Gena Rowlands Quotes

In 'Angels in America,' I got to fulfill a lifelong dream. I was in the air eight nights a week for two years, and I just loved it.

What I'd really like to do is do a film or two a year and then do theater in New York the rest of the year.

I happen to love working in cinema, but the theater is always there... you know, and I would never shut the door on it. Even though it's been quite a bit of time since I've done a play, last one was in New York.

I did theater at Carnegie, and in Pittsburgh and New York.

I spent a lot of time in the trenches in New York doing a lot of off-off-off Broadway theater.

I always wanted to be an actor. My first professional job was at 19, working in New York theater.

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.

I started out wanting to be an actress. My sister was in this theater company in Brooklyn. I saw her in some plays, and I was immediately obsessed. I started auditioning for plays when I was about 10.

It was always my dream to be a New York theater actor. I never thought I was pretty enough to be on camera.

I want to do everything. I just want variety and longevity. I've never filmed a movie before, I want to do that. I want to come back to theater at some point. But I was in New York for like ten years, grinding. I'm ready to be in L.A. for a little while, and really experience film and television.

After three years in L.A., I began to dream of my glory days on the boards. But it's very difficult to make a living as a theater actor in New York, which is why I moved out here, and I always had an ambition to work in television. I am a great admirer of the format, and I think it's how we tell long stories.

I'd love to shoot some of these bigger movies as they come, and I'll go back to theater at some point again.

My first role was on Broadway from 1963-64 in Chips With Everything.' It was very well reviewed but not very well attended.

I've had the struggling actor experience. At one point in New York, I was holding four jobs, including bottle service girl, while I was trying to break into acting.

When I finished high school, I didn't have much direction - I was a Deadhead kid who ended up bumming around London seeing a lot of theater. That's where I saw the performance that made me want to act: Vanessa Redgrave doing 'A Touch of the Poet.'

Marilyn always dreamt of being an actress. She didn't, by the way, dream of being just a star. She dreamt of being an actress. And she had always lived somehow with that dream. And that is why, despite the fact that she became one of the most unusual and outstanding stars of all time, she herself was never satisfied. When she came to New York, she began to perceive the possibilities of really accomplishing her dream, of being an actress.

I would like to be going all over the kingdom...and acting everywhere. There's nothing in the world equal to seeing the house rise at you, one sea of delightful faces, one hurrah of applause!

I'm the girl that works at Paramount all day, and Fox all night.

I felt a certain modicum of success because I had been paid well to be an actor for the first time in my life, but I felt like I had done adolescent work on the show, and stepping into the New York theater arena was the first time I felt like I'd come into my own. I felt like I was proving myself in a gladiatorial arena.

I played St. Jimmy on Broadway I sort of caught the acting bug. But I didn't want to go full-bore into it because I have a lot to learn.

We did monologues and scenes, and New York I did a scene from Amadeus and a monologue from Pounding Nails in the Floor With My Forehead by Eric Bogosian, and then in L.A. I switched the scene to This is Our Youth and did the same monologue. I was spiky-haired, super skinny. A lot of people were like, "You should come here and do a sitcom." That was the feedback that I got. Obviously it was quite a different journey than the one I've actually had, but I just listened to people.

My father went to college for drama in Pittsburgh, and so did my mother, and then my mother was a steadily working New York theater actress. They kind of quit when I was born. They did that for, like, 10 years before they had kids and then I was born and they were not into that lifestyle for kids.

Normally when people ask me what I do I say I'm an actor, and that's what I always wanted to be and that's the way I approach work even when I'm directing it.

I wanted to be a theater actress, and initially, I wanted to work in musical theater

I started off in theater; I did exclusively theater for four or five years. In the last few years, television has come along but I can still make film. I feel very privileged that I can move between them.