Shakespearean Acting Quotes

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.

If there is a streak of ham anywhere in an actor, Shakespeare will bring it out.

My first acting lessons were Shakespeare. The first time I ever started working with a coach was doing scenes from 'Measure for Measure,' which were tough dramatic scenes. And then 'Taming of the Shrew,' which required comedic timing. And that's the kind of stuff I love.

If I'm going to be honest with you, when I trained at school, I feel like I was training to be a chameleon. I want to be that versatile actor who can do anything - that's why you learn fifty different dialects, you do Shakespeare, you do commedia, you do it all so that if any job comes your way, you should be able to do it.

I was lined up to do this honors degree course in biology, of all things, for no better reason than I got high marks in it. I decided I didn't want to be removing worms' hearts for the rest of my life in Northern Ontario. I thought I would try acting. So, I went to England to study drama. I got Shakespeared out.

People assume that I'm very highly trained, that I studied and did years and years of Shakespeare. I have no training whatsoever and I've only done one Shakespeare play at university. If people want to believe that, I'm happy to go along with it.

You can't do Shakespeare with a Southern accent, honey.

I had never done Shakespeare before, but I don't think you can be an actor and not do it. There were moments when I thought, I'm just not going to be able to pull this off.

Playing Shakespeare requires technique. You don't play a Bach toccata by getting in the mood.

Simon Russell Beale is an incomparable speaker of Shakespeare and a superb all-round actor.

Shakespeare teaches you how to act. You come out of this process as a better actor. It's just the nature of the words he writes.

Most people know me from 'The Office,' where I played a guy who grunted out three or four words an episode and was kind of a knucklehead, and so I think it's surprising for people to see me do something like this. But Shakespeare is what I grew up wanting to do.

You'll see Dame Judi Dench in a Bond film, in Shakespeare and then starring in her own sitcom. You never see that here with Meryl Streep.

I wanted to play a TV detective because it's a rite of passage; I wanted to experience every area of acting. I haven't done comedy or as much Shakespeare as I had intended.

I just wasn't meant to do Shakespeare. I'm not vocally equipped; I've got this flat, nasal, East Anglian voice. I got to understand the fantastic words Shakespeare wrote but never got to fly with them.

All I ever wanted to do was be on stage, if possible acting in Shakespeare. And to be as good as I could be.

When you're playing Shakespeare, it forces you to think and feel and speak all at the same time, which really is what acting is. It expands your imagination and expands your size of thinking.

A lot of American actors when they do Shakespeare put on a phoney English accent and it drives me crazy. You're always fighting against the idea that only the British know how to do Shakespeare.

I found that the more I'd done Shakespeare, and the more I trusted my instincts and applied the same rules you would apply to any scene, the closer I got to how it's meant to be acted.

When I was doing Shakespeare and I had spent a lot of time and effort in trying to become a great Shakespearean actress. That was how I started my career, was in the theater doing Shakespeare. And my ambition was to be a great classical actress. That was what I wanted more than anything. So, I really pursued that in the first four years of my career. And it was an uphill struggle. It really was. Shakespeare's difficult and Shakespeare in a big theater is even more difficult. So, anyway, it was a struggle for me.

You've heard that old expression from Shakespeare, 'Just speak the speech'? The words themselves will take you to the reality of the character. And so this led me to interview people.

You have to get through the Hamlet hoop as a young actor. Your classical qualifications are based on the quality of your Hamlet. And then, as an older actor, you have to get through the Lear hoop. And I'm approaching the Lear hoop.

I think you need brains to do any Shakespeare with any authority. I could do Shakespeare, but not with any authority.