Aging Actor Quotes

I would hate to be a bitter, aging actor.

I want to play King Lear, Macbeth, Benedict, Coriolanus. I wouldn't mind doing Hamlet again. Well, I'm a little old. Perhaps I can rub Vaseline on the audience's eyes.

I've talked to a number of actors who have gained weight for roles, and just the sheer physical toll it puts on one's knees and shoulders - no one wants to do it again. I'm 57 and I don't think I'm going to take on any job or go on vacation again and see to it that I can gain 30 pounds.

I think I just never wanted to be the creepy guy where people say, 'Why do his leading ladies keep getting younger and younger, and why do they think he's so hot even though we know that the girl who's playing this part actually has a handsome boyfriend?'

I'd like this to become my principal activity: to make films about animals. Of course it's always interesting to model, but it depends who you are working with. I will continue to make acting, too, but I'm old - I'm getting tired of it.

It started at 49 with 'Tango in Halifax' and then 'Happy Valley.' I can't complain at a time when most actors are disappearing. I seem to have become very visible.

An old ham like me needs to be on stage.

Those offers come in now and again. They're not knocking down my door. I'm only an old character actor, and I'm not needed.

I don't think I want to play a teenager anymore.

I think, as an actor, it is good to feel the fear of failing miserably. I think you should take that risk. Fear is a necessary ingredient in everything I do. But if I do 'Hamlet,' it will probably be in a small theater on a small stage, and it will have to be very, very soon because I'm getting a little long in the tooth for it.

There is no barrier to Indiana Jones growing older. It's not an age-based character. We can't bang him up as much as we used to, maybe. But I guess I can pretend to have the capacity as well as I pretended before.

[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.

I have felt some twinges recently, about parts I wanted to play that I may be getting too old and fat to do. 'Hamlet,' for example - maybe that's gone. I would love to play Richard II.

I'm becoming more indulgent and less giving as an actor as I get older. I'm immersing myself more in roles emotionally.

As a younger actor, my motivation may have been 'Do you want that job or don't you?' Now it's 'Do you want to look like crap on film?'

I would love to do '24' until I was 60, but I don't think anybody would accept it.

I'm no longer the young woman I was playing before, and I'm in a profession where that continuum that is me is irrelevant to most people - they're meeting me for the first time, seeing me for the first time, and they're seeing an old woman, so that's what I've got to start being.

Obviously, you look for something that is commensurate with your age. You know that you can't be playing the young hero anymore, and you have to be relegated to something smaller and something elderly, and you just try and do your best.

I'm an old school actor in the sense. More and more now, I play myself as I get older. Even as a writer, I never got typecast. I've always bounced from project to project or initiated my own things.