Quotes About Theatre And Acting

#1. 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

#2. Part of what I enjoy about the theatre and acting is that sense of history.

Liev Schreiber

#3. I've learnt that there's acting for film, acting for theatre, and acting for an audition.

Sarah Snook

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. From there I did a one year theatre acting course in Fife, and then three years of drama school in London.

Ewan McGregor

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. The money is better in films and television. But in terms of acting, theatre is more rewarding.

Christopher Eccleston

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. I hope to be still acting when I'm 70 on TV, film and theatre.

Keeley Hawes

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. Dance and theatre afforded me the opportunity to discover my passion for acting, for telling stories.

Kelsey Chow

#30. 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

#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. The theatre-acting, creating, interpreting - means total involvement, the totality of heart, mind and spirit.

Stella Adler

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. I've had plenty of lessons about film acting and theatre acting.

John Boyega

#36. 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

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. I honed my passion for acting in theatre and education, and I think it's important not to belittle the child audience.

Rhys Ifans

#44. 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

#45. I majored in musical theatre performance at college, then went through years of waiting tables and temping while looking for acting work.

Brooke Elliott

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. 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

#54. I started doing community theatre as a way to make friends, and that was when I caught the acting bug.

Christina Hendricks

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. 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

#59. 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

#60. 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