LaChanze Quotes

You know, young actors say all the time, 'Should I use my own life experience?' And my response is, 'What choice do you have?'

In acting, you draw so much on your private life.

Good acting comes from finding the essence of a character.

Obviously an actor draws on his own experience.

There are elements of myself in every character I do, just because you take from your real life experiences and sprinkle those into your character.

As an actor, you always want to find a piece of who you are in every role you take on.

I suppose with any character that you play you always bring your personal experience to it. You always bring people that you know or that you've met and sort of - this is what I do, I mean, I don't know what anyone else does - but people that you know or that you've met that have affected you in certain ways, you bring into it.

I don't bring my life into a character at all.

Like any other actor, I draw on life experience.

In terms of likeability, that's something that I don't think about as an actor when I approach a role.

For me as an actor, you always sort of want to bring yourself to a character in some way. You want to find a way to approach something in a way that's real and interesting, and also so there's some empathy there.

I think it's always easier to play parts that you have something concrete that you can relate to.

When you are playing someone who is dealing with issues on a really personal level, if you don't bring your own issues into the equation, it's not going to feel really personal to the people watching it.

When you act, you want to emote and think in that language. I don't enjoy the process of doing a film in a language I am not good with.

I'm not a method actor, but I'm affected by the life I share my life with during shooting. It's always a very strange and special period for me.

As an actor, you can't just imitate someone. You have to get under her skin.

Acting, according to me, gets better with time and age. The more experiences you have in life, the more you have seen, the better equipped you are to deal with complexity and bring out the depth in characters.

As actors, when we keep working every day, after a point of time, we just know all our emotional cards and how to play them.

I sort of thought acting was just about arranging your face into emotions. I didn't realise it was about actually allowing yourself to feel the feelings, then letting your face follow. That was a big learning curve.

Everyone else went to drama school, and that teaches you how to dissociate from your character. I don't know any technique! I'm just acting by chance - and by connection.

I certainly always do draw upon stuff in my life. You do that instinctively as an actor.

I had no real experience studying acting; I came to it having done other things for a living for many, many years, and I have this gigantic respect for experience and technique.

To be a character who feels a deep emotion, one must go into the memory's vault and mix in a sad memory from one's own life.

As long as you have the acting chops and the desire to get inside a character, you can play anything.

I'm an emotional actor. When I'm doing a scene, I really believe it. I live the part as long as I'm in the scene.