Steven Spielberg Quotes

I had no idea what it took to be an actor. Then all of a sudden I found myself cast in a TV drama. The director was very harsh with me. One time, he told me this would be my first and last acting job. I seriously thought that acting was not the right career for me.

I learned my business in the theater and in television, particularly working with the actors. You can learn much more in the theater than directing a movie, because then you have no time when you are shooting a movie to really work with the actors. You have to learn this craft somewhere else.

Some of the roles that are challenging are more in theater and TV. In movies, there's a tendency to cast actors in roles that have been successful for them. It has to pay for itself.

All the training at MGM came to be a great help for me on 'Molly Brown.'

As an actor, Coppola trained me. That was my training ground.

I am not a trained actor. My real learning began on the sets.

When I entered the film industry, I didn't know anything about acting.

My grooming as an actor took place after working with top directors like Hrishikesh Mukherjee, Gulzar, BR Chopra and Shakti Samantha.

I enrolled in an acting workshop and my first acting role was on the TV soap opera 'Melrose Place.'

My very first acting job ever, the first time I got paid to be an actress, was in 2001, right between my sophomore and junior year in college, when I was just 19 years old. I got paid $250 every two weeks, 10 shows a week, to be in the Utah Shakespearean Festival. I was Calpurnia in 'Julius Caesar.'

As long as they keep offering me some good parts and so forth - there are some parts out there that fit me pretty well - I'll keep going for a while.

I played the young Reese Witherspoon in 'Sweet Home Alabama' when I was 7, and the boy who played the young Josh Lucas was 10.

When you're working on a film, it's not theater; you don't have a few weeks of rehearsal. A lot of times you are showing up on set, and you've never been to the place; you've never met the other actors you're working with.

A big fear of working with an actor that's never been a lead in a film before is that you're going to have to work really hard to pull a performance out of her.

I've worked with little kid actors before, and when they start crying or anything like that, it makes my job so easy, because you react. A little kid crying, there's not much else to do.

Backstage life is terrific training for an actor, seeing shows from the wings.

Being an actor helps me direct a little bit, when I do that, which I haven't been able to do that much, but I plan to in the future. There are a lot of reasons for that, but certainly because I feel like you know how to talk to actors, and you know what they need from you if you've been one yourself.

One of the great things about being an actor is that you have a completely different challenge every few months.

I've always wanted to act and I grew up a little on film sets when my dad was working as an actor.

I don't know if I'm going to do any more acting. It's a great job, you know? Make a movie? Why not?

I acted for so many years and sat on a million sets and worked with a million different directors so that is to me some of the best training you can get.

There was one film that I really wanted. This was a long time ago; it was a film called 'Fracture.' Ryan Gosling ended up doing it with Anthony Hopkins. It wasn't a giant box-office success, but I really enjoyed the script, and I enjoyed the character. I got pretty close and was kind of disappointed it didn't go my way.

The first time that I performed as an actor was the first day on the set of 'The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.'

I learned more doing 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' than I did during three years at drama school.

I think being on a film set for such a long time made me a technical actor without realizing it.