~ Acting and the Theatre Quotes ~

[MysteRy]

[highlight-text]You can't automate in the arts. Since the sixteenth century there has been no change in the number of people necessary to produce Hamlet.

William T. Wylie

[MysteRy]

[highlight-text]The unencumbered stage encourages the truth operative in everyone. The less seen the more heard. The eye is the enemy of the ear in real drama.

Thornton Wilder

[MysteRy]

[highlight-text]A good drama critic is one who perceives what is happening in the theatre of his time. A great drama critic also perceives what is not happening.

Kenneth Tynan

[MysteRy]

[highlight-text]If you're successful acting is about as soft a job as anybody could ever wish for. But if you're unsuccessful it's worse than having a skin disease.

Marlon Brando

[MysteRy]

[highlight-text]From the point of view of the playwright then the essence of a tragedy or even of a serious play is the spiritual awakening or regeneration of his hero.

Maxwell Anderson

[MysteRy]

[highlight-text]Acting is the expression of a neurotic impulse — it's a bum's life. The principal benefit acting has afforded me is the money to pay for my psychoanalysis.

Marlon Brando

[MysteRy]

[highlight-text]True tragedy may be defined as a dramatic work in which the outward failure of the principal personage is compensated for by the dignity and greatness of his character.

Joseph Wood Krutch

[MysteRy]

[highlight-text]Theatre is simply what cannot be expressed by any other means; a complexity of words movements gestures that convey a vision of the world inexpressible in any other way.

Eugene Ionesco

[MysteRy]

[highlight-text]When the characters are really alive before their author the latter does nothing but follow them in their action in their words in the situations which they suggest to him.

Luigi Pirandello

[MysteRy]

[highlight-text]The unique thing about Margaret Rutherford is that she can act with her chin alone. Among its many moods I especially cherish the chin commanding the chin in doubt and the chin at bay.

Kenneth Tynan

[MysteRy]

[highlight-text]There are five stages to an actor's career: who is Herschel Bernardi? get me Herschel Bernardi; get me a Herschel Bernardi type; get me a young Herschel Bernardi; and who is Herschel Bernardi?

Herschel Bernardi

[MysteRy]

[highlight-text]Bugs Bunny - the perfect employee. Never absent. Never late. Never changes the script. Doesn't have an agent. Never asks for a percent of the profit. Doesn't ask to have his relatives on the payroll.

Anonymous

[MysteRy]

[highlight-text]I'm an actor who they said was wrinkled and balding and everything else when I was in my early 30's. Most of the people who wrote that who thought they were younger than me are now bald and wrinkled.

Jack Nicholson

[MysteRy]

[highlight-text]There are some great roles - mostly in Shakespeare's tragedies which no one can play at full strength from beginning to end. One simply hopes that one can hit the peaks as often as one has the strength.

Peggy Ashcroft

[MysteRy]

[highlight-text]In music the punctuation is absolutely strict the bars and the rests are absolutely defined. But our punctuation cannot be quite strict because we have to relate it to the audience. In other words we are continually changing the score.

Ralph Richardson