Joanne Woodward Quotes

I got cast in a school play and I fell in love with that. I felt comfortable on stage and found out it was a brilliant way of expressing myself and I was happy and I could do it.

I became an actor because it was the only thing I could do. I didn't have any friends, I didn't fit in. But when I started acting everything in my life shifted and I felt happy.

I always liked performing. I always liked being in front of people. That's one of the things I loved about law; we had mock trials, and I got to go up and state my case. But I took an acting class, and after my first class, I was hooked.

A ham is simply any actor who has not been successful in repressing his natural instincts.

There was a little part of me that always felt like I was going to be an actress, but I never acted when I was growing up. I was a dancer. That's all I did, all day, all my life. Maybe this was just where I was meant to be, and somehow I ended up here, but it just felt right. As soon as I started acting, it just felt like it was meant to be.

It was quite strange, because it's quite different from singing, although it's quite natural because you're used to performing or acting on stage.

I played Winnie the Pooh in first grade. I was an early adopter of standing in front of people and looking like an idiot.

A lot of the time with child actors, you get the feeling they're trying to have a kind of poise or presentation that's beyond their years that might be put on, but also might be because they've spent years just hanging out with adults and they don't even have a sense of what it's like to grow up with kids their own age.

All children are natural actors, and I'm still a kid. If you grow up completely, you can never be an actor.

It's true what people say - that actors are the closest thing there is to children. They play.

As an actor, you always want to reach back to being a child and having the spontaneity and the imagination of a child.

There is a drama queen in me, as I love acting, and I used to stand in front of the mirror and act since my childhood.

You'd be surprised how much being a good actor pays off.

Sometimes you can do Shakespeare and you're still not an actor.

When we play the fool, how wideThe theatre expands! beside,How long the audience sits before us!How many prompters! what a chorus!

I think that acting is a very humanizing profession.

Acting has been my passion from the minute I started. I was pretty young when I wanted to be a doctor, but when I started doing theater work as a freshman in high school, the first time I hit the stage I was like, If I can do this every day, life won't get any better!

As far as being an actor is concerned, you have to have passion. If you're not bringing the passion of the character into the room with you, you might as well not come into the room at all.

I got on stage and I went, "Oh wow. No stage fright." I couldn't do public speaking, and I couldn't play the piano in front of people, but I could act. I found that being on stage, I felt, "This is home." I felt an immediate right thing, and the exchange between the audience and the actors on stage was so fulfilling. I just went, "That is the conversation I want to have."

I love to act, I love to sing and I love to entertain, so if I am passionate about a certain project and I want to do it, I hope to stretch my acting skills.

People often say that you should never work with child actors. I think that's all wrong. Children have not had the imagination kicked out of them by life experience and adulthood. So, they still are very much alive with that kind of magical thinking which enables an actor to believe they're in these circumstances and make them real to you.

Everyone has to do the same work as actors - I teach acting. But there are those people who come on, and there's just something about them in and above themselves that has to do with chemistry and electricity - this aura about them. And that's unmistakable. Do I have that? Yeah, I think I have that.

I knew I wanted to be a performer really early on, like around 8 years old. I did tons of acting and loved being in front of people.

I love acting. I can't imagine anything else that I would do. I know a lot of actors that really want to be directors and be musicians and all that stuff. I like acting and I feel like I'm good at it. It kinda makes me happy. It's actually pretty easy to me and I can't imagine doing anything else at this point because I've been doing it for so long.

Most actors are very deeply passionate about their line of work. I suppose there are probably people who sell insurance policies that are passionate about it, but I'm thinking the ratio is a little higher for actors. But, I may be wrong.