George Pierce Baker Quotes

An amateur can be great in front of the camera, but you need an education to get on stage where you have full control as an actor.

I still feel I belong to the theatre. There is nothing more challenging and exciting for an actor than performing before a live audience. The stage is the real testing ground for an actor.

I love theatre because it's just me and the audience. It's the litmus test in acting, to be able to sustain a performance over one, two or three hours.

There is probably some great acting that goes on in movies from people who have never been on a stage, but if you are in for the long haul, you'd be missing an enormous part of what being an actor is if you're not part of theater.

I have a background in theater. At the time I read 'The Loved Ones' script, I was playing Catherine the Great of Russia onstage. Straight after that, I played Stella in 'A Streetcar Named Desire' and Isabella in 'Measure for Measure.'

I was with the Jessie Bonstelle Stock Company in Detroit and Buffalo for three seasons - 10 performances and a new play every week. She was an amazing woman who did a great deal for me.

I played Jonathan Livingston Seagull in a musical version of 'Jonathan Livingston Seagull' in Austin, TX. It was pretty special.

When I lived in Ojai, I did community theater, and I was intrigued by acting.

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.

Acting is all about big hair and funny props... All the great actors knew it. Olivier knew it, Brando knew it.

One of the great joys of being an actor is you get to go back to school.

I was a dancer from about the age of four, so I was always performing and forcing my parents to watch my brother and I do 'Jesus Christ Super Star' in the living room. My first step was community theater, and then I started to do films.

I did great things in the theater. I did some nice roles, 'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly' or 'La Vie en Rose.' And I love my role in 'Frantic.'

It was a wonderful experience to live the life for a year; to spend all day doing Shakespeare and then do a play in the evening.

I'm a kid who did stock and summer youth theater where we'd put up two shows and you had no rehearsal. I've also understudied, where I've had to go on with no rehearsal.

I fell in love with acting at around the age of 11, when I was drafted in to play a fairy at an amateur production of 'Midsummer Night's Dream.'

I acted in junior high in the junior high school group, and then when I got into senior high I was, you know, the main actor of the senior high school.

As an actor, to go and see those shows - great plays like 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' and Clifford Odets's 'Golden Boy' - it's so exhilarating. I'd personally love to perform the role of Jerry in Edward Albee's 'The Zoo Story.' He's a transient, lost soul, and an example of humanity at its rawest.

I'd love to go back and do theater. There's nothing like that instant response and the connection to a live audience.

I never wanted to go longer than five years off the stage. Not necessarily musicals, but just doing a play or something.

As an actor all we want to do is act and play people.

The next day I was in my school's production of All My Sons. This was the performance where I realized something was happening between me and the audience that I hadn't recognized before.

So what's so enticing about doing a play is that you get to do that thing that got you into acting in the first place... There's a real attraction to being able to play, to just play. And that's something that theater affords you.

Acting is in your soul.

The great thing about acting is that, until you're dead, you can do it. There are aspects to it that as time goes on you hope you get better at, and there are a lot of things that I'm excited to explore.