Top 95 Quotes About Theatre Acting
#1. The theatre-acting, creating, interpreting - means total involvement, the totality of heart, mind and spirit.
Stella Adler
#2. I hold theatre acting in such high esteem that it scares me.
Kate Bosworth
#3. The great difference between screen acting and theatre acting is that screen acting is about reacting - 75% of the time, great screen actors are great reactors.
Nicolas Roeg
#4. From there I did a one year theatre acting course in Fife, and then three years of drama school in London.
Ewan McGregor
#5. I've had plenty of lessons about film acting and theatre acting.
John Boyega
#6. Acting is mostly about listening. If you just focus in on what the other person is saying, acting takes care of itself to quite a large extent.
Alan Rickman
#7. I never achieved my first goal in the National Actors Theatre, which is to have a permanent Acting Company.
Tony Randall
#8. My father was a classical singer of baroque music, and my older sister was in musical theatre, and I thought about doing the same thing but then realised straight acting was for me.
Antonia Thomas
#9. Without writers, stories would not be written,
Without actors, stories could not be brought to life.
Angie-Marie Delsante
#10. The imagination is closer to the actor than real life-more agreeable, more comfortable.
Stella Adler
#11. 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
#12. Acting in theatre or television or screen is only for the irrecoverably diseased, those so smitten with the need that there is no choice.
Michael Shurtleff
#13. I was always interested in the arts as a child - drawing, painting, and piano - but acting became a favourite. I was a major theatre geek in high school - if I wasn't in the drama room at lunch rehearsing, I'd be in the art room finishing up some type of project.
Laura Mennell
#14. When I began to direct, I began to understand and realise that everything that I'd learnt, both in music and dance and in the theatre, seemed to come together as a director, and I began to enjoy it. And slowly I let the acting go.
George Ogilvie
#15. I came to musical theatre from straight acting, and a lot of my friends have a real prejudice about musical theatre - one I probably shared.
Bertie Carvel
#16. I was born in the theatre. My father was a small time impresario on the West Coast and I was acting from the age of 7, but I started to write when I was 12 and by the time I was 14 I was making more money than I was acting.
Anita Loos
#17. We were like two performers in a play, but we were divided, we were not acting with one another. We had to endure it alone, we had to put up this show, this miserable, sham performance for the sake of all these people I did not know and did not want to see again.
Daphne Du Maurier
#18. When you most succeed, you do so by seeming not to act at all.
Stella Adler
#19. I did some theatre. I had some smaller roles in a couple TV shows and films. I used to think I did a lot of acting, but my 'career' started when I started 'Homeland'.
Morgan Saylor
#20. I just enjoy acting, whatever area - theatre, film, television.
Michelle Dockery
#21. But then I got a job selling coffee at the York Theatre, and when I met theatre people, something clicked. I felt comfortable with them; I felt like myself. I decided to go to drama school based just on that feeling. I had never done any acting.
Janet McTeer
#22. We don't want bores in the theatre. We don't want standardised acting, standard actors with standard-shaped legs. Acting needs everybody, cripples, dwarfs and people with noses so long. Give us something that is different.
Sybil Thorndike
#23. My first interest was always music, and somehow that channelled itself into films and acting. I don't know what the natural transition of it was. I mean I acted a little bit when I was young and like any kid would in a community theatre.
Andy Garcia
#25. All that day she felt as if she were acting in a theatre with better actors than herself, and that her bad performance was spoiling the whole affair.
Leo Tolstoy
#26. The best author is a dead author, because he's out of your way and you own the play. Take what he has given you and use it for what you need.
Stella Adler
#27. Acting is a trick word invented in the festival of Dionysus, before Christ, in Greece at a fertility festival. That's where theatre came from: a fertility festival. No women were allowed. All the men played all the parts.
Gary Busey
#28. The money is better in films and television. But in terms of acting, theatre is more rewarding.
Christopher Eccleston
#29. I took up drama and did so much extracurricular work, like the National Youth Theatre and Guildhall's Saturday school. Acting is where I felt most comfortable and how I wanted to express myself.
Douglas Booth
#30. Part of what I enjoy about the theatre and acting is that sense of history.
Liev Schreiber
#31. Tell yourself that the world is outside, that it's not to be hidden from you, that you are going to thrust yourself forward and be relaxed in the world. You have chosen a field where you're going to be hurt to the blood. But to retreat from the pain is death
Stella Adler
#32. One half of the pleasure experienced at a theatre arises from the spectator's sympathy with the rest of the audience, and, especially from his belief in their sympathy with him.
Edgar Allan Poe
#33. I was very interested in theatre, mostly in stage design. I did a little bit of acting.
Jim Henson
#34. Hollywood was a detour, although my mother was an aristocrat from Tokyo who ran away to join the theatre, so acting is in my genes.
Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa
#35. The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster.
Oscar Wilde
#36. My introduction to acting was through theatre, so I actually saw a couple of Broadway shows that made me want to be an actor.
Skylar Astin
#37. Your job as actors is to understand the size of what you say, to understand what's beneath the word.
Stella Adler
#38. I did a play called Throne of Straw when I was 11, at the Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles. It became really clear to me at that point that I enjoyed acting more than any other experience I was having.
Kiefer Sutherland
#39. Dance and theatre afforded me the opportunity to discover my passion for acting, for telling stories.
Kelsey Chow
#41. Acting requires a creative and compassionate attitude. It must aim to lift life up to a higher level of meaning and not tear it down or demean it. The actor's search is a generous quest for that larger meaning. That's why acting is never to be done passively.
Stella Adler
#42. The acting bug just seemed to stick with me. I loved going to theatre school in college and continued to train in film classes and had been auditioning for T.V. and movie roles since I was in my late teens. My career has been slow and steady, and I kind of like it that way.
Laura Mennell
#43. I decided to have a regular childhood and not pursue [acting] until I left school, although I wrote plays, directed plays, and got involved in theatre at school. When I left school I decided that's that I was going to pursue and gave it a crack.
Karl Urban
#44. I hope to be still acting when I'm 70 on TV, film and theatre.
Keeley Hawes
#45. I love the stage, I love the process of acting in theatre, but unfortunately, it doesn't pay the bills.
Kabir Bedi
#46. I think theatre is by far the most rewarding experience for an actor. You get 4 weeks to rehearse your character and then at 7:30 pm you start acting and nobody stops you, acting with your entire soul.
Christopher Eccleston
#47. Theatre, in which actors take on changing roles, has among its many functions the examination of identity. For the individual, theatre is a kind of identity laboratory in which social roles can be examined vicariously.
Richard Hornby
#48. My parents wanted me to be a doctor, and they weren't very happy at the idea of me choosing acting as a career. Everyone in my family went to university - my older brother is a lawyer - but when they saw me for the first time at the theatre, they thought, 'OK.' They like it very much now.
Caterina Murino
#49. I started acting as a child in Community Theatre but I didn't do any serious stuff. It was all musicals like 'Annie' and 'Wizard of Oz.' I was always in the chorus.
Michelle Williams
#50. It's good to learn early that every show is a family
complete with dysfunctional relationships, tough love, and plenty of occasion for forgiveness ...
Kristin Chenoweth
#51. I would like to be going all over the kingdom ... and acting everywhere. There's nothing in the world equal to seeing the house rise at you, one sea of delightful faces, one hurrah of applause!
Charles Dickens
#52. 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
#53. I didn't want to get into acting just to play bystanders. I feel a bystander enough in my own life. And I do think that theatre can contribute to a certain analysis and commentary on our own world.
Elliot Cowan
#54. I'm interested in the spirits of people. In the theatre, there's the acting part of acting - and I'm not saying that can't be great - and there's the essence. To explore that essence, you need a key, a look, a gesture, an insight that unlocks the person's soul.
Ralph Fiennes
#55. I majored in musical theatre performance at college, then went through years of waiting tables and temping while looking for acting work.
Brooke Elliott
#56. You'll never really be great unless you aim high.
Stella Adler
#57. For my first acting job I played the role of Ensign Pulver in 'Mr. Roberts' at the Manitoba Theatre Centre.
Len Cariou
#58. 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
#59. I honed my passion for acting in theatre and education, and I think it's important not to belittle the child audience.
Rhys Ifans
#60. 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
#62. 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
#63. I've been acting since I was 8 - I used to play hockey and there was a kids' theatre down the street from my house and one day I just walked in and signed up for auditions for 'The Wizard Of Oz.'
Nico Tortorella
#64. Acting was merely a pastime; I wanted to make films. But theatre, ah - now that was a labour of love. Can there be anything better than performing without retakes and cuts, in front of people you can see, hearing them breathe in the darkness of the hall?
Kabir Bedi
#65. Like the Bible, Stanislavsky's basic texts on acting can be quoted to any purpose.
Lee Strasberg
#66. Acting must be scaled down for the screen. A drawing room is a lot smaller than a theatre auditorium.
Arthur Lowe
#67. I've learnt that there's acting for film, acting for theatre, and acting for an audition.
Sarah Snook
#68. I went to a lot of theatre schools, got a lot of training, did a lot of repertory where you do a different play every night. I took a lot of voice, movement, and acting classes.
Jeffrey Combs
#69. My style is an extension of acting and an outcome of some serious lessons I picked up learning when I did theatre in my early days.
Kapil Sharma
#70. I feel as if I could be any thing or every thing, as if I could rant and storm, or sigh, or cut capers in any tragedy or comedy in the English language.
Jane Austen
#71. What acting means is that you've got to get out of your own skin.
Katharine Hepburn
#72. I never imagined I'd go into acting, but I always loved drama, and when I was 16, I discovered the Library Theatre up the road. So I plucked up courage and asked if I could watch rehearsals. It was like Heaven.
Lesley Nicol
#73. Honestly, I really don't like acting. I don't enjoy it. What I do like is going to a movie theatre and seeing my face on a poster. I like seeing my name on a poster. That is cool.
Gabriel Iglesias
#74. 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
#75. I'd love to do more theatre and acting. I attended a performing arts high school in London, and it would be great to be able to put all of that training to use again.
Derek Hough
#77. 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
#79. I had worked in this New York theatre company for my first eight or nine years out of college, acting and directing there, and I'd begun to write a little bit.
Clark Gregg
#80. I love theatre. It's far more satisfying than film. Sometimes there's a collective sigh from the audience, or it's so quiet you can hear a pin drop. I couldn't believe how easy acting was when there's an audience; after a few previews I almost couldn't do it without one.
Katie Leung
#81. I never had any acting heroes. I never really went to the theatre.
Julie Walters
#82. Acting is not a state of being ... but a state of appearing to be. You can't be eight times a week without going stark staring mad. You've got to be in control.
Noel Coward
#83. When I was 16, I played Macbeth at school and my English teacher said, 'I think you may have acting talent. Try to get into the National Youth Theatre of Great Britain and see where you get.' I wouldn't have thought of that at all. I wanted to be a surgeon, but I wasn't a clever man.
David Suchet
#84. I did ballet and gymnastics, and then I started acting when I was eight - just doing amateur theater at a place called Oldham Theatre Workshop in my hometown.
Olivia Cooke
#85. I love theatre because it's just me and the audience. It's the litmus test in acting, to be able to sustain a performance over one, two or three hours.
Helen McCrory
#86. When I was a fireman I was in a lot of burning buildings. It was a great job, the only job I ever had that compares with the thrill of acting.
Steve Buscemi
#87. 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
#88. I started doing community theatre as a way to make friends, and that was when I caught the acting bug.
Christina Hendricks
#89. No actor is a success unless he feels inside himself, as long as he lives, that he is good.
Stella Adler
#90. I think theatre helped, only because it was acting experience. I got to work with a lot of directors.
James Denton
#91. I didn't learn anything about acting until I joined the Group Theatre. They taught me an entirely new approach, an entirely new technique.
John Garfield
#92. I think, by and large, the level of acting is mediocre. When I go to the theatre, I get so angry. I don't go.
Uta Hagen
#93. Actors need a kind of aggression, a kind of inner force. Don't be only one-sided, sweet, nice, good. Get rid of being average. Find the killer in you.
Stella Adler
#94. Actor training should be broadly humanistic, involving the study not just of dramatic literature and theatre history, but of languages, literature, and history generally, and should be centered on acting in plays rather than just exercises, improvisations, monologues, or even scenes.
Richard Hornby
#95. I always thought that it was every performer's dream. That's the epitome of being an artist, being able to express song, dance and acting in a live theatre setting and really connecting with an audience on that level.
Deborah Cox
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