Honor Blackman Quotes

My looks haven't prevented me from playing prostitutes or people broken by life. But when they need a token blonde with big breasts, that's OK, too. It's part of the game.

I don't like actors, I like women.

I tend to play nurses and waitresses and policewomen.

It'd be very difficult to cast me as a ballet dancer. Everybody is, in some sense, controlled by their size and their gender. I'm not going to be allowed to play the part that Denzel Washington plays.

Not one role that I've played has been written specifically for me.

I am fond of depicting the lives of young folks for one thing, and if you have parts for girls or young men, you must absolutely have young people to fill them - that is generally acknowledged now.

A lot of the time, in the past, I have played the pretty blonde in a lot of roles.

I remember I was up for the role of Jim in 'Huck Finn,' and because I went to Harvard and Yale, they didn't think I would be able to play a slave. I said, 'Oh, please.' I had to go in there and prove to them that I wasn't too intelligent to play a slave.

If I were a man, I'd be allowed to play roles that were compelling and drove an audience to an emotional response.

Not until somebody turns round and says, 'Art, how do you fancy playing Charles Dickens? How do you fancy playing Prince Charles in this biopic?' Until those movements come, then no, we haven't got past anything.

I look at my early career, and you know, when I left drama school, for a young Asian actor, you could either play a doctor on 'Holby City,' or you could play a terrorist in 'Spooks' and get to wear a nice shiny suit.

There is a very thin line when a man plays woman. If you're not careful, you may end up looking like a eunuch. If you don't enact your role properly, you can look very bad.

I don't want to put on any gimmicky layers just to give the character more definition. I just want to play good characters. It doesn't matter to me if it's 'open ethnicity' or 'specifically Asian.'

I once literally had a casting director ask my agent, 'Can she play anything other than a drunk?'

I was a youngster looking up to dudes like Vicky McClure, Joe Dempsie and Michael Socha - in fact, he was a big influence on how I was able to detach drama from the all-singing, all-dancing stigma.

In 'There Will Be Blood,' my character was someone who was an actor himself almost. He had a rehearsed quality about him. He was a performance artist in a way.

I never get the tall, blonde, glamorous roles because I'm not tall, blonde and glamorous. I'm more the wee, disturbing characters because of the way I look or sound.

So I sat down with him and portrayed more the side of the character he needed to see. Which is what I do when I go in for an interview for a part I like. As much as you think you're dealing with creative people, they see you for what your image is out there.

Actors and magicians are both performers, and they represent things that are not necessarily who they are.

Being an actor, you are recognized for being somebody else, whereas these books are distilled from me.

I used to play a lot of foreign women in my youth because I was prettier then. I would go for interviews, and directors would look at these sultry, exotic looks, hear this clipped accent and think the two don't go together. So they would give me a foreign accent.

In sitcoms, the women are so beautiful, understanding and well-bred. They have humor, but sort of display it with a twinkle of the eye and not a guffaw. But there's no juice in that for me.

Matching character and actor is what a good director does.

I don't exactly set out to only play creepy characters, it's just that a lot of those roles come my way.

I consider myself a character actor.