Top 95 Quotes About Theatre Actors
#1. There is a strange pecking order among actors. Theatre actors look down on film actors, who look down on TV actors. Thank God for reality shows, or we wouldn't have anybody to look down on.
George Clooney
#2. I have a theory ... Theatre actors are better at auditions than film actors.
Shaun Sipos
#3. There is a whole bunch of great British actors of my age who aren't film stars or theatre actors; they're very much both.
Harry Lloyd
#4. I think there's that weird bastardization where musical theatre actors are treated as almost like vaudevillians or circus performers - that we're somehow not good actors because we sing and dance.
Laura Benanti
#5. You can see some very great theatre actors who don't work at all well on screen. They're trying too hard at it.
Kevin Whately
#6. In this country, you have movie actors and theatre actors and television actors.
Max Von Sydow
#7. The Theatre of the Oppressed is theatre in this most archaic application of the word. In this usage, all human beings are Actors (they act!) and Spectators (they observe!).
Augusto Boal
#8. I believe in the time when we shall be able to create works of art in the Theatre without the use of the written play, without the use of actors.
Edward Gordon Craig
#9. Everyone the world over talks about British actors and British talent and I think that's because we were trained - until now - in theatre.
Brenda Blethyn
#10. We can compare classical chess and rapid chess with theatre and cinema - some actors don't like the latter and prefer to work in the theatre.
Boris Spassky
#11. It is very hard to cast a number of plays adequately from the same company of actors without several parts being miscast.
John Gielgud
#12. 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
#13. I have done film, television and theatre - all at a pretty substantial level - I don't think it's possible for American actors to do that.
Helen Mirren
#14. It is a great help for a man to be in love with himself. For an actor, however, it is absolutely essential.
Robert Morley
#15. The Actor should make you forget the existence of author and director, and even forget the actor.
Paul Scofield
#16. I didn't go to film school. My Grampa always says just watch a lot of movies. He didn't go to film school; he went to theatre school. It's interesting to learn about the technical side of it, but I think it's more important to learn about writing and working with actors.
Gia Coppola
#17. 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
#18. Theatre is a sacred space for actors. You are responsible; you are in the driving-seat.
Greta Scacchi
#19. As much as the mystery element is all a lot of fun, when you do go to 'Edwin Drood,' you're going to a theatre to see a show about going to a theatre and what that relationship between actors and audiences has been for years.
Rupert Holmes
#20. I never achieved my first goal in the National Actors Theatre, which is to have a permanent Acting Company.
Tony Randall
#21. I like working in theatre now and I think that once you've done a certain amount of films most actors love working in the theatre because of the camaraderie.
Francesca Annis
#22. We're actors - we're the opposite of people!
Tom Stoppard
#23. 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
#24. When you're an actor and you walk into a theatre where your movie is playing, you're kinda proud. "Look at my skill!"
James Hetfield
#25. I'm interested in working with groups of actors to tell complicated stories about what's happening to people, and that's because I came out of the theatre where I worked in ensembles, and I really loved that.
John Wells
#26. Without writers, stories would not be written,
Without actors, stories could not be brought to life.
Angie-Marie Delsante
#27. I suppose as an actor you become very sensitive to rhythm, not just rhythm as you look at it sort of from the, from the outside as a director might see it, but within yourself you become used to the idea of hearing your fellow actors, responding to them in space.
Simon McBurney
#28. I really look up to actors like Gwyneth Paltrow and Cate Blanchett who have a strong background in theatre.
Alexa Vega
#29. There isn't really a theatre culture in L.A., which is odd when there are so many brilliant actors there.
Raza Jaffrey
#30. I've never been a puppeteer, I conceive and I write and I design and I direct. And not just puppets. I direct actors, I direct dancers, I direct singers, I direct films. I also direct puppeteers. I'm really a theatre maker, but there's not a word for that.
Julie Taymor
#31. I feel the theatre is the most unique one of all [the arts] for collaboration. I feel very fortunate to be in a field where I really do get to have long conversations with the visual artists, the actors, the musicians. It's all art forms rolled into one and I feel very fortunate to be a part of it.
Susan Stroman
#32. In comedy, beware the split focus. The audience should focus on the face of the actor. The audience must see the setup. If there is action elsewhere on the stage, the comic line can be lost.
James Carver
#33. Actors already striving in the theatre wouldn't dream of putting themselves on these shows; it means that only about 10% of the talent out there is being auditioned for parts.
Elaine Paige
#34. It is hard to get good actors who also do television, ads and films. Theatre requires six weeks of rehearsal for a play.
Lillete Dubey
#35. My grandparents - both of my mother's parents - were actors, and they ran the Reading Repertory Theatre Company, through the town of Reading, where I come from.
Kate Winslet
#36. Theatre's great. It's such an act of faith. It's a wonderful art form where you suspend disbelief for a couple of hours. It's a lovely art form because the actors and the audience are alive and in the room at the same time together. That's why I love the theatre.
Israel Horovitz
#37. Getting the call to be in The Goblet of Fire was like being welcomed into the most exclusive upper circle of some elite actors' club. You sit on set with the cream of the National Theatre and the RSC, all clutching wands or wearing witches' hats.
David Tennant
#38. All life is theatre,' he said. 'We are all actors, you and I, in a play which nobody wrote and which nobody will see. We have no audience but ourselves ...
Susan Cooper
#39. Your job as actors is to understand the size of what you say, to understand what's beneath the word.
Stella Adler
#40. I see a ton of theatre whenever I'm not working to stay inspired. I love feeling like I'm a part of the theatre community and following the work of actors and writers I admire. I'm a big reader, too.
Sarah Steele
#41. I find the theatre faintly embarrassing for the actors performing on stage. It seems rather showy-off in an undignified way.
Charles Saatchi
#42. A fool cannot be an actor, though an actor may act a fool's part.
Sophocles
#43. In theatre, there's the director, the writer, and below them the actor. In film, it's the actors who are most important. That goes against the grain for me.
Anne-Marie Duff
#44. I don't like the theatre. I like plays in which the audience is addressed by the actors. I don't like seeing people talking to each other on stage as if there isn't an audience.
Jonathan Meades
#45. My advice to young actors is probably to do some theatre; definitely do that. I keep running into these actors who have never been on stage, and it's invaluable for an actor. What you will learn about yourself is huge.
Yul Vazquez
#46. I just wanted to be one of those actors who works at the National Theatre the whole time.
Robert Emms
#47. In the theatre, if you say 'Macbeth', all the actors will start looking very anxious. I'm so well-trained not to say it in the theatre that I can hardly say it in normal life.
Anna Chancellor
#48. All that day she had had the feeling that she was playing in the theatre with actors better than herself and that her poor playing spoiled the whole thing.
Leo Tolstoy
#49. Collaboration to me is ... my favorite collaboration in the theatre is the collaboration between the actors and the audience because it's just that thing that happens when the only thing left that is left on the human scale is that human beings come to look at other human beings act out stories.
John Benjamin Hickey
#50. When actors go onstage, you know immediately if they can do their job. You can be a lawyer or an accountant for years and not find out.
Patsy Rodenburg
#51. I think I come from a theatrical tradition where, if you look at the great theatrical actors of the British theatre, they took enormous pride in being wildly different from one role to the next. That's the tradition I come from.
James Purefoy
#52. You need three things in the theatre - the play, the actors and the audience, and each must give something.
Kenneth Haigh
#53. I used to drive up from theatre in Michigan to Stratford, Ontario to watch every show. I idolized the actors from Stratford. I was very influenced by them because they would come down and work at my theatre and get time on their American Equity union cards.
Robert Englund
#54. I get bored at the theatre a lot because I notice that there's not always a connection between the actors. They may be technically proficient, but they're not surprising each other. I'm thrilled by actors who make choices that are surprising.
Lusia Strus
#55. The deaf community is in a favorable position because they have a national theatre and training groups of their own to get them started. Deaf actors have often acquired very valuable skills and experience before they get their break.
Richard Masur
#57. I had great faith in Irish actors, that they'd be hip to the whole theatre thing, and they are. I had no illusions of coming over here as some kind of big shot. It's been a learning experience for me too.
Christopher Meloni
#58. All actors say they're concerned about the state of the theatre, but what they're really concerned about is that there'll be less work around.
Michael Gambon
#59. 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
#60. Don't wear green in your dressing room,' suggested Miss Spink.
'Or mention the Scottish play, added Miss Forcible.
Neil Gaiman
#61. To save the Theatre, the Theatre must be destroyed, and actors and actresses all die of the Plague ... they make art impossible.
Eleanora Duse
#62. What was good was that I had friends who were actors and in theatre who were really good, because I think my strengths were visual, like pictorial.
Rob Urbinati
#63. In my collection, to me at least, the theatre of the past lives again and those long-dead playwrights and actors have in me an enthralled audience of one, and I applaud them across the centuries.
Robertson Davies
#64. The Old Vic has always been first and foremost an actors' theatre, a home for great talent and memorable performances.
Kevin Spacey
#65. Young actors, fear your admirers! Learn in time, from your first steps, to hear, understand and love the cruel truth about yourselves. Find out who can tell you that truth and talk of your art only with those who can tell you the truth.
Constantin Stanislavski
#67. The strength of British theatre should be that these actors in their middle years know what they're doing and are good at it. Not rich, not famous, but making a living.
Ian McKellen
#68. You fight for certain roles, and you realise they're being filled by television and film actors, because theatre is constantly fighting for survival and they need names and faces and ticket sales.
Richard C. Armitage
#69. I studied drama in high school, and when I was 18, I studied at the Actors Studio in New York. Then I moved to London when I got engaged to Bryan Ferry, and I studied at the National Theatre there.
Jerry Hall
#70. I find that actors who are wanting to pursue tv or films don't seem to have much interest in classical theatre.
Renee O'Connor
#71. I feel so sorry for younger actors who aren't able to have the opportunities that I had, starting out in repertory theatre. It's really tough on young actors now.
Antony Sher
#72. The theatre is not the place for the musician. When the curtain is up the music interrupts the actor, and when it is down the music interrupts the audience.
Sir Arthur Sullivan
#73. I get on with actors, and when I'm doing a theatre show, it's great being with them all the time. But we're all alike, and it's much nicer being with people who are different.
Phil Daniels
#74. An actor is part illusionist, part artist, part ham.
Oscar Wilde
#75. I think a lot of people think that we [comedians] are nerveless people in the theatre, that we don't feel that kind of terror which traditionally anyone who has to do any public speaking feels. It's worse for actors, because our livelihood depends on it.
Barry Humphries
#76. When you most succeed, you do so by seeming not to act at all.
Stella Adler
#77. I need theatre for my equilibrium because in theatre, the actors don't care so much about image, about celebrity; you are more independent.
Clotilde Hesme
#78. There's an infantilization that happens to actresses in general - musical theatre, straight theatre, television, film - we're spoken to like children. Actors are spoken to like children a lot of the time.
Laura Benanti
#79. All actors know that the real adrenaline rush is in doing theatre. There is an immediate connect, and a role in a play, for an actor, is the biggest temptation.
Lillete Dubey
#80. The theatre of the world is stocked with fewer settings than actors, and with fewer actors than situations.
Marcel Proust
#81. 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
#82. An actor without techies is a naked person standing in the dark trying to emote. A techie without actors is a person with marketable skills.
Mark Leslie
#83. That is why it has been repeatedly noticed that the human life is a theatre where the mask show takes place, and we are merely the actors of that show, having entirely identified ourselves with the masks and fooling not only others, but first of all ourselves.
Arvydas Sliogeris
#84. 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
#85. The world 's a theatre, the earth a stage, Which God and Nature do with actors fill.
Thomas Heywood
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. I would have started the National Actors Theatre 30 years earlier.
Tony Randall
#89. My whole family is very artistic - my uncles are all actors and theatre directors.
Morena Baccarin
#90. 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
#91. There are many actors who'll make their living in other areas, and they'll say they don't like theatre. What they're saying is that they're afraid of theatre because they know it will separate those who can from those who can't.
Ken Stott
#92. I think I'm a better actress for having friends and interests outside the theatre. I wouldn't want to live my life surrounded by other actors all the time.
Penelope Keith
#93. I'm convinced that theatre is a horrible business. Make this the headline. You have to be on the spot every night as an actor. You are damn lonesome standing out there.
Walter D. Asmus
#94. The most important thing you can teach actors is to understand plays.
Stella Adler
#95. That's where the theatre of dreams is, over in L.A.; it's the land of opportunity for actors, and to go over there with a good team behind you and have a part you want to audition for really makes it a joy.
Luke Pasqualino
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