Frank Langella Quotes

When I'm doing a play like 'Betrayal,' I have to be careful not to get stimulation overload.

I want to keel over on stage playing King Lear at age 99 or something like that.

Denzel [Washington] just knows the actor. He knows the process, and you don't often get that.

I play out my role, I've even been out walking -They tell me that it helps, but I know when I'm beaten.

Oh, I like going down the rabbit hole. You know, that's kind of my job. When you play Macbeth, you gotta dive down that one. The trick is figuring out how to do it with love and a sense of humor so you can pop back out again. But, kind of the actor's job is to go down the rabbit hole.

I've been fortunate in my career to have performed in revivals of great musicals and to have originated roles in musicals that have in turn been revived. And I'm not dead!

I do find working with people in the entertainment industry hard. It can cause anxiety and depression.

I took the role of Ophelia in Hamlet because she is so naive, loving, and innocent.

It's a long way from not having enough serotonin to thinking the world is "stale, flat and unprofitable"; even further to writing a play about a man driven by that thought.

[May 1958, on playing Macbeth at age 30 and age 48] When you're a young man, Macbeth is a character part. When you're older, it's a straight part.

Every role affects an actor a little bit. There's always a little chunk of a character that stays left over in your heart.

every actor knows that tragedy, being linear and inevitable, is taxing - but comedy, which depends on the element of surprise, is the hardest act of all.

The training gave me the building blocks to get through it. A production of that scale, in a theater that big, you are going to struggle to keep your voice at first-run perfectness. All that work I did - the pull-ups and pushups - helped keep my body fit. Hamlet, the show, is a cardiovascular workout of about three hours, never mind the mental, soul-crushing element of it.

I did a different production with a different director and Bill Pullman. Oleanna­ - the one you saw - we were doing right after Bourne Identity or right after it came out.

I remember seeing Janet McTeer in A Doll's House. My grandmother took me and we had seats in the very back row, but her performance was so powerful - it was very accessible. I felt like I was much closer than I was.

That's what I tell young actors. "You don't have to compromise. Go do some theater and wait for an appropriate role."

The example alone of a vicious prince will corrupt an age; but that of a good one will not reform it.

Watching these channels all day is incredibly depressing. I live in a constant state of depression. I think of us as turd miners. I put on my helmet, I go and mine turds, hopefully I don't get turd lung disease.

I have asked a lot of my emotions-one hundred and twenty stories. The price was high, right up with Kipling, because there was one little drop of something, not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these, in every story, it was the extra I had. Now it has gone and I am just like you now.

Action films are emotionally and physically draining, and you're dirty and sweaty. In a romantic comedy, you have to have your fingernails perfect, you're in air-conditioned rooms the whole time.

The cast of Hamlet had not moved much. They had that haunted yet hopeful look in their eyes, like the ones you see in photographs of people crammed into steerage compartments, traveling to some new, unknown land.

This changes nothing. It can't. You are my friend, my king,but that's.... All you can be." He nodded, but it was a gesture that indicated that he heard her, not that he agreed, which was abundantly clear as he said, "And you are my queen, my savior, my partner---and that's everything.

[Fan In Lobby from Stardust Memories] that was just after The Dain Curse. My other big uncredited role from back then.

I believe when actors say they can go crazy playing the same role, over and over again.

The depressed fall back exhausted from every undertaking.