Christopher Reeve Quotes

My father had a lot to do with me thinking about acting, though he never saw me act. He passed away probably - he passed away as I was doing my first play, but I just think being exposed to it and being around it. It wasn't something that I ever thought I couldn't do because I grew up around it.

I did community theater and kids programs at professional theaters and plays at school and voice lessons for seven years. I stopped because it was so time-consuming. But then I realized that I had access to this world where I could go on auditions. And there wasn't too much of an identity crisis when I started acting professionally because I had been acting longer than I had been writing. It didn't feel new.

As a kid, I was a huge fan of movies and acting. My mom was in the sort of community theater, and I always hung around down there, and I was a massive fan of everything I'm kind of involved in now. But fairly ordinary and cheeky.

I first wanted to be an actress after seeing a play - not a movie.

I grew up with artists.

Everyone in my family is an artist. Both my parents are painters and my mom's an opera singer. I was never shown any other way to process life.

A lot of people I went to college with felt like they wanted to pursue theater exclusively, so I don't think that I really was in competition with people that I went to school with.

When I was ten, I saw 'Grease' on stage and thought: 'I want to be part of that; it looks like so much fun.' My mum enrolled me in a local theatre group, and it all went from there.

I went to acting school. I went to college for acting.

I've always known actors because my parents are actors on stage and so I lived in a very creative environment when I was a kid. All my life.

As a kid, I was fortunate that we grew up near a children's theater, with all different classes and things; so as a kid I took classes there and as I got into high school I did all the community theater stuff. Then I came to college here in New York, going to Marymount Manhattan, and studied acting there. But most of the training I got was from working. Working with really great people.

I grew up doing theater when I was very young - always enjoyed it. Studied it in college, got my degree in it, and never really had the guts to do it professionally. But one summer, a friend of mine was with an extras agency and asked me if I wanted to be an extra with him in a movie, and I was, like, "Sure." At lunch, the writer came up to me and asked me to audition for a role. I got it, and it sort of snowballed from there.

I went to New York out of college, and in my day, we were told that was the way you became a good actor. You don't go to Hollywood, you go straight to New York and work in the theater. So that's what most of the people I knew did.

Theater is the foundation of how I live my life, actually. My father was a playwright, so I was around it all the time and loved to talk shop with him, just loved it. And basically everything that I hold to be good and true and worthy, I learned in the theater. So not even just about the work, but just about life. Discipline, problem solving, creativity, how to get along with people.

The theater was my mother and my father.

I had just done something in TV, but my real love is theater. I had won this award and I was up at Yale, and I was happy because it came with money.

I did all the musicals in high school, and I loved it. And then I got to theater school at college, and was like, "No, I'm a serious actor. I want to do Shakespeare. I want to do classical theater." I took myself very seriously.

My real father was a portrait painter. I went to a lot of auctions as a kid and galleries.

The theater community at large, I have to say, has just been so warm and so welcoming, and that's not something I'm as used to.

With a group of people, a troupe of actors in the theater, you go out on tour, and you're like a traveling circus. It's very sociable, and there's a real community, and it's very intense, and then you may never see them again. That was very appealing. I mean, it wasn't consciously appealing, but I think a lot of actors like that.

They have a desire to put on plays and to fulfill that traditional role of a theater in a community: to be the place where people go to hear the truth.

I knew I wanted to engage in the world of the imagination, but it was not economically feasible for me to study acting, so I went to a teachers' training college.

I started doing community theater when I was seven and I think the intent was just expression. When you're a musician, you can make music in your room, and when you're a writer, you can write. Acting is one of the tricky art forms where you need a certain amount of permission to be able to do it. You can talk to yourself in the mirror, but it's different than actually acting or doing a scene. You need an audience and you need someone else to do it with.

I feel most real to myself in the studio.

I learned so much about the making of Star Wars and that became a real drive for me, right from the time I was 12 or 13.