British Actors Quotes

The reason that most British actors are better than most American actors in the end is that they don't make any money. At the very end of their lives, they get into a space movie and they make a lot of money, but until that happens, basically, they don't have bank accounts. They live from day to day.

I have to say as an actor I have been inspired by so many British actors throughout the years.

When you're a young English person who wants to be an actress and you have dreams, you dream of being Vanessa Redgrave or Judi Dench.

I think it's sort of a rite of passage for a British actor to try and get the American accent and have a good crack at doing that.

Rory is very established in England, which you are seeing right now with Bond. But his father Roy Kinnear was a very, very beloved comedy actor here in the UK. And Rory actually even looks a bit like his dad. And so it makes a lot of sense to me that Rory has such good comic chops because it's in his blood. He's very, very funny as Sean.

I've found a lot of the thinking in America is that a lot of people become actors to become famous. At least from my experience, I have a dozen or so British friends who are actors, and if you look at their body of work, and they'll go do theatre, and they'll go do this and this. They work, and they're always honing and trying to be better.

It's weird, because usually if you're British and you go to America you play baddies; but I play naughty people here and goodies in America.

Americans are very good at animating voices. I don't know why. They have a freedom with them that we British actors find more difficult to get to.

American actors who voice animated movies are so brilliant at it, because by the nature of American speak, it's full of energy and full of commitment. And as a British actor, we have to kind of learn that.

On the whole, British actors star in theater, and I think there's something quite grounding about that.

British actors are pretty good, by and large, at turning on at 'action' and off at 'cut.'

But as I grew up as a child, falling in love with the theater and Shakespeare, my heroes were Sir Laurence Olivier and Sir John Gielgud.

England produces the best fat actors.

It's often assumed that British actors read Shakespeare and sonnets as we're going to bed at night and we're all very familiar with it.

British actors are renowned for being great villains in movies, like Bond films, all the rest of it.

I've always had a thing about Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett, Helen Mirren, Julie Walters, and Imelda Staunton. I'm hoping to follow in their footsteps.

When I first did a U.S. pilot season, there were very few British actors schlepping around town trying to get into television. That was 1999.

I want to be able to follow the example of those extraordinary British actresses who move effortlessly from film to TV to theatre roles.

There are some tremendous actors in the U.K. who have been knighted, and I've spent much of my life admiring many of them, like Laurence Olivier. So it's very flattering to be in their company.

I think there's a quality of passion to the American actor. I'm certainly attracted to it, and I like to hope that underscoring it is a characteristic of my work. That quality is certainly also present in some British actors, but I tend to feel the mechanical and intellectual process is dominant in the British.

I'm a huge fan of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost.

In England, with all due respect, we have some of the plainest actresses in the entire world as our greatest.

American actors are very different to British actors who have generally studied and been brought up culturally with the sense that the writer is the star and that their job is to serve the writing. Whereas Hollywood actors are brought up to believe that the actor is the star, and everything and everybody is in the service of them.

There is a whole bunch of great British actors of my age who aren't film stars or theatre actors; they're very much both.

We can only use British actors because everybody's got to talk exactly the same.