Marianne Elliott Quotes

I really love to act; I love everything about it. I've never had this addiction to being known. I mean, sure, if you go into acting, there's part of you that is saying, 'I want attention' but I was brought up to work to deserve attention, and it is the work, not the trappings that are important.

I am always excited to be an actor. If I wasn't, I would be acting, and the audience wouldn't watch me.

Film and stage are very different; I don't necessarily prefer one over the other. Every few years, I get a big itch to go back to the theater. To learn humility, to learn bravery and to remind yourself that the pistons that drive your craft are working on full power. And to remind yourself how badly paid actors can be.

I want to break into the acting industry. It's something I have a great deal of respect for; it's a passion of mine. It's so amazing, the differences between acting and being an athlete, but the one commonality is they both evoke emotion in the viewer. And those emotions are real. So I think that's pretty cool.

There's a tremendous amount to be gained from being a performer, and being an artist, and being an actor.

I love theater work because of the immediate effect your performance has on the audience. And I love the repetition; I love getting on the same stage for more than a month and reciting the same lines, trying to make a small or large step towards an improvement in my acting.

You've got to love acting and that's true for me. I love the idea of getting on stage and getting in front of a camera.

As an actor, you wouldn't be able to play a character if you were worried about the reaction to what you're doing.

Staging any play is very exposing because, if you are going to do it well, you have to put so much of yourself into it.

That's my job as an actor - to go on and try to do the work so subtle and so fine and specific that the memories will linger for a long time.

Acting is like lifting a 400-pound feather. It's a feather, how hard could it be? And yet, you go to lift it and it's heavy. For that reason, I love it, because it's very hard and difficult and challenging and obviously I want to learn more.

When you're in a good play and a good production, you find that you're in something that has a life beyond you. You think, 'Oh my goodness, this play's alive.'

I love rehearsing; it's the best part of the job.

I love live theater. I get my rocks off by doing stand-up, and I am the only actor. But to show up eight times a week and not have that time for myself; to do someone else's lines? When I work for Wendy Wasserstein or Terrence McNally, Neil Simon or even Shakespeare, I do not have the right to change the lines.

I still feel I belong to the theatre. There is nothing more challenging and exciting for an actor than performing before a live audience. The stage is the real testing ground for an actor.

I just love acting. Being in theater or being in television or film, I'm really living out my destiny.

As I told you, from the time I was fifteen, I thought the theater was too much involved with actors trying to make the audience love them, being over emotional.

I can't imagine anything more debilitating, anything more challenging, anything more thrilling than to get on a stage and do any kind of play. It is such a vulnerable place for any actor to be in.

As actors, you do have to be aware of your audience. You can't act in a vacuum, even if that audience isn't exactly present with you.

I think I started out just loving the attention. But that's changed into a real love and passion for my profession. Acting has never lost that challenge and excitement for me.

I enjoyed acting and marveled that one could get paid for doing it.

I'm glad acting sunk its teeth into me, because now I can't imagine doing anything else.

It's very hard when you're doing a new play that you believe in, and you want to tell the story in the best way possible.

As much as I can act, I don't have anything in me that yearns to be an actor - that sense of needing to be onstage, in costume, in character; that is utterly not interesting to me.

It's a surprisingly sacrificial job being an actor.