To grasp the full significance of life is the actor’s duty, to interpret it is his problem, and to express it his dedication.
James Dean
Acting is about giving something away, handing yourself over to whatever role you are asked to play…
Alan Rickman
Be daring, be different, be impractical; be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.
Cecil Beaton
Regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.
Thornton Wilder
The language of the body is the key that can unlock the soul.
Konstantin Stanislavsky
The camera doesn’t remind me of a gun, but it does remind me of a weapon. I believe the revolution will be fought with a camera, with films, and at a certain point guns will be unfeasible. Minds will be won in the theatre instead of on the battlefield.
Dennis Hopper
An actor, like every human being, has a very thin part of him which he uses all the time and which he considers to be himself. There is a vast area which is himself that he doesn’t know. By experimenting and taking risks a new process starts – what one actor once called a ‘number of drawers’ in himself that he has never opened.
Peter Brook
We don’t want bores in the theatre. Give us something that is different.
Dame Sybil Thorndike
If you want a bourgeois existence, you shouldn’t be an actor. You’re in the wrong profession.
Uta Hagen
Every now and then, when you’re on stage, you hear the best sound a player can hear. It’s a sound you can’t get in movies or television. It is the sound of a wonderful, deep silence that means you’ve it them where they live.
Shelley Winters
He who is incapable of feeling strong passions, of being shaken by anger, of living in every sense of the word, will never be a good actor.
Sarah Bernhardt
Quotes from the prospectus of the East 15 Acting School, Essex, England
