Vivien Leigh Quotes

People often argue about this. Obviously one of the skills in performance is acting, and you can't expect every Romeo to really be in love with their Juliet!

My dream as a youngster was to be like Olivier. To be a great stage actor. To be a great Shakespearean actor. To me that is the Olympics of acting.

I had always heard that theatre is for 'serious' actors but after actually having rehearsed day in and day out, I realize how challenging it is.

I think if you're an actor, then you can work on stage - but if you've never done it before, you're going to have picked up a few things that you're going to need to change when you're working on stage.

Making a film or doing a play are completely different experiences and entirely fulfilling, but completely unique. I also think one complements the other. People often say that theater is about flexing your muscles, and is actually real acting, whereas I sort of disagree.

I trained as a stage actor and was given a lot of technical tools to play with.

I've done so much theater, and yet I never had an experience like 'The Normal Heart.' We could feel the reaction of the audience every night. It was visceral.

My real training as an actor was when I started doing theatre.

When I first started acting, and we would all sit down and talk about Shakespeare and how great it was. I thought well, I suppose it is.

To be honest I don't think I was any great shakes as a theatre actor because everything I was doing was really small in size - intimate.

In my heart of hearts, I love theatre. It's the joy and terror of putting a play on, the creativity of it. It is infinitely harder than film and television and more tiring. Your performance is heightened in the way it isn't with film.

I understudied Colm Feore quite a bit in '85 and '86 - 'Persephone' and 'The Boys from Syracuse,' too - and that was great, great training for me. He was and he is an amazing theatre actor.

I was in the National Youth Theatre, too, but there was no dancing there. I was doing plays like 'Julius Caesar' and playing the lute very badly.

The cool thing about doing a play is that the final interpretation of a piece is turned over to the actors.

I think in any form of acting, you're always well served if you've done theater.

Film acting is really the trick of doing moments. You rarely do a take that lasts more than 20 seconds. You really earn your spurs acting onstage. I needed to do that for myself. I would hate to say at the end of everything that I never did a stage play.

Sometimes I think of movie acting as advanced pretend.

In a rehearsal room, your real resource as an actor aren't the things around you; your resources are your imagination and your director and the other actors. In those close quarters, your imagination and your skills are what you turn to.

Being an actor in movies is a lot about the power of your imagination and making the circumstance real to you so the audience will feel that it's real.

Your primary tools, as an actor, are observation and imagination. You can pretty much get everything you need from that, and you do. It brings back that element of pretend.

When I started acting, my whole focus and intention was to work as a stage actor in a company where you're asked to different roles - do a comedy, do a tragedy, etc. I haven't had any reservations about jumping from one type of genre to another.

A stage actor has to be 10% aware of the audience as he's performing.

Juilliard definitely emphasizes the theater. They don't train - at all really - for film acting. It's mostly process-oriented, pretty much for the stage.

There is probably some great acting that goes on in movies from people who have never been on a stage, but if you are in for the long haul, you'd be missing an enormous part of what being an actor is if you're not part of theater.

An actor should be able to create the universe in the palm of his hand.