Top 100 Quotes About The Actor
#1. It is my greatest joy to live a really good part, even though it imposes great strain. An artist is tired but proud when he has created a great work of art. So it is with the actor who really lives a great role and is proud of the part he played.
Conrad Veidt
#2. I've always felt it's the directors purview to say what; it's the actor's purview to say how. It's not good for an actor to have the big picture in mind - it bollocks you up. An actor's purview is the tiny little ... We measure our performance in seconds.
William H. Macy
#3. There are several types of movie space, the three most important being: (1) the field of the screen, (2) the psychological space of the actor, and (3) the area of experience and geography that the film covers.
Manny Farber
#4. The better the actor, usually the safer you feel working with.
Morgan Freeman
#5. Actors are players and if they're hot, or onto something, you let them go, or you and the actor can both get on to something. I always run out with lines as I think of them.
William Monahan
#6. I still sing, but completely for my own pleasure. I play a nightclub singer in 'Sparkle,' but I'd like to pursue it a bit more. I sang at a friend's 60th at Claridge's the other month; I did 'Baby It's Cold Outside' with the actor Hilton McRae, and 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow.'
Lesley Manville
#7. The art of persuasion. The actor persuades himself, first, and through himself, the audience.
Laurence Olivier
#9. The function of the actor is to make the audience imagine for the moment that real things are happening to real people.
George Bernard Shaw
#10. 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
#11. I love voice over work. To me, voice over and animation is such an art, because you focus solely on your voice. You do not focus on how to speak, combined with facial expressions, movement, etc. You as the actor need to convey all those things with only your voice.
Atticus Shaffer
#12. As the actor, you just have to believe in what your character is doing in order to play them.
Kristen Bell
#13. You have to start with the notion that you pick the actor who's going to embody the role, the best person that you can find. If you don't start with that then it sort of defies the whole purpose of trying to make the best film that you can make.
Christopher Meledandri
#14. Almost everything I learned about being an actor came from those early years at the Actor's Studio.
Paul Newman
#15. Theater is an engagement between the actor and the audience. Film is a different sort of medium. It's not immediate, but in some ways it's more involving.
Pauline Collins
#16. There is a kind of invisible thread between the actor and the audience, and when it's there it's stunning, and there is nothing to match that.
Maggie Smith
#17. If the actor gave his performance without knowing that he was in a play, then his tears would be real tears and his life a real life. And whenever I think of this pain and joy that rise up in me, I am carried away by the knowledge that the game I am playing is the most serious and exciting there is.
Albert Camus
#18. The actor is not quite a human being-but then, who is?
George Sanders
#19. In film, there's so many little things where not just the actor can blow his lines, but technically, it doesn't quite come off in the perfect way envisioned.
Ali MacGraw
#20. Once the curtain is raised, the actor is ceases to belong to himself. He belongs to his character, to his author, to his public. He must do the impossible to identify himself with the first, not to betray the second, and not to disappoint the third.
Sarah Bernhardt
#21. More than most people, the alcoholic leads a double life. He is very much the actor
Bill W.
#22. I never think of an actor as a model. A model wears what you tell them to wear, that's their job. An actor is different. It's important to work with the actor because in the end that's who the audience sees and that's the success that you need.
Patricia Field
#23. I think film and television are really a director's medium, whereas theatre is the actor's medium.
Christopher Eccleston
#24. It's funny because I've resisted acting as a career for most of my life. But both my parents told me if I ever want to direct, I should act first because no director should direct until they know what it's like to be in the actor's shoes.
Dylan Penn
#26. You couldn't hope to make a drama and have people rewriting on the day and having the actors making suggestions, "Wouldn't it be funny if my character did this?" "No. You're the actor. I'll tell you what to do."
Declan Lowney
#27. I don't want to be the actor who's followed by paparazzi, you know? I would like to just do good work and have that work be respected and acknowledged.
Randall Park
#28. I have one friend that I've had since I was born, and she's from Coatzacoalcos. She's not really impressed or interested in the actor's life. My family isn't really either.
Salma Hayek
#29. As the actor, you can't go in saying, 'I'm the bad guy.' You've got to think your reasons for doing what you're doing are good.
Sendhil Ramamurthy
#30. I learned very quickly that the hard thing in life is to make good films. Technically, filmmaking is the camera and the actor telling the story and that's what I'm more interested in doing.
Matthew Vaughn
#31. They had some really cool rigged cars and things that were different that they would tow behind the camera car that were actually on these trailers that manipulated side to side and stuff like they were getting hit, and actually put the actor right in the middle of the chase.
David R. Ellis
#32. You know, the hard thing about audiences not liking what a character does is that they sometimes take it out on the actor personally. That's something that you know when you become an actor or actress, but it's always hard to deal with when it actually happens.
Linda Cardellini
#33. Life is like a movie where you are both the director and the actor.
Steven Redhead
#34. The actor side of me loves to get dressed up and I feel like Cinderella when I'm in diamonds.
Virginia Madsen
#35. In every shoot, between the actor and the director there is manipulation. I'm not saying that negatively. It's healthy.
Adele Exarchopoulos
#36. On 'Saturday Night Live,' you wear so many hats there. You're the prop person, the actor, you're everything.
Casey Wilson
#37. The actor has a constant problem of personal identity.
Cyril Cusack
#38. I am the actor that I am. I do what I do. I've been a 'leading man' playing romantic leads for a long time now.
Pierce Brosnan
#39. Directors have a tendency to use their hands like orchestra conductors. They don't realize that the actor is looking at their faces, anyway.
Alan J. Pakula
#40. Having a live audience makes a world of difference to the acting. It keeps your timing sharp. When something doesn't work, the actor can sense the reaction from the audience and quickly move on.
Betty White
#41. I like playing guys where it's as important what they're thinking as what they're saying. Those are the people I like playing, and the actor that I strive to be. I like actors who work in that area and I like parts that allow me to work in that area.
Lennie James
#42. Bullshit!" Thor shouted at the stage, causing the actor playing Estelle to look at the audience. Thor added, "Just leave. Be done with this nightmare of a play! Goddamn cowards!
Dylan Callens
#43. The actor is concerned with his own bit of it, but the director's somehow trying to work the whole thing into a much bigger picture. It's like conducting an orchestra.
Roland Joffe
#44. There is no effort to acknowledge some equivalent accountability by associating "terrorism" with all violence that is deliberately aimed at civilians, either directly or as foreseeable effects of violent acts, whether the actor is a non-state individual or group or the state.
Richard A. Falk
#45. I don't call cut between the takes - it's my way to help the actor keep focused. As soon as you say 'cut' you have 10 people jumping on them and everybody's trying to do a great job, and they do, but sometimes they forget that the more important thing is the performance, creating the performance.
Michel Gondry
#46. I think a lot of what you do depends on the other people in the cast. It doesn't only depend on you the actor, but it depends on a variety of things, what the other actors are like.
Robert Loggia
#47. The actor Danny Kaye used to say, "Life is a great big canvas. Throw all the paint you can at it." I like that thought. More important, I try to live by it as much as I can. I
James Patterson
#48. I watch a lot of television and I watch a lot of film and I hate when you watch the action sequences - and I always tell when they use a stunt man - and then they put the actor in and you can tell these actors haven't done anything ...
Raymond Cruz
#49. People assume actors are born liars, but I'd argue the actor's job is to tell the truth. And I've realised I'm not a good liar.
Cate Blanchett
#50. The audience perceives only what the actor wants to do to the other actor.
David Mamet
#51. I don't think of an actor. I think in the character, and then I search for the actor. Usually I'm thinking without names, because they will change my idea. No big egos. If I want egos - just mine. That is enough.
Alejandro Jodorowsky
#53. A film director is not a creator, but a midwife. His business is to deliver the actor of a child that he did not know he had inside him.
Jean Renoir
#54. Music is my breath, blood and food - without music I would perish; the actor in me would die.
Dhanush
#55. I like this other world, this forgetting of myself. The actor works in order to escape, not to find himself. You become an actor by leaving yourself, and then you have to keep acting. How tragic!
Sylvia Kristel
#56. We don't ask the actor playing James Bond what his sexual preference is. So I don't know what it is, really, with trying to out actors who portray gay characters on television. But it is some sort of fascination in society.
Jack Falahee
#57. Acting in a scene is like paddling a canoe from a pebbly beach on to the river, the writer builds the canoe, and the actor provides the river. The river is the actor's thoughts and emotions.
Sanford Meisner
#58. As far as I could discover, the notion that a play could succeed without any further help from the actor than a simple impersonation of his part never occurred to Tree.
Herbert Beerbohm Tree
#59. It's kind of up to the actor to deconstruct the scene and deconstruct the character and figure out how to make it real. That's what I love about this job: It's sort of a puzzle each time, and figuring that out is sort the key, whether I'm playing a cop or a killer.
Shawn Hatosy
#60. Studios have been trying to get rid of the actor for a long time and now they can do it. They got animation. NO more actor, although for now they still have to borrow a voice or two. Anyway, I find it abhorrent.
James Coburn
#61. If you think about filmmaking as an entire spectrum, starting with the writer and ending with maybe the marketing department, the actor's contribution is a rather slender band.
William Mapother
#62. It was said that one of them, either the actor or the history teacher, was superfluous in this world, but you weren't, you weren't superfluous, there is no duplicate of you to come and replace you at your mother's side, you were unique, just as every ordinary person is unique, truly unique.
Jose Saramago
#63. Very occasionally I hire an actor and get it wrong. The actor just doesn't trust the process or me as fully as I thought they would. In this case, you can be quite sure that if an actor is untrusting, it's got nothing to do with me or the process.
Mike Leigh
#64. But I would like to think that it's the actor that makes the difference in these cases. Not the director, not the guy that wrote the book, not the guy that adapted it for the screen, but the actor.
Ray Walston
#65. I wish I was a bit shorter, as I think shorter people have better walks. Freddie Fox, the actor, is shorter than me and has an amazing gait; and Tom Cruise has a brilliant run. I'm just gangly.
Jack Whitehall
#66. I trust the [series] writers when I'm filming, because it's interesting for me to go in every week and see what's going to happen, and the challenge for me as the actor is to make it work.
John Barrowman
#67. Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story, instead of the actor in it.
Ram Dass
#68. To realize the Self involves an action, it implies that there is something to realize, that there is time, a temporal world, and that Self is not yet realized, but will be realized by the actor through action.
Frederick Lenz
#69. The auditioning process is one in which the actor gets very little information about almost every element of it.
Danny Strong
#70. When I went to get my master's in creative writing at San Francisco State after Grinnell, I joined the moribund remnants of the Actor's Workshop, until I saw Kay Hayward and Sandy Archer in the San Francisco Mime Troupe and drove down that day to audition. The rest is history.
Peter Coyote
#71. The actor cannot afford to look only to his own life for all his material nor pull strictly from his own experience to find his acting choices and feelings.
Stella Adler
#72. Being present is the actor's job. Being aware of your body, in space, and the emotions that are occurring inside, is essential. Well, quite simply, the more aware one is-of yourself, of your surroundings, of other people-the more likely you are to respond truthfully.
Sandra Oh
#73. Homelessness is the actor's fate; physical incapacity to attain what is most required and desired by such a spirit as I am a slave to.
Edwin Booth
#74. I remember the actor Dale Robertson said he quit acting when he got tired of having to hold his stomach in. I feel that way sometimes.
Ted Shackelford
#75. I hate acting when I see it. I don't want to feel it, I don't want to see it, I want to be taken away with the story - I don't want the actor's ego in front of me. That's what I try to live when I do the work.
Rutger Hauer
#76. Oh, I like going down the rabbit hole. You know, that's kind of my job. When you play Macbeth, you gotta dive down that one. The trick is figuring out how to do it with love and a sense of humor so you can pop back out again. But, kind of the actor's job is to go down the rabbit hole.
Ethan Hawke
#77. The play is one of the very few pieces of great dramatic and comic writing that I have read in a long, long time. I was drawn to it because of the power of the writing, which gives me the actor a chance to explore many facets of myself.
Linda Lavin
#78. Actors are there to represent the human condition back to itself. It's never about the actor. It's about the content. That's what I strive for in my work.
Debra Lawrance
#79. Sword fighting in film is not about how good the fighter is, but how good the actor receiving the blows is.
Takeshi Kitano
#80. What the actor is in private life, he is to a large extent on the stage, because he cannot conceal himself and his true personality from his audience.
Leslie Howard
#81. The magic of drama is infinitely more powerful than the magic of trickery. It is as available to the conjurer as it is to the actor. The only difference is that actors take it for granted, whereas few conjurers are even aware that it exists.
Hake Talbot
#82. Point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath
Oscar Wilde
#83. The actor playing Lee got really irritated. He tried to escape by turning, running, or twisting and talking or yelling above the voice of the illness, but the illness didn't sit quietly.
Pete Earley
#84. I think that with any emotion - fear, love, nervousness - if the actor's feeling it, then the audience feels it.
Jessica Chastain
#85. On my set, people have to respect the actor's process. I totally respect what actors do. I give them whatever time they need, and I never scream out directions from the camera. I take the time to walk up to them and talk to them personally.
Gina Prince-Bythewood
#86. 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
#87. The instinct to impersonate produces the actor; the desire to provide pleasure by impersonations produces the playwright; the desire to provide this pleasure with adequate characterization and dialogue memorable in itself produces dramatic literature.
George Pierce Baker
#88. The actor's realm is that of the fleeting. Of all kinds of fame, it is known, his is the most ephemeral. At least, this is said in conversation. But all kinds of fame are ephemeral. From the point of view of Sirius, Goethe's works in ten thousand years will be dust and his name forgotten.
Albert Camus
#89. The actor depends wholly on himself. He gives his performance in what, to him, seems the most effective manner.
Bela Lugosi
#90. The face and the actor is great, but if you were to start out and you said, My name is Humphrey, somebody would punch you out, because that's a stupid name to have.
Jamie Farr
#91. Work for the actor lies essentially in two areas: the ability to consistently create reality and the ability to express that reality.
Lee Strasberg
#92. Most writers write haphazardly. The actor is fighting unjustified words all the time.
Marlon Brando
#93. One of the views of the [actor's] job is that whatever age you are, there's a role that's about who you are and where you are. There are parts for that age that you can bring things to.
Clive Owen
#94. It's up to the actor to make sure they don't get typecast.
Bryan Cranston
#96. You learn, even at 'S.N.L.,' that the funniest scripts a lot of the time were written with the actor, because they know what makes people laugh. It's always going to be better if they own it.
Akiva Schaffer
#97. My daughter is the most normal towards me. For her, I am just her mom. I am just a regular mom, and the actor comes after that. If she likes something that I am wearing, she tells me, and if she doesn't, she still makes it a point to let me know.
Karisma Kapoor
#98. Characterization in a play is like a blank check which the dramatist accords to the actor for him to fill in.
Thornton Wilder
#99. Every scene is a love scene. The actor should ask the question: 'Where is the love?'
Michael Shurtleff
#100. A lot of what I think I do as a director is try to give everything over to the actor. So I disappear.
Ira Sachs
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