Famous Acting Quotes - Famous Quotes about Acting
A good review from the critics is just another stay of execution.
- Dustin Hoffman
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A good role for a woman is hard to come by—be she black, white, or sky-blue pink.
- Halle Berry
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Acting is a masochistic form of exhibitionism. It is not quite the occupation of an adult.
- Laurence Olivier
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Acting is a matter of giving away secrets.
- Ellen Barkin
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Acting is all about honesty. If you can fake that, you've got it made.
- George Burns
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Acting is like roller skating. Once you know how to do it, it is neither stimulating nor exciting.
- George Sanders
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Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing.
- Sir Ralph Richardson
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Acting is not being emotional, but being able to express emotion.
- Kate Reid
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Acting is not something you can do by the numbers. It changes from part to part. Day to day. Hour to hour. Some days I don't feel like it's that hard at all. Some days I don't want to do it for the life of me.
- Philip Seymour Hoffman
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Acting is standing up naked and turning around very slowly.
- Rosalind Russell
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Acting is the most minor of gifts and not a very high-class way to earn a living. After all, Shirley Temple could do it at the age of four.
- Katherine Hepburn
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Acting should be bigger than life. Scripts should be bigger than life. It should all be bigger than life.
- Bette Davis
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Actors and actresses who say they never go to see their own pictures are talking through their hats. You don't have to be a Freud to know that the most fascinating person in the world—actors or anybody—is yourself.
- Paulette Goddard
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Actors are the opposite of people.
- Tom Stoppard
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Actors like him are good but on the whole I do not enjoy actors who seek to commune with their armpits, so to speak. (on Marlon Brando)
- Greer Garson
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Actors should be overheard, not listened to, and the audience is 50 percent of the performance.
- Shirley Booth
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Actors who have tried to play Churchill and MacArthur have failed abysmally because each of those men was a great actor playing himself.
- William Manchester
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Actually, as a kid I wanted to be a tennis player, but I wasn't good enough, so I became an actor. Since then, I've just been lip-locking with gorgeous babes. So, let that be a lesson to all you little tennis players out there.
- Matthew Perry
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An actor is a sculptor who carves in snow.
- Edwin Booth
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An actor should be ready to play any role within reason. For example, I think the most ridiculous thing for me to do would be to try and play Shakespeare.
- Glenn Ford
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An actor who knows his business ought to be able to make the London telephone directory sound enthralling. -- (as quoted in Observer, Feb 12 1989)
- Donald Sinden
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An actor's a guy who, if you ain't talking about him, he ain't listening.
- Marlon Brando
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An actor's success has the life expectancy of a small boy about to look into a gas tank with a lighted match.
- Fred Allen
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An actress must never lose her ego - without it she has no talent.
- Norma Shearer
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Be nice to people on your way up because you meet them on your way down.
- Jimmy Durante
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Because I'm the only actor who ever killed John Wayne in a picture, producers have pegged me for a villain.
- Bruce Dern
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Because modeling is lucrative, I'm able to save up and be more particular about the acting roles I take. (star of 'Alien From L.A.' and 'Danger Island')
- Kathy Ireland
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Celebrity is death. . . . celebrity—that's the worst thing that can happen to an actor.
- John Cusack
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Cesar Romero would attend the opening of a napkin.
- Jim Backus
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Co-starring with Garbo hardly constituted an introduction.
- Fredric March
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Come to work on time, know your lines, and don't bump into the furniture.
- Spencer Tracy
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Damn sympathy! I don't care whether they love me or not. I don't care whether I am beautiful or not. I want a chance to act.
- Pola Negri
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Ernest is a neighbor or relative that we've all had at one time. He's abrasive, but he doesn't mean to be. He gets excited and ends up standing on your toes. I try to make him clownish and I don't want him too low key; and he's physically funny.
- Jim Varney
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Even the scenes where you don't have the action, I've got to pace myself. At the end of the day, you know, you might be doing a close-up and working on this scene and you got to be prepared, you got to have it available. So I think of that when I'm preparing for a film, so I prepare very hard.
- Tom Cruise
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First of all, I choose the great [roles], and if none of these come, I choose the mediocre ones, and if they don't come, I choose the ones that pay the rent.
- Michael Caine
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For an actress to be a success, she must have the face of a Venus, the brains of a Minerva, the grace of Terpsichore, the memory of a MaCaulay, the figure of Juno, and the hide of a rhinoceros.
- Ethel Barrymore
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For an actress to be a success, she must have the face of Venus, the brains of a Minerva, the grace of Terpsichore, the memory of a Macaulay, the figure of Juno, and the hide of a rhinoceros.
- Ella Wheeler Wilcox
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Fundamentally I feel that there is as much difference between the stage and the films as between a piano and a violin. Normally you can't become a virtuoso in both.
- Ethel Barrymore
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Get him. Ain't he purty? (seeing himself onscreen)
- Nelson Eddy
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Give me a couple of years, and I’ll make that actress an overnight success.
- Samuel Goldwyn
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Having talent is like having blue eyes. You don't admire a man for the colour of his eyes. I admire a man for what he does with his talent.
- Michael Caine
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He played the King as though under the momentary apprehension that someone else was about to play the Ace. (reviewing Creston Clarke as King Lear)
- Eugene Field
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Hell, I ain't paid to make good lines sound good. I'm paid to make bad lines sound good.
- Walter Huston
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How many actors does it take to change a light bulb? One hundred. One to change the bulb, and ninety-nine to say, "I could have done that."
- Norm Crosby
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I am happy being able to play roles with people my age because once you do something really mature there is no turning back.
- Lindsay Lohan
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I am not Spock.
- Leonard Nimoy
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I benefit from the Mr. Potato Head syndrome. Put a wig and a nose and glasses on me, and I disappear.
- Phil Hartman
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I didn't know her well, but after watching her in action I didn't want to know her well. (on Bette Davis)
- Joan Crawford
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I do not regret one professional enemy I have made. Any actor who doesn't dare to make an enemy should get out of the business.
- Bette Davis
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I do not welcome advice from actors; they are here to act.
- Otto Preminger
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I don't believe in astrology. The only stars I can blame for my failures are those that walk about the stage.
- Noel Coward
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I don't get acting jobs because of my looks.
- Alec Baldwin
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I don't have to try to be a sex bomb, I am one!
- Kylie Minogue
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I don't know very much, but what I do know I know better than anybody, and I don't want to argue about it. I know what I think about an actor or an actress, and am not interested in what anybody else thinks.
- James Agate
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I don't want to be a star. If you have to label me anything, I'm an actor—I guess. A journeyman actor. I think 'star' is what you call actors who can't act.
- Paul Muni
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I don't want to read about some of these actresses who are around today. They sound like my niece in Scarsdale. I love my niece in Scarsdale, but I won't buy tickets to see her act.
- Elvis Presley
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I don’t know what you do but whatever it is, it’s electric. (to Jim Nabors)
- Andy Griffith
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I enjoy being a highly overpaid actor.
- Roger Moore
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I feel ghostly unreal until I become somebody else again on the screen.
- Peter Sellers
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I have a wonderful make-up crew. They're the same people restoring the Statue of Liberty.
- Bob Hope
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I knew at an early age I wanted to act. Acting was always easy for me. I don't believe in predestination, but I do believe that once you get where ever it is you are going, that is where you were going to be. Was I always going to be here? No I was not. I was going to be homeless at one time, a taxi driver, truck driver, or any kind of job that would get me a crust of bread. You never know what's going to happen.
- Morgan Freeman
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I know I'm not pretty. I cannot make a place for myself on the screen as a beauty. I am not even an exciting person. There is, therefore, only one thing left. I must be an actress. And the more variety I can get, the more they will think of me as a capable actress.
- Karen Morley
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I love acting. It is so much more real than life.
- Oscar Wilde
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I love to come in and play with a wig or glasses or clothes. I love using props. I'm from the Peter Sellers school of trying to prepare for the character.
- Dan Aykroyd
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I make two movies a year to take care of the butcher and the baker and the school fees. Then I try to write, but it's not that easy. Acting is what's easy.
- David Niven
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I never let them cough. They wouldn't dare.
- Ethel Barrymore
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I never said all actors are cattle; what I said was all actors should be treated like cattle.
- Alfred Hitchcock
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I really think that effective acting has to do literally with the movement of molecules.
- Glenn Close
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I think acting is the most thankless profession in the world.
- Rosemary Clooney
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I try to choose to work on film and television projects that can change people...I like to do things that will make people think.
- Raven-Symone
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I was always a singer and a dancer, and I always wanted to be an actress. For me, it's all just one thing.
- Jennifer Lopez
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I was the first actress in the family, and I am still the only actress in the family. I shouldn't be saying it, but it slipped out!
- Eva Gabor
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I was told to avoid the business all together because of the rejection. People would say to me, 'Don't you want to have a normal job and a normal family?' I guess that would be good advice for some people, but I wanted to act.
- Jennifer Aniston
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I was what they called a feature player, never a star. They say I was in 500 films, everything but the newsreels.
- ZaSu Pitts
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I wish I could do it again. I didn't have enough time to get it right. (on playing Babe Ruth)
- John Goodman
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I won't be able to do what I'm doing forever. There aren't that many scripts floating around for fifty-year-old chicks.
- Cher
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I won't go up in a plane, but if a play crashes, I'll jump into the next one that comes along and take it up for a spin.
- Paul Muni
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I'd like to make people who see me in comic pantomime on the screen feel the way Mark Twain makes his readers feel.
- Dorothy Gish
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I'll walk through fire to do what I do because the movie business, when it's right, is the coolest art form ever invented.
- Ron Perlman
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I'm 49 years old and I'm cautious of the fact that very few people in comedy have careers after age 50. I think there's a notion in our society, and it may be valid, that people aren't as funny when they get older. It's a stigma still attached to the rebelliousness of youth. I do believe that sooner or later I'll get those great roles like Gary Sinise's part in "Forrest Gump" or Tommy Lee Jones' as "Two Face" in "Batman Forever".
- Phil Hartman
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I'm a lot more sartorial than thespian. They come to see me and go out humming the costumes.
- Constance Bennett
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I'm a Method actor. I spent years training for the drinking and carousing I had to do in this film. (on Ocean's Eleven, Total Film, 2002)
- George Clooney
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I'm a pretty girl who's a model who doesn't suck as an actress.
- Cameron Diaz
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I'm a skilled professional actor. Whether or not I've any talent is beside the point.
- Michael Caine
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I'm an actor. And I guess I've done so many movies I've achieved some high visibility. But a star? I guess I still think of myself as kind of a worker ant.
- Bill Vaughan
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I'm never satisfied with my own work.
- Pernell Roberts
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I'm not an actor, and I enclose my press cuttings to prove it.
- Victor Mature
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I'm not Jack Nicholson. I'm not Brando. But I do mumble.
- Benicio del Toro
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I'm now learning how to distinguish when I'm acting and when I'm not acting - offstage as well as onstage.
- Micky Dolenz
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I've always played disintegrated characters. I don't know much about acting, but I can play those kinds of characters.
- Jason Robards
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I've always thought of myself—not my personal self, but my professional self—as a kind of blank. I try to get inside a character and project him—one of my own private rules of thumb is that I have not got a character until I have mastered exactly how he walks. . . . It's not sufficient to concentrate on his looks. You have got to know his mind—to find out what he thinks, how he feels, his background, his mannerisms.
- Alec Guinness
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I've been close to Bette Davis for thirty-eight years - and I have the cigarette burns to prove it.
- Henry Fonda
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I've got a lot of ham in me.
- Lionel Barrymore
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I've made so many movies playing a hooker that they don't pay me in the regular way any more. They leave it on the dresser.
- Shirley MacLaine
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I've played a lot of bad guys, 'cause that was the only work I could get. People saw my face and went 'Oooh.
- Lawrence Fishburne
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If I make a move, like raise my eyebrows, some critic says I'm doing Nicholson. What am I supposed to do, cut off my eyebrows?
- Christian Slater
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If it's a good script I'll do it. And if it's a bad script, and they pay me enough, I'll do it.
- George Burns
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If there's anything unsettling to the stomach, it's watching actors on television talk about their personal lives.
- Marlon Brando
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If you apply reason and logic to this career of mine, you're not going to get very far. You simply won't. The journey has been incredible from its beginning. So much of life, it seems to me, is determined by pure randomness.
- Sidney Poitier
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In my next life, I'd like to come back five foot, two inches, with the best ass and tits you've ever seen.
- Andie MacDowell
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It is easier to get an actor to be a cowboy than to get a cowboy to be an actor.
- John Ford
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It was inescapable. I'd just about land something substantial, something I like or a good career move. Then some dinosaur would rear up and say, 'But the audience will think of him as Batman.' It was formidable. It was there like a brick wall.
- Adam West
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It was so wonderful being on 'Batman,' because you could be nasty and mean, and in the fifties women could never (unless you were some 'B' picture actress) be mean, bad, and nasty. It was so satisfying; I can't tell you how satisfying it was.
- Julie Newmar
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It's only people who are hysterical who can play hysterical parts.
- Sybil Thorndike
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Look, I take my work seriously, but I take myself really lightly.
- Salma Hayek
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More than in any other performing arts the lack of respect for acting seems to spring from the fact that every layman considers himself a valid critic.
- Uta Hagen
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My billing has always been; 'and', or 'with', or 'including.' That's all right; let the stars take the blame.
- Keenan Wynn
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My mother told me never explain, never complain. Even as a young actress, I determined I would never give personal interviews, since they made me so uncomfortable.
- Jennifer Jones
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My only problem is finding a way to play my fortieth fallen female in a different way from my thirty-ninth.
- Barbara Stanwyck
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My whole career has been devoted to keeping people from knowing me.
- Lon Chaney
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Nobody became an actor because he had a good childhood.
- William H. Macy
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Once the curtain is raised, the actor is ceases to belong to himself. He belongs to his character, to his author, to his public. He must do the impossible to identify himself with the first, not to betray the second, and not to disappoint the third.
- Sarah Bernhardt
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People tend to remember my performances, not me.
- Ellen Barkin
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Playing Shakespeare is very tiring. You never get to sit down unless you're a king.
- Josephine Hull
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Poor Ingrid—speaks five languages and can't act in any of them.
- John Gielgud
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Scarlett O'Hara is going to be a thankless and difficult role. The part I'd like to play is Rhett Butler.
- Norma Shearer
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She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B. (speaking of Katharine Hepburn)
- Dorothy Parker
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Sometimes between takes, I'll spin to disorient myself.
- Martin Short
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Sometimes I wonder if I'm doing a Jimmy Stewart imitation myself.
- James Stewart
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Talk low, talk slow, and don't talk too much.
- John Wayne
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That's what I like about acting: You get to live out these fantasies, and then you go home at night to your normal life, go back to just being Jon.
- Jonathan Taylor Thomas
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The basic rule of human nature is that powerful people speak slowly and subservient people quickly -- because if they don't speak fast nobody will listen to them.
- Michael Caine
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The best research (for playing a drunk) is being a British actor for 20 years.
- Michael Caine
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Theatre director: a person engaged by the management to conceal the fact that the players cannot act.
- James Agate
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Therapy? I don't need that. The roles that I choose are my therapy.
- Angelina Jolie
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There are no small parts. Only small actors.
- Milan Kundera
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There are two types of actors: those who say they want to be famous and those who are liars.
- Kevin Bacon
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This has definitely been the highlight of my day. (on winning an Oscar for "American Beauty")
- Kevin Spacey
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This isn't exactly a stable business. It's like trying to stand up in a canoe with your pants down.
- Cliff Robertson
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To tell you the truth, if Oliver Stone had wanted Pat Nixon to wear a G-String and swing from a chandelier, I would have played it that way. (on her role in the movie "Nixon)
- Joan Allen
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Two members of the acting profession who are not needed by that profession, Mr. Ronald Reagan and Mr. George Murphy, entered politics, and they've done extremely well. Since there has been no reciprocal tendency in the other direction, it suggests to me that an actor's job is still more difficult than their new ones.
- Peter Ustinov
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We become actors without realizing it, and actors without wanting to.
- Kin Hubbard
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We called him 'mumbles.' He didn't speak his words very loud. The sound man was always saying, 'Kid, speak up!' But he mumbled his way to a fortune.
- Sheb Wooley
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Well, for a nine year old kid to be able to earn $110 in one day compared to $10 for a paper round, the economics were even obvious to a ten year old. (on being a child star)
- Kurt Russell
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Whatever it was that this actress never had, she still hasn't got it. (on Loretta Young)
- Bosley Crowther
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Whatever it was that this actress never had, she still hasn't got it. (on Loretta Young)
- Bosley Crowther
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When I see myself on film, I find it kind of disturbing. She is so much in me. It's a genetic thing. (on her mom Ingrid Bergman)
- Isabella Rossellini
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When I was on my way to the podium a gentleman stopped me and said I was as good a politician as I was an actor. What a cheap shot!" (2004 Republican National Convention, August 31, 2004)
- Arnold Schwarzenegger
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When I work, I work very hard. So I look to work with people who have that level of dedication. And I depend on that from everyone. From the director to my crews that I work with.
- Tom Cruise
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Why am I so good at playing bitches? I think it's because I'm not a bitch. Maybe that's why Miss Crawford always plays ladies.
- Bette Davis
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Working with [Sophia Loren] is like being bombarded by watermelons.
- Alan Ladd
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You are never so alone as when you are ill on stage. The most nightmarish feeling in the world is suddenly to feel like throwing up in front of four thousand people.
- Judy Garland
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You can pick out actors by the glazed look that comes into their eyes when the conversation wanders away from themselves.
- Michael Wilding
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