Richard Masur Quotes

Soaps are a great springboard for any actor but if you want to be taken seriously, you have to be careful.

Soaps are the best. They really are. If you can do a soap, well, you can do anything. You have to learn pages of dialogue very quickly.

I have the absolute utmost respect for soap opera actors now. They work harder than any actor I know in any other medium. And they don't get very much approbation for it.

Stevie Van Zandt could not walk on to a set and act. I don't know how actors do that! It's the scariest thing in the world.

My first time on camera was 'One Life to Live.' I mourn for actors coming up that the daytime soap opera is becoming extinct. It's theater onscreen.

As with real families, my fictional family on 'Life Goes On' had its ups and downs, and as part of the fictional downers, the actors were often called to cry on cue. This absolutely terrified me, because I was a pretty happy kid who didn't have much to cry about.

When you play a daily soap character that character lives with you for a really long time.

I loved my time on All My Children. That show was a family to me. I am so sad that daytime is slowly fading away. I owe so much to daytime. I learned so much about my craft and I made so many wonderful friends there and I am so sad that it is all going away.

People say, "Why is it that you love to act?" And you want to say, "Well, most of acting is sitting in your trailer, either bored or worried about the scene coming up." A lot of it is about things you don't really like, so it's a wonder why acting is such a huge draw, why everyone loves it so much.

Filming is physically and emotionally hard, especially acting in something like this, where we go into the honest feelings of these people. But it's also very exciting because there's an adrenaline that's pumping (through you) when you're doing these scenes.

I like doing horror films. I think it's helped me as an actress because you have to run and scream and cry for so long and do ridiculous things in front of strangers, you sort of break down any barriers, you can't be embarrassed.

For me, obviously anything that reduces the amount of acting required and makes the process more of an experience, rather than having to synthesize, is incredibly helpful. There were definitely some hardships and some challenges, but eventually all of those hardships and challenges had a positive effect on the work.

people always live for ever when there is an annuity to be paid them

When I have to do a scene where I feel vulnerable as an actress, I always grow from those experiences, so I welcome them. Even though it may not feel amazing at first. You have to embrace it and use it to improve yourself.

The fact that the movie's called Norman and I play Norman was just a weighted responsibility that I never experienced before. I just tried to be prepared as possible. I think that's really the only way to go about it, from what I heard from people who have to do this a lot.

I started working in front of the camera for the first time when I was 15 years old. I joined a soap opera. We filmed in Brooklyn and I would skip class to shoot my scenes. It was terrifying and I entirely self-conscious in front of the camera.

I know that the fantastic amount of profit that people want to make on anything is damaging. And that none of us seem able to resist it.

There was definitely a learning curve in terms of being on film, but being on a set was all good.

I went to NYU for acting, for six years. I thought acting was the easy way out or in because I didn't put in enough effort in school, being a crazy kid in college. But, I was good at it, so that was the other side of it. I would love to direct. What I've learned from being on set is more how to deal with actors than even the visual part of it all.

I wish it had been something as sexy as the old Joey Tribbiani, falling-down-an-elevator shaft. But no. It just faded out. I wasn't related to anybody or anybody's lost, amnesiac lovechild in One Life to Live. They just didn't have room for me, so it was a slow fade. I remember feeling the writing on the wall: "This is not going to end well for me."

I learned a lot about acting from the people I worked with.

Many people and companies only have one goal: money, money, and more money. Greed is ok when you let others profit from it, but greed for oneself is bad, it makes you ill.

What used to frustrate me going into an audition was that some inexperienced, lesser casting people would think that actors are acting only when they're speaking.

I'm not going back to acting class, although I've thought of it. The classic training that people get usually when they start out, I never had, and I always felt and still feel the lack of it, so there's a lot of basic stuff that I just don't have a clue about.

I've had pretty much the same crew for all the films that I've made, and I've managed to have really nice, calm, funny people. That is a big part of it, a family feeling of warmth and finding something interesting and making a platform for them to perform. It's a very difficult job, acting, in that it's totally counterintuitive to how we are brought up.