Ildar Abdrazakov Quotes

Then I trained as an opera singer for four years before I started singing professionally as a pop act.

I've been doing musicals since forever. Actually, I was focused on singing and becoming a singer until I landed on 'Passions.'

I have been taking voice and singing lessons since age 10 and originally got into it because I was really interested in musical theater. After writing my first couple of songs and performing at age 14, I knew that I really wanted to be a singer.

I really wanted to be an opera soprano.

I was classically trained in operetta from about age 4, I think.

I decided I was going to give up singing and concentrate on acting, and a result of that, I didn't do another film for two to three years, and I don't blame it on anybody but myself.

The acting was first. As a teenager I was an actress; and then I came back as a singer.

I started performing opera when I was 10 years old. I didn't perform as Zola Jesus until I was probably 18.

I don't speak English, so I cannot foresee a career in Hollywood. But I do see myself more and more as an actress rather than a dancer.

I trained as a singer before I was an actor. I was a kid singer, I went to theater and choir school, and then I got music scholarships throughout my education. And that's what I was going to do. And then I took a left turn and went to drama school and became an actor.

In the eighth grade I found I had a voice for opera, so I followed that path a little, but my impulse has always been an actor. I have always liked cinema, and let's face it, opera singers are just bad actors! I didn't want to translate myself in that direction.

It's something that I've always done. I started singing when I was four years old; that was the first time I took a voice lesson. I would say, maybe from five years on, I sang on stages constantly. That's what I call my natural habitat: It's a place where I feel most like myself and the most confident, the most excited.

I was doing musical theatre 'til I was, like, 17, and then I started realising I could use my voice in a more, like, current way.

Sometimes you have to re-invent yourself in this business in order to be accepted in different roles.

Being onstage and communicating with an audience was part of my life since I was very little, but I was never pushed into singing.

I found most of my learning has taken place after culinary college, when I travelled and met chefs and non-chefs.

The working environment in L.A. is really refreshing, really good. Because in Malaysia, it's a small country - you end up working with the same people that you like and that you know.

I'd love the opportunity to continue to work in the U.S. with people I have always admired and I also want keep telling stories from where I'm from.

'Strictly' is definitely life-changing, and I hope it can open another pathway for me, career-wise. Maybe something a bit more musical.

I had accepted a position as a business analyst at Deloitte Consulting in New York. But before I went into that workforce, I decided to take a year off and went to India to do a social enterprise fellowship. It wasn't the best fit, but that was where a TV show in Korea found me and invited me to first come perform.

I was an acting opera singer, and that's one of the reasons I left opera.

Both my mother and my grandmother aspired to be opera singers. And they studied it.

I went to a performing arts school. I went to an audition for a musical, 'Les Miserables,' in the West End, and I got in, and my parents were like, 'Oh, you can sing?' So I kind of started singing properly when I was, like, seven.

For sure, one moment really defined the path that I was to take in the future, and that was when I won the Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions in New York in April of 1995. I had just turned 25 two days before the finals concert, and when I won, I had no idea how my life would change because of it.

I have an inspired career other than just singing.