Jack Lemmon Quotes

I should be soaring away with my head tilted slightly toward the gods, feeding on the caviar of Shakespeare. An actor must act.

Movies have takes. But plays are like life - you don't really get takes.

I have so much respect for people in the theater. You can't do 10 or 15 takes. It's all live. It's like life in motion.

As rewarding as a good film role can be, there is just nothing like getting up on a stage and taking an audience for a ride.

Reading great dialogue as an actor is such a rare privilege.

I see myself as a performer and that applies to a Greek drama or a modern comedy.

Comedy and drama are both challenging to me.

I played comedies and dramas.

I've done a lot of Shakespeare as a young man; I was involved with Shakespeare and Company.

I'm really eager to go back and do some theater. I would love to do some more comedy as well because I think that's really the hardest thing to do; it's what I grew up doing, and I would love to go back and do that. I did a lot of theater growing up - musical theater.

I do prefer the stage. It's really the granddaddy of them all.

Acting? No, it is not for me. I would be terrible.

I think theater will always be my first love. I've been doing it since I was nine, and there's nothing quite like being on stage, having the immediate intake of energy and exchange of ideas.

I'm kind of thinking that I might start trying to do some acting. I really enjoy role play.

I'm an actor. I want to do drama.

When I first became an actress, I expected to do regional and classical theater; I just love the whole creative process.

I'd like to do plays, maybe a one man show.

Doing a play, you have a little bit more time, obviously. You rehearse for a month before you get up in front of people. It's a totally different energy. With film, TV, you want to try to capture lightning-in-a-bottle moments. I don't try to rehearse as much with that stuff, because you want those sparks of something to come out, if they do.

I have, I think to do a play a year is very good if you can afford the time and the energy because it's difficult to do, it's really the actors medium of course, because you're really out there and nobody's yelling cut so, yeah I have.

I played a little basketball, but basketball interfered with theater season. That's when we did our term plays and did nutshell versions of Shakespeare for English classes. And, believe me, I got a fair amount of looks from the guys on the team. 'You're in theater but you can play football?'

I have been doing acting my whole life. I did plays in high school. I take it pretty seriously. I used to do a lot of Shakespeare and Shakespearean festivals and monologues.

The theater is so endlessly fascinating because it's so accidental. It's so much like life.

No matter how good you might be in a movie, you'll never be any better. But in a play, I can be better next Tuesday. That's the thrill of it.

I went to drama school. I'm classically trained; I studied Shakespeare, blah blah blah. But I always preferred to do Oscar Wilde, or Shakespeare's comedies over his dramas.

I kind of went into soap opera with 'General Hospital' in the '80s. It's like theater because every day it's a new script, which really doesn't have a beginning, middle or end like a play or a movie script. So you have to be on your toes and bring it every day. And you have to be spontaneous, which is really how I like to work.