Miriam Margolyes Quotes

For me the voice is the most important, but making your singing believable makes a great performer.

For me and accent work, I think once you've figured out where that energy is, where the sound is in your throat or your mouth, it's a whole lot easier to do.

There are some sounds that English singers find quite difficult to manipulate.

It's tricky when you're doing a recording, because the only weapon you have is your voice and the delivery of that voice. You don't have a gesture or a facial expression, there are no costumes or set pieces. Everything needs to be present in the voice.

If you've got a good vibrato, you can get away with a lot.

What you find with singers, no matter where they're from, if they have any kind of an accent, the accent tends to disappear when they sing.

Voice acting is very different from live-action. You only have one tool to convey emotion. You can't sell a line with a look. It's all about your vocal instrument.

The human voice is the most beautiful instrument of all, but it is the most difficult to play.

I think I'm a vocal genius, not a musical genius. I like background vocals. I consider myself a voice, not a singer. A voice is a sound, and singing is what you do with that sound.

Everyone thinks I'm singing falsetto, but that's my normal singing voice.

I'm not the best singer - like, I know I'm not Celine Dion.

You are an instrument if you understand your voice and how to use it - this sound, that sound and certain ranges and different pitch. Within that I try to find a rhythm and play the voice as if it was a horn.

I'm an OK singer.

You don't have to make a grand, exaggerated sound to sing opera.

Nobody told me how to sing, so I just thought I'd try and sing like Howlin' Wolf. It was like a bark; there was melody to it - but I would go off a bit and I wouldn't stick AutoTune on it or anything to make it in key. Even now, I couldn't tell you about harmonies. I couldn't tell about what notes I'm singing because nobody taught me to sing.

Everything I'd taught myself about screaming is basically a big no-no for singing. Your posture, your airflow - you're just pushing all the air out. When you start out, you're fast, heavy and loud but you're hiding behind it in a way. When you stop screaming, that's when it gets hard.

I think I've learned a lot on the vocal side of things.

The best vocalists I can think of are female.

The biggest thing is to just keep your voice in shape so that when the emotion hits, it's there to have the colors to paint those pictures with the lyrics as well as the sound.

For any actor, voice is his strength.

It takes a big voice a long time to develop properly; the bigger it is, the harder it is to develop the technique.

Whether the theater is 1,000 seats or 500 seats or 200 seats, you have to make sure the person in the back of the theater can hear you and understand you. So there's a lot of articulation and a lot of voice in theater that really just isn't necessary when it comes to dealing with the camera.

I've always been obsessed with the grain of the human voice. It's the ultimate instrument, there's this whole level of virtuosity and poetry, a sort of athleticism, of controlling your voice.

Exene taught me how to bend my notes when I sing. That's her style. And I learned that from her.

Voice is the first instrument.