Martin Landau Quotes

Good acting comes from finding the essence of a character.

Actors walk around wearing these little tool-belts of acting skills. And I just don't find that interesting to watch. I never want to see someone who clearly can cry at the drop of a hat. That's so uninteresting.

The worst acting is about imitation.

Good actors, you always know what they're thinking. That's why they're good actors.

As an actress, I was trained to show emotion I did not feel, or no emotion at all.

Obviously an actor draws on his own experience.

I think good acting is always character acting.

When I see an emotion being enacted by a great actor, I always feel I can never do that.

Even great actors who transform who they are still go to a really honest place; I think that's sort of that special skill that actors have.

Sometimes directors come to me when I have to play some horrible thing, scary or hysterical or crying; they ask, 'Did you study somewhere to be an actress?' No, this is life. That's why I think I don't want to say you need a really bad experience to be a good artist, but bad experiences in your life say something.

Crying does not equal good acting.

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

Good actors I've worked with all started out making faces in a mirror, and you keep making faces all your life.

You can't just tell actors, especially young ones, to 'act happy' and expect them to do it. They must in some essential way be happy.

I think when you're an actor and you're drawing on your emotions all the time, you need to be quite steady.

I went through this realization that acting, at its heart, is the ability to manipulate your own emotions.

Method acting is a label I don't really understand, because there's a method to everybody's acting.

You can't perish because of your own feelings; you have to embrace those things as an actor because it's part of your palette.

All good actors are actresses. The more like a woman they are, the better they act, because a man's salvation is his femininity. Women have stronger sensibilities than men, which allows them to go a bit deeper when they are on and off the stage.

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.

There is an art to acting, and there are techniques that are acquired. You can be as emotional as you'd like, as a person, but figuring out ways that you can bring specific emotions at specific times and have them be true, and relating to someone as someone that they're not, is a lot.

The skill of a gifted actor, their ability to interpret and develop a character and truly bring her or him to life, is one that I admire enormously.

I was always under the impression that acting is an innate gift. One of the first things I heard them say at Koothu-P-Pattarai was that actors should realise the art of acting through their training.

When I was a kid, I thought good acting was fascinating, and I could tell the difference. I could see that at like 9 years old.

An actor's job is to find variations of the same emotion in his being so that every time he expresses grief or joy, it doesn't look the same.