Olivia Williams Quotes

I had never dreamt I'd become an actress. It was destiny that put me in the right place at the right time and gave me the right opportunities.

An unforgettable experience happened on December 15, 1996 when I won the Supermodel contest while still in school. I was just seventeen years old then. Winning that competition was the turning point of my life. That's how I got into modeling and later started acting.

I dream of acting with Kevin Costner. I would love to do a movie with him. Not something funny, but a dramatic role.

I grew up on such a small island, and professional theater seemed so far away. I never, ever thought I'd get so lucky to be appearing in movies.

That's what I really focused on in school - straight drama - and I would love to get an opportunity to do that.

I didn't like the idea of acting back in school. Both my brothers were into it.

With 'Imposters,' I finally felt I had gotten something I could sink my teeth into. It's a dream come true, and I couldn't ask for a more fulfilling and challenging experience. It was something I didn't expect. A real surprise.

Getting a part in 'Raman Raghav 2.0' was an unbelievable moment. I couldn't believe that it was happening to me.

I think 'The Witch' was actually my 100th job. Only took me 100 jobs to get a lead! But it did change things a lot. It was a magical thing for Rob Eggers to pick me out of the all the actors he could have for that part. It was an amazing part. It's changed my career massively.

I got out of Las Vegas after high school. I knew that if I stayed there, I wouldn't have been able to pursue my dreams as an actor or dancer. My family always told me to dream big, so I made sure that I got out of there and explored new places, because the world is huge. And I'm still learning new things every day in this business and in my life.

I left drama school and went straight into a 10-week film for which I was paid £75 I might say, which for 1962 was one heck of a lot of money.

When I was a little kid it was my dream to go to drama school, but it was never something I thought would happen to me. I was a Jewish girl from North London and things like that don't happen to Jewish girls from North London called Amy Winehouse.

It was like a dream to me to suddenly get into the market with that kind of movie, like La Haine. It actually created my identity as an actor, that thing.

I grew up with it. As a young actor, I was always aware of the brilliant work of Shakespeare. We studied Romeo & Juliet and Macbeth in school. As a young actor, you're always mystified and intrigued by such brilliant work. To actually have the chance to be involved in this production was a wonderful thing for me.

I went to comprehensive school in North London and left without any qualifications [diploma]. And I was doing bits of acting and improv in a drama club in the evenings. Then I discovered you didn't need qualifications to go to art school, you just needed a body of work.

I was always acting. I was doing after-school plays and stuff like that.

I barely slept during high school because I was too busy dancing and acting all the time. The plan was to go to my dream college that had one of the best performing arts programs, and then go to LA to follow my dream of being an actress.

I grew up doing plays - I went to a stage school after school - and it's always something that I've wanted to do, but, in a weird way, if you do television and film and you didn't go to drama school and don't have a theatrical background, it's hard to get your foot in the door. In the same way that it is for theater actors to get into television and film. There's a weird prejudice that goes both ways.

I never planned on being an actress, just as I never planned on being a model. I went to law and international-relations school. It wasn't my direction. It kind of happened to me. And because it wasn't my dream when I started, I wasn't starstruck.

I've always loved movies but everyone loves movies, so I never conceived of the fact that I could actually be in them. In high school I had some friends in the drama department, but they were just doing plays, and I was like, "Eh, I don't really think that that's me." So I just played sports. Then, a bunch of years later, I'm acting.

The headmistress was a very well-respected theater teacher. She taught me what stage left and stage right were, what a director was, and what all these things meant, which was something I had no concept of. She sent me off to drama school, at age 18, and I stayed there for three years. Before I knew it, I was working on a TV show.

Acting has been my passion from the minute I started. I was pretty young when I wanted to be a doctor, but when I started doing theater work as a freshman in high school, the first time I hit the stage I was like, If I can do this every day, life won't get any better!

I was quite straight-laced. I was quite academic until I was about 14 and then I went to boarding school where I had the opportunity to continue to be very academic, but got less interested in it and became more involved in acting. And then when I was applying for universities I used a couple of places on my UCAS form to apply for drama school without telling anyone... but didn't get into drama school. But that was the most rebellious thing I did.

You don't have to necessarily go down the drama school route, or have connections in the industry. You can just make it.

When I first started out, it was very, very difficult to even get in the room with directors or casting directors because they would see that I hadn't been to drama school and wouldn't want to see me. Now, I feel like it's changing. We have this new generation of a lot of writers, directors and actors who are just breaking through, and they're doing it for the passion.