Jack Klugman Quotes

Uta Hagen is our greatest living actor; she is, moreover, interested and mystified by the presence of talent and its workings; her third gift is a passion to communicate the mysteries of the craft to which she has given her life. There are almost no American actors uninfluenced by her.

I do think - I always tell that to young people - go to college, do theater, work with an audience. Don't try to learn how to act in front of millions and millions of people. Don't make that your first ambition, to be on a sitcom or get into the movies. Learn who you are as an actor, and the best way to do that is to do it in front of an audience.

I consider theater, this is a vacation for me from LA, I sort of view this as I get to have this vacation and during my vacation I get to work on acting. It's like an acting class. And if I go too long without doing a play, I just feel empty. Like approaching a role, I feel like the pool is very shallow, like I'm drawn from it. So I need to come back and do a play, fortunately I've been able to, every couple of years.

What I've found is that stage is very much a foundation of acting. It's where it all began and you're working with that repetition.

I started doing regional theater. My first job was 'The Importance of Being Earnest' at Dallas Theater Center.

Film acting is really the trick of doing moments. You rarely do a take that lasts more than 20 seconds. You really earn your spurs acting onstage. I needed to do that for myself. I would hate to say at the end of everything that I never did a stage play.

My goal has been to be a great character actor.

A lot people ask me, 'How do I become a voice actor?' and, well, first of all, drop the 'voice' because you don't know what mechanics you'll have to employ. If you can just focus on the acting, then the rest will come.

Doing Shakespeare on stage with Kenneth Branagh, I don't think it gets better than that.

I think if you're an actor, then you can work on stage - but if you've never done it before, you're going to have picked up a few things that you're going to need to change when you're working on stage.

In England, when we're at drama school, we spend a lot of time learning the craft from playwrights and stage actors, who are very well trained in the basics of acting because they need to get it right the first time - you can't have second or third takes when you're in front of a live audience, unlike in film.

I left the Gaiety School of Acting in Dublin in 2004, and I did five years of theater after that.

The process of doing plays will make you an actor.

Doing Shakespeare certainly makes you a better actor.

I think I'll always prefer theater to working in front of the camera. It seems a more distilled form of the craft.

I've been acting for a while, but theater is pretty different. I've never been in a play.

I don't mind doing the green-screen stuff at all, and in fact it's a lot like black-box theater, which I did plenty of in New York.

I wanted to be the best actor possible. I worked very hard at the craft of it.

I've played parts that were just likable people, and there's a certain pleasure in that. And that's that.

I needed to do a play. I needed to learn how to act again, in a focused, all-encompassing way, and a really challenging play is a great way to do that.

I knew I wanted to act since I was 10, but I didn't actually start acting until I was in high school. My favorite play was 'Lilies of the Field.'

I did theater when I was younger, and I'm not the best actor ever - I haven't done it in a long time - but hey, if an opportunity presented itself, I would take it!

I never thought I'd be doing TV. I've always loved it, but I felt like I was just going to do Broadway because that was what I wanted to do the most.

I'm a geeky actor, in the way that I like the craft of acting. I trained as a stage actor and was given a lot of technical tools to play with. I like the craft of acting. It sounds geeky when I say it, but it's true.

My mom (Kate McCauley) is an actress, so I guess she's the one that taught me it was a possibility. For as long as I can remember, I've always played make-believe ... It's something that I've always done, that I've always been comfortable doing.