Stage Actors Quotes

A true priest is aware of the presence of the altar during every moment that he is conducting a service. It is exactly the same way that a true artist should react to the stage all the time he is in the theater. An actor who is incapable of this feeling will never be a true artist. ~ Constantin Stanislavski

Stage actors are usually much more conscious of speaking up and making sure that everyone can hear in the back of the theatre; a film actor probably thinks of that a little less. ~ Clint Eastwood

I'm a stage actor. That is what I do. ~ Jeremy Piven

The stage lost a fine actor, even as science lost an acute reasoner, when [Holmes] became a specialist in crime. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

I love Back Stage. I have lots of theater friends and actors who depend on Back Stage. ~ Anurag Kashyap

Unlike the people you see in Mathew Brady's photographs from the Civil War, the men and women of the Revolution seem more like characters in a costume pageant. And it's a pageant in which the performers are all handsome as stage actors, with uniforms and dress that are always costume perfect. ~ David McCullough

For the record, if you're not a stage actor, climbing onto Broadway and tackling something like David Mamet is not an easy thing to do. ~ Jeremy Piven

It used to be that you kind of got pigeonholed into one thing - you're either a stage actor or a TV actor or a movie actor. Today, there's a lot of crossover with film actors doing television, which never happened before, so those lines are a little bit more blurred than they used to be. ~ Aaron Tveit

I love stage actors. The pool of world class actors that have done theater [is big], there's a higher opportunity of grabbing somebody from that pool. ~ M. Night Shyamalan

There are so many stage actors on TV but you wouldn't know they were stage actors. And film and TV actors are going to the stage as well, so the crossover is great now. ~ Matthew Morrison

If you get a chance to act in a room that somebody else has paid rent for, then you're given a free chance to practice your craft. ~ Philip Seymour Hoffman

Film actors are, by nature, more complicated than stage actors. ~ Margaret Rutherford

I'd love to do Broadway some day. Before I started doing television I was just a primarily a stage actor, but I haven't done it in a while. ~ Steve Carell

I'll tell you what I think in general about people who want to make their Broadway debut that are not trained stage actors. Don't they know, Broadway ain't for sissies? It is a tough gig. You are responsible, physically, mentally, emotionally, for eight shows a week, at the top of your game. It's not easy. ~ Patti LuPone

Movies are a fad. Audiences really want to see live actors on a stage. ~ Charlie Chaplin

You can see some very great theatre actors who don't work at all well on screen. They're trying too hard at it. ~ Kevin Whately

An illusion has three stages.
"First there is the setup, in which the nature of what might be attempted at is hinted at, or suggested, or explained. The apparatus is seen. volunteers from the audience sometimes participate in preparation. As the trick is being setup, the magician will make use of every possible use of misdirection.
"The performance is where the magician's lifetime of practice, and his innate skill as a performer, cojoin to produce the magical display.
"The third stage is sometimes called the effect, or the prestige, and this is the product of magic. If a rabbit is pulled from a hat, the rabbit, which apparently did not exist before the trick was performed, can be said to be the prestige of that trick. ~ Christopher Priest

Wanting to be on television is a mental illness. Wanting to be president of the United States, wanting to be an actor - these are degrees of the same mental illness. If you need to be approved of simultaneously by more people than are in this room now, there's a problem. ~ Keith Olbermann

I think we have arrived at the stage where we are making it too complicated. I know guys who can't play two rounds before running to their teachers. ~ Vijay Singh

I used to play for 200 people and now I'm selling out places that hold 16,000 people. It's a big change, and it's so cool to see people out there screaming the words to songs that I wrote. It just really reassures me that what I'm doing is working, and it really boosts my confidence, as far as on stage as a performer and a writer. ~ Miranda Lambert

That pit of blackness that lies beneath us, everywhere ... the firmest substance of human happiness is but a thin crust spread over it, with just reality enough to bear up the illusive stage-scenery amid which we tread. It needs no earthquake to open the chasm. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

Since it was too difficult to get into the Screen Actor's Guild in New York, I moved to Miami in 1982 and started a successful career as a television commercial actress, obtaining my SAG card there. ~ Donna Rice

Actors think they're far more important than they are, and that can only lead to hurt. People with colossal self-importance have very far to fall. ~ Julia Sawalha

I started out in theatre, and there's no better feeling than the adrenaline of being on stage. ~ Georgia Groome

Politics is like a stage. Each politician plays his part according to the lines that are given to him. But backstage, the hero and the villain enjoy their drink together. Everybody ~ Ashwin Sanghi

In film, other actors' performances really are not your concern. If the other actor isn't giving you what you want, act as though he were. ~ Michael Caine

I worry that track is going to enter into an impossibly complicated stage, where our understanding of the complexities of human physiology - and our ability to accentuate and exploit them - is going to make the notion of pure competition impossible. ~ Malcolm Gladwell

So consequent were we in the liberation of human beings from the shackles of industrial exploitation that we sent about ten million people to do forced labour in the Arctic regions and the jungles of the East, under conditions similar to those of antique galley slaves. So consequent that, to settle a difference of opinion, we know only one argument: death, whether it is a matter of submarines, manure, or the party line to be followed in Indo-China. Our engineers work with the constant knowledge that an error in calculation may take them to prison or the scaffold; the higher officials in our administration ruin and destroy their subordinates, because they know that they will be held responsible for the slightest slip and be destroyed themselves; our poets settle discussions on questions of style by denunciations to the Secret Police, because the expressionists consider the naturalistic style counter-revolutionary, and vice versa. Acting consequentially in the interests of the coming generations, we have laid such terrible privations on the present one that its average length of life is shortened by a quarter. In order to defend the existence of the country, we have to take exceptional measures and make transition-stage laws, which are in every point contrary to the aims of the Revolution. ~ Arthur Koestler

I was a huge fan of 'Avenue Q' long before I ever dreamed of being a part of it. I saw it off-Broadway at the Vineyard and waited at the stage door for autographs! ~ Rob McClure

No one has ever asked an actor, 'You're playing a strong-minded man ... ' We assume that men are strong-minded, or have opinions. But a strong-minded woman is a different animal. ~ Meryl Streep

Most scripts are written to be green lit. They're not written to be acted. And a lot of writers with the greatest intention in the world don't write for actors. They don't understand the architecture of what an actor needs to get from point A to point B. ~ Laura Linney

I became an actor by doing school plays and youth theaters, and then National Youth Theatre of Great Britain. And then I did study at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts. For me that was a good way to enter the field, to work in the theater. ~ Chiwetel Ejiofor

Growing up and being a kid, I knew that creativity was at the heart of what I wanted to do. I always had this feeling of wanting to be a comedian and wanting to be an actor. ~ Chris Gethard

Stage 13 was, then, a toy shop, a magic chest, a sorcerer's trunk, a trick manufactory, and an aerial hangar of dreams at the center of which Roy stood each day, waving his long piano fingers at mythic beasts to stir them, whispering, in the ten-billion-year slumbers. ~ Ray Bradbury

No country can reach a high stage of civilization without a leisure class ... ~ Gertrude Atherton

That's one of the cool things about going to local bars: seeing what people are doing and jamming with them. I'm a huge advocate of jamming with others; you learn a lot. So I love to go and do that - even if people wipe the stage up with you.. ~ Slash

I was running after the sublime, where everything is good. I was chasing after an image of ruffled sails that raise themselves like a phantom ship on a sea of oil, drifting, coming together, breaking free at the command of imperceptible trade winds, trailing around an infinite sorrow to the four corners of the stage. And whether the ship was a galley, a schooner, a merchant ship, or a privateer vessel didn't matter. What did I care whether it put up its sails or slowly stripped itself bare? Its wandering was what moved me. ~ Anne Garréta

As a film director and as film actors, you get used to a certain rhythm that's slow. But with TV, it's hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry. It's a different pace. ~ Lee Daniels

Actors are their own worst enemies. They quite often will get in their own way, and I have to be encouraged, endlessly, not to get in my own way. ~ James Purefoy

I always feel like if someone has stage fright, I really try and say, "Listen, these people want you to succeed, they want to have a good evening. They want to see something really great. They don't want to see something crappy. They don't. They want to be at something really special." ~ Laurie Anderson

The profession of magician, is one of the most perilous and arduous specializations of the imagination. On the one hand there is the hostility of God and the police to be guarded against; on the other it is as difficult as music, as deep as poetry, as ingenious as stage-craft, as nervous as the manufacture of high explosives, and as delicate as the trade in narcotics. ~ William Bolitho

But I've always been hard to cast, I've never been an ingenue, I've never been the romantic lead. I'm an actor; give me the script and I do what I do and hope it's good. ~ Edie Falco

As an actress, I always felt like the people you met on set were interchangeable with the people you met on other sets - the grips, the gaffers, the actors, the directors - everybody steps into their role. ~ Brooke Adams

To have a songwriter that wrote so specifically what I felt to be true ... I've never been much of an actor either. If something is real for me, then I can do it. ~ Barry McGuire

As a director and an actor, I encourage improvisation but in character and in the moment of what it is. ~ Billy Crystal

I played Thersites and I remember we were also doing some places out of town before starting our run at The Old Vic in London and we were at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre in Guildford and I walked on stage and I've got an opening speech that begins: "Agamemnon, how if he had boils?" And I went on and said: "Agamemnon ... " And a woman in the front row just went 'tut'. I thought: "I've only done four syllables, give us a chance!" I got one word out and the audience were already tutting. It was worse than any heckle I ever had doing comedy. So, I'll stick to gnomes. ~ Matt Lucas