Mary Steenburgen Quotes

My dad turned me onto Peter Sellers as a kid. I loved the fact that he was a unique combination of being extremely subtle and over-the-top all at the same time, and that's a hard thing to do. I admire that.

You have to be smart to play a dumb blonde over and over again and keep the audience's attention without extraordinary physical equipment.

I consider myself a character actor.

I realise that certain actors project their own image onto the screen - those who are the same on as they are off. But I've never had the necessary statistics to be able to do that sort of thing, and so, anyway, I always wanted to be a character actor.

You know, I've just always been sort of goofy and kind of gone with it. I actually usually work more in drama, but I have been floating back and forth with comedy, and somehow they keep giving me jobs in comedy, so I guess there's something funny about me.

Some actors try to play parts and do things they can't do. Being funny is one of them. Being funny's hard.

My heroes are Bill Murray and Dustin Hoffman. Those are the two actors that both do comedies and dramas, seamlessly. Also John C. Reilly and Philip Seymour Hoffman. They're all just great actors, neither comedic nor dramatic. They're just great actors.

Good actors, you always know what they're thinking. That's why they're good actors.

For me really good acting is about subtext.

With any character I play, I gravitate to the juxtaposition and humor.

I always enjoy impersonating my characters in the first-person singular.

There is this miraculous thing I heard Hugh Grant talking about - the thing about screen acting is that you can read people's thoughts. You are trying to register something inside and usually the eyes in cinema are where you will register that.

I'm not a very good impersonator, my friends maybe, but not famous people.

You have a dramatic portion of your television program and you treat it dramatically, and then you have a comedic portion of your program, and you treat it differently. Why do you change who are between the two pieces? You're the same person. Just go.

Do you think I am standing here, making this up as I go? I am sorry to disillusion you. I am not Robin Williams. I am the king of the pen.

The beauty of performance for me is finding details with which to betray character.

I think good acting is always character acting.

Drama comes more naturally to me. It's the comedy you really have to delve into.

An actor is an actor is an actor. The less personality an actor has off stage the better. A blank canvas on which to draw the characters he plays.

It's interesting - a lot of good actors are good mimes. But I'm terrible. If I tried to do an impression, nobody would know what I was doing.

You do develop a taste as an actress: Chekhov, Ayckbourn: it's the combination of comedy and human drama. I would never want to do anything without comedy.

To do comedy, you have to be a pretty good actor to start with.

Sometimes you can take those dramatic roles and maybe interject a little humor into them, and I think the reverse also works.

Actors act... Their job is to become this character. And I have, in fact, seen Sam Heughan become Jamie and Caitriona Balfe become Claire right before my eyes. It was an astonishing transformation.

I guess I find it easy to play uptight characters.