Actor Quotes

My father was brought up in an orphanage in the Catskills. He was a factory worker. And because his family wasn't there for him, family was everything. We could disagree inside the house, but outside the house it was us against the world. So when I became a drag actor, he looked sideways but said okay.

I do think I'm lucky I met Michael. Not just Michael Douglas the actor and producer with two Oscars on the shelf, but Michael Douglas, the love of my life. I really do think it was meant to happen.

I didn't become an actor to have power, but it just happens that I have it and so I have a lot of opportunities.

It is scary for an actor when you get hired as a lead. No matter what the plot is, it is your job to do something interesting enough to make them want to get inside the lead character's head.

When I was a kid, I thought I was going to be an actor.

As an actor, you don't often get a chance to know exactly the impact of what the audience is seeing, even though you can ask where the frame is. A move that feels tiny can be huge, and vice versa.

Well, I was sort of a jack-of-all-trades in show business for a long time. I was a singer and a dancer and then I got a job as an actor.

You can't ignore the system and the power you acquire as an actor if you're in films that are successful.

The more film I watch, the more John Ford looks like a giant. His politics aren't so good, and you have to learn to accept John Wayne as an actor, but he's a poet in black and white.

So from an actor's perspective, you really have no idea how you're acting.

And I think that's why I was going to be a musician. I was very rebellious. And I didn't want to be an actor. My father used to say to me you should be an actor if you want to be in the arts.

Indeed I regard the enduring support which I have received over the years from all sections of the community in Ballymena as being more than sufficient recognition for any success which I may have achieved as an actor.

I wouldn't even begin to presume that the talent of an able actor is anything like the talents of a prodigious musician.

A biopic would have required hiring an actor, and I always wanted to just let Bobby be Bobby. My thought was it would make it a more universal story to focus on ordinary people rather than this extraordinary man.

An actor has to embody a role.

I was just a young guy who was excited to become a comedian and an actor and I just wanted to get to do what I got to do.

To me, it's the kiss of death when you start winking at the audience as an actor. I just never liked it. I don't like it when we do monologues, looking into the character.

I've always considered myself an actor first and foremost.

Not to be offensive, not to be capricious, not to be arbitrary, not to be neurotic, not to be an actor outer, you're just trying to get in and you're given so little time to get in gently, but it's always hard.

As a young actor, people were trying to define who I was before I really knew that for myself. But I still remember thinking, "This is what I love doing, and I hope I'm going to be able to do it forever."

I've always said that I benefit, as an actor, from not having the illusion of security.

Obviously an actor draws on his own experience.

People need to realise what real happiness and success is, because success as an actor is fleeting. You can be up there one day and gone the next.

From that moment on I knew my profession in life was and has remained until today an actor's life.

I was in drama, wanted to be an actor.

And once you cease to be a real person, you stop being a good actor.

I like working with an actor who doesn't do the oneupmanship. One who has no trick and gives a true, honest performance.

There's always a concern as an actor that you'll be boring unless your character is swinging from a chandelier.

Actresses can get outrageously precious about the way they look. That's not what life's about. If you starve yourself to the point where your brain cells shrivel, you will never do good work. And if you're overly conscious of your arms flapping in the wind, how can you look the other actor in the eye to respond to them?

I'm a director's actor; I'm a storyteller's actor.