Stella Adler Quotes

The theatre, our theatre, comes from the Greeks.

I grew up around the theatre. My mother is an actress. I would fall asleep on tons of theatre chairs. It's in my blood; it's in my spirit and my fabric of who I am.

All these actors who died before I was born, all the theaters and the artistic movements - all that stuff fills you up and makes you feel like you're the inheritor of all this information and of all its passion.

One has a sort of spiritual obligation to go back to the source material of the literature, to make contact with one of the seminal plays of the modern theater.

The center of Western culture is Greece, and we have never lost our ties with the architectural concepts of that ancient civilization.

Doing Shakespeare certainly makes you a better actor.

If you actually saw your favorite movie star who is also a great classical actor doing 'Romeo and Juliet,' 'Macbeth' or 'Taming of the Shrew,' it would be a great thing and a great thing for kids to get interested in language.

I trained as a classical actor in London for three years. We did Tennessee Williams and dialect and accent classes; they were one of my favorite things to do each week. And we'd strip it down to the phonetics and listen to the sound. It was a really interesting way to look at it all.

I wasn't working much. So I focused on studying, and I really learned what it means to be an actor. And here I was on Jonny Quest,working with all these great people from back in the golden age of Hollywood, who came up doing radio. These were journeymen, working actors. It made me proud, and gave me some insight into what acting was really about if you weren't a star.

My real pleasure is that 4 times a week 1,800 people are standing up and shouting on Broadway for an author who died hundreds of years ago.

Thousand years ago, we all descended from Africans who left the continent. Those ancestors, we will never know their name. We can go back 200 or 300 years and actually populate your family tree with real people who had names and documents. They had customs, characteristics that, unbeknownst to you, you have inherited. Almost through osmosis it has been passed down to you.

Cultivate a love of skill. Learn theatrical skills. They will give you continual pleasure, self-confidence, and link you to fifty thousand years of the history of our profession.

I always think the great parts outlive the actors that play them and that's a stage tradition, that goes back hundreds of years and it should be that way.

When I was 15 years old, or 16, I carried around on the streets of Brooklyn a paperback copy of Plato's Republic, front cover facing outward. I had read only some of it and understood less, but I was excited by it and knew it was something wonderful.

I just love the history of acting. It's such a beautiful craft and you absolutely get out of it what you put into it.

Almost everything I learned about being an actor came from those early years at the Actor's Studio.

[Greek] Theater started off and used masks and Kabuki, in the East, they used mask-work. And then, Commedia dell'arte in Italy and then, you know, we're part of an acting tradition and, and performance capture is no different.

We are the damaged heirs of a damaged cultural style which has been practiced now for about seven thousand years.

It's not a movie, no private screening This method acting, well, I call that living

Tawny," I barked. My voice held the authority of a drill sergeant. She jumped. "I am NOT making out with you until the end of time. You want to do this, then you've got to work for it. Now, TAKE OFF YOUR CLOTHES." "Oh," said Hugh. "I've waited ten years to hear you say that to another woman.

I haven't really had a major role in film for about 12 years. But I never stopped working in the theater. I do stuff back to back.

There's no such thing as a small part. There are just small actors.

I was trained to be an actor, not a star.

I would rather have a young fellow too much than too little dressed; the excess on that side will wear off, with a little age and reflection; but if he is negligent at twenty, he will be a sloven at forty, and stink at fifty years old. Dress yourself fine where others are fine, and plain where others are plain; but take care always that your clothes are well made and fit you, for otherwise they will give you a very awkward air.

In the theater lying is looked upon as an occupational disease.