Classical Theatre Quotes

When I was a kid, I wanted to be an actor in classics like Shaw and Shakespeare and Chekov and Ibsen.

I'd started going to acting classes at 14, played 'Medea' at 15 and really wanted to be a classical actress.

My dream as a youngster was to be like Olivier. To be a great stage actor. To be a great Shakespearean actor. To me that is the Olympics of acting.

The classical actor in England makes roughly the equivalent of a bus driver.

I'm into parlor dramas. I'm into theatre. I'm trained for the stage. I trained to do Chekhov and Shakespeare, I was trained for the stage.

England is a mecca for actors who want to do the classics.

I never went into acting to do film. I went into it to do theatre - classical roles.

When I did 'Amadeus,' I hadn't done a play for five years. And I was so happy doing it and felt so foolish that I hadn't done a play for such a long time that I wanted to go back and really kind of reach out for a classical career.

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.

I think going from doing TV and straight plays to Shakespeare is weird enough because you have this heightened language, and you are telling a story through metric poetry. But I think music is that place beyond poetry.

I was a stage actor for 20 years or so; I was leading men in classical things. 'Shakespeare,' you know. And now, I never play leading men. I'm that kamikaze comic that comes from the left, turns the table over, and leaves, or the hyper-intelligent yuppie scumbag if it's a drama.

A lot of my training is in classical theatre; I've done a lot of classical plays in New York and also at the Guthrie and here and there across the country.

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.

I come from the theatre where there are no boundaries to the style you're doing; you're doing Molière, then you're doing Chekhov and then you're doing Arthur Miller in a season and no-one bats an eye.

I learned from master teachers at the University of Evansville, at Juilliard, at Shakespeare festivals all over the country, eventually landing at Shakespeare in the Park in N.Y.C. That show transferred, so I got to make my Broadway debut doing 'The Tempest' with Patrick Stewart.

I was very fortunate to have gone to drama school in London for three years, and that was classical training in the sense that a lot of it was dominated by stage work, so I would love to go back to stage.

I had the training at drama school where I studied Shakespeare and Brecht and Chekov and all these period historical playwrights and I think that I responded to the material.

I started out in the theater, and my background is classical. I'd love to be in a film version of a Shakespeare play.

Doing Shakespeare once is not fair to the play. I have been in Shakespeare plays when it's not until the last two or three performances when I even understand certain things. In the old days star actors would travel the world doing the same parts over and over again.

The only theatre I ever saw was Shakespeare.

The first 10 years I was a professional actor, I did Shakespeare.

When I was at drama school I wanted to do classical theatre. It just so happened that I did a film when I came out and I moved that way.

I started out doing a lot of theater, a lot of Shakespeare, classic plays.

Television has dried up for my generation, so it's plays and films. You get used to being lazy doing films, but classical theatre's going to finish me off.

I thought the best route to being the great actor I wanted to be was to play the great classical parts.