June Whitfield Quotes

The working class is very under-represented in politics, literature, and everywhere else.

I think that, often, actors represent what they're not. You get people who define the aristocracy who are not aristocratic - they're lower-middle class or working class. An awful lot of your so-called angry young actors have grown up in extreme bourgeois comfort. It really is surprisingly common.

I'm not a fan of the working class being mocked, including by some of our famous writers - even those who came from it.

I think there's a tendency in England, when you look at the past, to either have upper middle class period drama with its own rules, or if you're going to look at working class people, you have to do that in a particular 'Isn't it a shame, aren't they oppressed' way, or it's treated comically.

In Britain, when the working class are summoned for fiction, it's 'isn't it a shame, isn't it a pity, isn't it awful, the terribly poor things... ' whereas from within, it's nothing like that. It's fantastic, it's glamorous, it's terrible and good the same as it is for everybody.

Working-class actors have no identity. Our identity is playing every single poor person on 'Game Of Thrones.'

I reckoned my accent and class would count against me; I didn't see actresses as being working-class.

I come from an Irish working-class background but went to a posh school, and any type of pretension was quickly mocked at home. I've always had a keen eye for pretension.

Several people, not just reviewers, took me to task for writing about what they called the working classes - something I've been doing for 40 years. I thought that was contemptible - what do they want to do, ghettoize the working class as a subject? Can you only write about your own class? I've written about royalty, am I not allowed to do that?

People who bowl vote. Bowlers are not the cultural elite.

Telly never has any smart, amusing intellectuals living on a council estate.

People think that they just want movies like Pretty Woman, when really they - at least the ones that I know personally - have been waiting for something that doesn't completely insult them.

I'm working class, and want people to know I'm not unintelligent and all the other cliches that come with it.

I don't think that coming from a privileged background makes you this monster who doesn't feel things.

The white working class likes being pandered to even less than it likes being insulted.

With a few notable exceptions, literary fiction in the U.K. is dominated by an upper and upper middle-class clique who usually have a tin ear for the demotic and who portray working-class characters with, at best, a benevolent condescension.

I'm really white trash.

In England we only make films about the working class or the aristocracy.

‘The laboring poor’ is a detestable, canting phrase.

It's interesting that we assign the label 'political' to art that doesn't just fit a mould of status quo. Is 'Downton Abbey' not political? That's political! Every piece of art offers a perspective on the world. And what is politics if not a perspective on the world? 'Downton Abbey' is about class. It's also about race.

If you're white working class, it's very easy to caricature the elites, and if you're elite, it's very easy to caricature the white working class.

'Sons' was about working class white guys. And even though I didn't grow up in a motorcycle club, I grew up in a working-class, white-guy neighborhood.

Eccentricity is usually owned by middle-class and upper-class people. If you are working class and eccentric, then you're just mad.

My family wasn't involved in the college. They were more of just your 'white trash' kind of family. And so I have that kind of background, but I always kind of aspired to be something else, and I made a lot of different friends over the years that were passing through.

Not that I am hugely working class, but in the U.K. I'm always perceived, casting-wise, as being working class.