Actor's Struggles Quotes

People ask me, 'Did you ever want to be a live-action Peter Parker?' Are you kidding me? These actors live in a gym and wear really uncomfortable tights for 14 hours a day. And it's not like you're doing some very fun acting. Shooting is a real drag. Then you do press for five months? I don't think I could get it.

I was up at Big Sur with Christopher Reeve and Christine Lahti, doing this woman in a big fat-suit - Mrs. Bassett in Tennessee Williams' Summer And Smoke - and my husband was in the show too, playing Lahti's fiancée. Every night he'd be proposing to beautiful Christine Lahti, and I'd barrel onstage in this fat-suit. I hated it! But I did it, because by then I knew that that was my casting.

It's my life's aim to make people understand the job of an actor, what they go through, and why they are such a protected species. People see the glamour part of it. But there's so much stress that often you don't even pay attention to the luxuries.

I'm just a believer in keeping all of the creative brain cells moving and working even when you're not working because the inevitable loneliness and boring drought in the actor's world, it can eat you alive.

[Denzel Washington] was rustling with something and when he came back it was with a word about loving myself and the body that I'm in because I was still going on and on about the weight thing. I just liked that, because what people don't understand is that so much of what blocks us as actors is so personal.

An actor's life is abnormal! It feels like I'm being watched all the time, whether I'm at a restaurant, gym, or anywhere. I sometimes feel I don't want to be looked at.

Such is an actor's life. We must ride the waves of every film, barfing occasionally, yet maintain our dignity, even as the bulk of our Herculean efforts are keel-hauled before our very eyes.

Many times an actor is stuck for the lack of choices. The same happened with me when I started my career. That was the time when mainly romantic films were being made, and that is what I was offered all the time.

The crushing, pitiful, and frequently just plain risible pathos of an unsuccessful actor/performer's life is well charted.

I think my parents were surprisingly cool with me entering the arts. Although, I think they thought it was going to be a phase, and they didn't expect me to actually stick with it, and rightfully so. They were concerned whether I could afford groceries, being an actor.

One of the first roles I had on stage was with a brilliant director in a brilliant play with a brilliant cast, but I just couldn't find my way into the heart of the character. I found myself straining a lot. When it started. I felt lost. That was the Eugène Ionesco play Rhinoceros. I don't think I was prepared for that. I don't think I had the full tool kit to do it justice. It's a very difficult play, it's an extraordinarily difficult part, and I never felt I really got it right. Far from it. To a degree, Hamlet was the same.

I totally agree. I hate knowing too much when I'm going to the cinema and watching as a viewer. I don't want to know that the actor has just gone through a divorce. I don't want to know that the person is an alcoholic. It just gets in the way of my pleasure of watching the character on the screen.