theatrical skill Quotes

To me, as long as we've known each other, I've always thought Mick's most brilliant thing was that he could work in an area two foot square and give a very exciting performance.

Basically, I have a gift as an actress, and I want to present the sophisticated side of me as an actress and a person.

I have played Dracula a thousand times on stage and I find I have become thoroughly settled in the technique of the stage and not of the screen.

The big gap between the ability of actors is confidence.

Acting is bad acting if the actor himself gets emotional in the act of making the audience cry. The object is to make the audience cry, but not cry yourself. The emotion has to be inside the actor, not outside. If you stand there weeping and wailing, all your emotions will go down your shirt and nothing will go out to your audience. Audience control is really about the actor

An actor who is good at comedy can also be very good at drama, but not necessarily vice versa.

(Acting) is an extension of life. How you're capable of performing in your life, that's how you're capable of performing on screen.

I don't make much distinction between being a stand-up comic and acting Shakespeare - in fact, unless you're a good comedian, you're never going to be able to play Hamlet properly.

Improvisation is not a presentational form, except in small doses, or as a game. It's a tool.

I can do accents really well.

Comedy is commitment and playing a character and falling into the role, and I've been doing that since I was 19 years old.

A frequent change of role, and of the lighter sort - especially such as one does not like forcing one's self to use the very utmost of his ability in the performance of - is the training requisite for a mastery of the actor's art.

All of my favorite actresses are comedians at heart: Shirley MacLaine and Madeline Kahn, Diane Keaton and Debra Winger. And they are all amazing dramatic actresses, but everything they do is funny.

Emotional power is maybe the most valuable thing that an actor can have.

Some actors are brilliant character guys. They submerge.

How I shall miss Alan Rickman, his beautiful command of English, and a voice he played like a musical instrument.

I had to learn that a good actor, like an iceberg, reveals only a small part of his ability on the surface. You suggest; you don't serve on a platter. You hold back. You don't expose it all to view. That's the way to put the audience's imagination to work.

I think acting is magic. If I tell you all about myself it will spoil it.

Most of the great practitioners of the art of acting know exactly what they're doing; even in the best, most successful moments, when they let go of the awareness of what they are doing, they still, somewhere deep inside their body, know what they're doing. There is a craft.

The actors that I admire are able to step into so many different roles.

You have to be so confident and so gifted to fill five minutes of nothing at the very beginning of a play before even a word is uttered.

The actor should be able to create the universe in the palm of his hand.

I don't have the temperament of a performer, and I certainly couldn't do it every night.

As soon as I suspect a fine effect is being achieved by accident I lose interest. I am not interested...in unskilled labor. ...The scientific actor is an even worker. Any one may achieve on some rare occasion an outburst of genuine feeling, a gesture of imperishable beauty, a ringing accent of truth; but your scientific actor knows how he did it. He can repeat it again and again and again. He can be depended on.

Good actors can make a huge difference to a scene that might sound or read flat.