Angela Lansbury Quotes

I probably did a dozen plays, like Off-Off-Broadway stuff.

I started off in theater; I did exclusively theater for four or five years. In the last few years, television has come along but I can still make film. I feel very privileged that I can move between them.

I actually acted onstage before I'd ever seen a live performance, and I loved it.

The old guys like me started in the theatre. I was in the theatre for nine years.

I think I've had more of a variety in what I've done than most actors.

Most of my career up until the last couple of years has basically been a training ground for me. Actors that came up in the '50s and '60s, they had the theater, and television was in its infancy.

I did theater at Spelman until I graduated from there, and I got to work with such luminous actresses as Diana Sands in 'Macbeth.'

I used to do a lot of repertory theater. You're playing different roles all the time, and I love that.

I started working in New York City as an actor and did many plays. I did regional theater, smaller theaters, children's theater.

I came from a theater background and always wanted to act.

I want to get to experience all kinds of roles.

When you look at me you don't immediately imagine a very very glamorous icon, so it's only in the theater that I get to do these experiments. I've been an actor about 51 years now. I've played everything from an 8-year-old black boy to a 72-year-old French matriarch, and they hardly hire you to do that on TV.

I went to New York out of college, and in my day, we were told that was the way you became a good actor. You don't go to Hollywood, you go straight to New York and work in the theater. So that's what most of the people I knew did.

The cliché about young actors is that they want to diversify the work that they do to show their range, but it's true. Or at least, for me, I want to keep doing different stuff; doing different work, you see different things.

For me, I've been really, really lucky because I have been able to play a lot of different parts.

My American accent is really, really good. I started out in the theater, doing all different characters with all different accents. When I first came to America, I thought I would be playing American, all the time. It was just weird how it worked out that I played more international characters.

I'm lucky that I've worked with so many different directors with very different styles and with a lot of different actors.

I don’t think I would ever have been able to be an actress had I not started at nine years old. I would have been the last person to stand up and say, ‘I’d like to star in the play.’

There are different types of art, and you just have to follow where things take you. It helps me with my desire to perform live. That's something that a lot of actors and actresses don't get to experience on a regular basis.

I stopped acting when I was about nineteen, twenty, when I got thrown out of college. I did act for about ten years. I don't know. I suspect I'm still a reasonably good actor, but I don't really know that I want to get on the stage again ... and having to say all those boring words by me over and over again ... I don't know if I want to do that. Also, I like a certain amount of freedom of movement, and if you're acting, you're stuck in one place for a long time. Having said that, I will probably be onstage next fall.

I've been lucky enough to be part of some great ensembles in theater - I'd been doing theater since college.

Mother of three; divorcee; American. Twenty years experience as an actress in motion pictures. Mobile still and more affable than rumour would have it. Wants steady employment in Hollywood. (Has had Broadway). References upon request.

I had been in a Shakespeare company for three years and done a lot of Shakespeare. That was fun. That was interesting. It was a lot of work - anything other than Shakespeare was less work. I had a lot of interesting roles, but I don't point to them and say, "That was more interesting than that," because I don't know what the criteria are.

I was raised in the theater and I started acting when I was nine. To me, the idea of being an actor was about playing different characters and being a chameleon. That's why I was in the theater.

I did community theater and kids programs at professional theaters and plays at school and voice lessons for seven years. I stopped because it was so time-consuming. But then I realized that I had access to this world where I could go on auditions. And there wasn't too much of an identity crisis when I started acting professionally because I had been acting longer than I had been writing. It didn't feel new.