I'd love to tackle a classic Shakespeare play or take on Nora Helmer in 'A Doll's House.' Musical theater, it's the classics like Rodgers and Hammerstein and Cole Porter's 'Kiss Me Kate.' I'm much more a Julie Andrews-type soprano than an Idina Menzel.
I started to work in television for three or four years, in 1954. There was one channel of television, black and white. But it could be entertaining and educational. During the evening they showed important plays, opera or Shakespeare's tragedies.
Classics stay alive because a great actor or a great director wants to do them.
Shakespeare in the Park is one of the greatest gifts in New York City. You just have to wait for the tickets - and it's worth the wait.
I've played some great ladies. Mame. Agnes Gooch in 'Mame,' when I started out in the '60s... it's a beautiful role.
Doing classic plays is wonderful. It's a wonderful way of developing style.
I do a lot of American plays. I've done a lot of Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams and Neil Simon. I was in 'Sisters Rosensweig,' 'Six Degrees of Separation,' all of that stuff. So we're very familiar with America. I did 400 performances of 'Born Yesterday.' I did 700 performances of 'They're Playing Our Song.'
Shakespeare is one of the reasons I've stayed an actor. Sometimes I spend full days doing Shakespeare by myself, just for the joy of reading it, saying those words... I do Shakespeare when I am feeling a certain way.
My parents would always take me to the theatre, and I was bored a lot of the time. Loads of Shakespeare, and I didn't know what the hell was going on. And then, when I was 13, we went to see 'The Cherry Orchard,' and it changed everything for me.
Here in America, every single actor, since they were little boys, they sing and dance and perform like angels. We don't do that. We are actors who work in a theater in very classic performances or plays.
We studied so much Shakespeare in drama school and I'd like to go back to that. I'd really throw myself into something that would probably petrify me. Tennessee Williams. Something juicy.
It was the '50s, and the card catalog and the Dewey Decimal System were in fashion. I hung out in the 812 section - American theater and plays. This is where I first read Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman' and was transfixed. I remember staring into space for what seemed an eternity after reading Linda Loman's final speech.
The great classics that, as a professional you don't get to do, you do as a student, when you don't know any better.
One reason why Shakespeare's plays remain so popular is that they're now regularly presented in updated stagings with a contemporary flavor.
I love the theater and I particularly love the classical theater and I love doing Shakespeare. It pays the soul, but it doesn't pay the rent.
I grew up in a small town, in a small community, and I would not have had access to great plays when I was a kid were it not for the films of 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' and 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.'
It's fascinating. It's also exhilarating when you see people making the exact same choices that you've made. It kind of validates what you've decided to do. I saw a wonderful production of Jessica Lange doing Streetcar with Alec Baldwin. It was gorgeous. It's a measure of what a great classic that is, that our Cate Blanchett also did an absolute amazing Blanche in Sydney, as well as in New York.
As an artist, you're thankful to get a shot at a story more than once, because it doesn't happen all the time. Whether you talk about 'Hamlet' or 'Death of a Salesman,' you always want to see what the next group of actors will do.
I'm not a big, three-hour-play, Ibsen-revival kind of man.
I started out doing a lot of theater, a lot of Shakespeare, classic plays.
Whether they know it or not, most American playgoers owe an incalculably great debt to translators. Were it not for their work, comparatively few of us would be able to enjoy the plays of Chekhov, Ibsen or Moliere.
It is true that there are few plays of Shakespeare that I haven't done.
When I was in school, and even after, I did a lot of classic plays, and I guess it sort of extended into film.
Being a theater actor, I've done a lot of plays where I've seen someone else play the same role in another production. Especially with the classics: Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams.
No producer should revive a play unless they have a very good reason for it. I think there's quite enough about a good play to make it available to new audiences.
