women was never noticed when I was a stage actor on Broadway. I don't know when I got it. And by God, I can't explain it.
Clark Gable
#80. I don't want to restrict the life of a play to a particular production. The original actors might leave after the first six months, and I want the play to last 30 or 40 years. You write for the character, not the actor on the stage.
Neil Simon
#81. The world 's a theatre, the earth a stage, Which God and Nature do with actors fill.
Thomas Heywood
#82. 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
#83. On the stage you try to act real. On the screen you try to be real.
Shirley Maclaine
#84. I've been on the stage my entire life as an actor.
Jeremy Piven
#85. I'm very interested in silence. And, more importantly, in what happens when people aren't talking on stage. I'm interested in letting actors play and do things between the lines. And in slowing everything down.
Annie Baker
#86. There is no more reason for a room on a stage to be a reproduction of an actual room than for an actor who plays the part of Napoleon to be Napoleon, or for an actor who plays Death in the old morality play to be dead.
Robert Edmond Jones
#87. When the drama of history is over, Jesus Christ will stand alone on the stage. All the great figures of history ... will realize that they have been but actors in a drama produced by another.
Helmut Thielicke
#88. Recognize that the great majority of us aren't trained actors and entertainers. Usually, it's not our faces, our bodies, our personas or our stage presence that sells our books. It's our stories, our visions and our voices.
M.J. Rose
#89. When I write plays, I'm already seeing the shapes on stage, of the actors and their interaction, and so on and so forth. I don't think I've ever written one play as an abstract piece, as a literary piece, floating in the air somewhere, to be flushed out later on.
Wole Soyinka
#90. I come from the stage. I started my career as a stand-up comedian and then later on became an actor.
Patrick Huard
#91. We were all actors, just as you are all actors now. But our audience wasn't as large as yours. And our performances, like those on a stage, were fleeting, uncaptured.
David Levithan
#92. It is only when an actor feels that his inner and outer life on the stage is flowing naturally and normally, in the circumstances that surround him, that the deeper sources of his subconscious gently open, and from them come feelings we cannot always analyse.
Constantin Stanislavski
#93. Most actors are either a shower of bloody scruffs or think they should dress like Hamlet off stage.
Martin Freeman
#94. On the stage one must not confuse the nature of a personality with the naturalness of a person.
Karl Kraus
#95. One thing he'd learned in ten years on the New York Stage was this: don't make friends with the man who plays Hamlet; make friends with the man who pays Hamlet.
Thomas Dyja
#96. I found that golf saved me from going to the pub every day, so instead, I play golf with other unemployed actors. I'm a member of the Stage Golfing Society, and I play golf with all sorts of people.
Phil Daniels
#97. My professional acting life, stage and screen, has brought me public support, emotional fulfillment and material comfort. It has brought me together with fine people, good companions with whom I've shared the inevitable lot of all actors: flops and hits.
Peter O'Toole
#98. Few rash of any modern nation have a proper sense of an aesthetical whole; they praise and blame by parts; they are charmed by passages. And who has greater reason to rejoice in this than actors, since the stage is ever but a patched and piecemeal matter?
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#99. Many people with a wild desire to act prove failures on the stage, their inclinations are greater than their powers. Rarely is it the other way ...
Alec-Tweedie
#100. In Manhattan, every flat surface is a potential stage and every inattentive waiter an unemployed, possibly unemployable, actor.
Quentin Crisp
