Uta Hagen Quotes

#1. We must overcome the notion that we must be regular ... it robs you of the chance to be extraordinary and leads you to the mediocre.

Uta Hagen

#2. It must be noted that it is often the colleague or direct disciple of a new thinker who gets stuck in literal interpretations of the work, tending to freeze the new ideas and language into an inflexible, static condition.

Uta Hagen

#3. Uta Hagen would say, there's the representational actor and the presentational actor.

Jake Gyllenhaal

#4. We were not allowed to say, Screw, but we could say, Hump the hostess, because hump is in Shakespeare.

Uta Hagen

#5. No work of art is ever finished, nothing is ever static, no performance is for keeps.

Uta Hagen

#6. All tedious research is worth one inspired moment.

Uta Hagen

#7. The need to be loved and protected is at a peak when we feel abandoned and are particularly vulnerable to difficult circumstances.

Uta Hagen

#8. Keep pace with the present. Take a trip to the moon. envision the future.

Uta Hagen

#9. 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

#10. Uta Hagen is our greatest living actor; she is, moreover, interested and mystified by the presence of talent and its workings; her third gift is a passion to communicate the mysteries of the craft to which she has given her life. There are almost no American actors uninfluenced by her.

Fritz Weaver

#11. To rebel or revolt against the status quo is in the very nature of an artist.

Uta Hagen

#12. I won't go to England because they won't let my dog in.

Uta Hagen

#13. I'm a bad liar; I don't know what to say backstage.

Uta Hagen

#14. If you want a bourgeois existence, you shouldn't be an actor. You're in the wrong profession.

Uta Hagen

#15. We had a relationship that lasted 44 years. Herbert and I lived together 10 years before we were married. He always gave me a little heart for whatever anniversary.

Uta Hagen

#16. Once in awhile, there's stuff that makes me say, That's what theatre's about. It has to be a human event on the stage, and that doesn't happen very often.

Uta Hagen

#17. They still had the Lord Chamberlain, so we had this idiotic censorship. We were allowed three Jesus Christs instead of 10. Why three were OK, I don't know.

Uta Hagen

#18. Talent is an amalgam of high sensitivity; easy vulnerability; high sensory equipment (seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting intensely); a vivid imagination as well as a grip on reality; the desire to communicate one's own experience and sensations, to make one's self heard and seen.

Uta Hagen

#19. I had three influential teachers. The first was Uta Hagen. The second two, Bobby Lewis and my late husband, Charles Kakatsakis, were both from the Actors Studio.

June Squibb

#20. I love playing Chekhov. That's the hardest; that's why I love it most.

Uta Hagen

#21. Usually, someone who's in a show gets me a ticket. I feel cornered. I can't walk out if I don't like it.

Uta Hagen

#22. Working with Brando was fun. It was like a tennis match. We played unbelievably well together.

Uta Hagen

#23. One cannot demand of art that it pay you in any other way than in the satisfaction of the work itself.

Uta Hagen

#24. Marlon was so sensitive, you thought the poor guy just had a bad education.

Uta Hagen

#25. Thoughts and feelings are suspended in a vacuum unless they instigate and feed the selected actions, and it is the characters actions which reveal the character in the play.

Uta Hagen

#26. I have disassociated myself from that book.

Uta Hagen

#27. I love going to the movies; I love watching good movie actors. They must know something I don't.

Uta Hagen

#28. The knowledge that every day there is something more to learn, something higher to reach for, something new to make for others, makes each day infinitely precious

Uta Hagen

#29. Maybe the one I enjoyed playing most was A Month in the Country.

Uta Hagen

#30. Awards don't really mean much.

Uta Hagen