No one tries to cry. You try not to cry. No one tries to laugh. You try not to laugh.
— Martin Landau
I've got two daughters, and it's impossible for me to say one of them is a favorite.
I always believed that all it would take was a decent role. I felt like a pinch hitter with a leaden bat: that if I got a chance, I could hit a home run.
I run the 'Actors Studio' on the West Cost. I'm artistic director of that.
People do not necessarily reveal what is going on - only bad actors do.
An actor knows much more about a character than the character knows about himself.
I was very thin, exceedingly thin. If you look at 'North By Northwest,' you'll get a clue.
I trained as an actor with Lee Strasberg, Elia Kazan, and Harold Clurman, and those guys set a very high bar.
I don't know anybody who's any good who isn't nuts.
I had hair down to my shoulders, a beard and mustache. I was crude and rude.
I can take scripts directly to actors. Agents don't like to hear that.
I'm certainly not going to play any of Matt Damon's roles in the future. But he will eventually grow into mine, since he'll be around for a long time.
The winners shouldn't necessarily win, and the losers shouldn't necessarily lose.
A good director makes a playground and allows you to play.
I played a wide variety of roles.
The Italian tough guys, dey talk real deep like dis down in dere chests... while the Irish speak way high-ah, up here in their heads.
Life is a roller coaster. There are ups; there are downs. There are hills; there are valleys, peaks, and so on.
You can't perish because of your own feelings; you have to embrace those things as an actor because it's part of your palette.
I started teaching when I was in my 20s because Lee Strasberg asked me to, and he didn't do that with a lot of people.
Sergio Leone came to see me when I was doing 'Mission Impossible.' He wanted me to do 'A Fistful of Dollars.' I turned him down. I didn't want to get stuck as a stoic Western movie star.
My mantra is 'stay perpendicular.' Horizontal is not as good.
Dialogue is what a character's willing to share and reveal to another character, and the 90% they aren't willing to share is what I do for a living.
I could play a lot of things. And it's hard for people and logically hard and understandably hard for people to think of me for certain roles.
How a character hides his feelings tells us something about him.
Great teachers are the ones who inspire you.
The modern cineplexes are mundane, dull boxes. But 'The Majestic' pays tribute to the movie palaces that made people feel like royalty. It honors a time when pictures helped Americans get through grim periods like the blacklist and the war.
I did 12 shows in 13 weeks at a summer theater in Maine where we were paid $35 a week. After taxes and $25 for room and board, I had enough money for a pack of cigarettes and a bowl of lobster bisque.
Pictures are packaged and cast by agents.
Of course, I remember the Disney 'Pinocchio.' I was a little kid then... It was very instructive. Little boys who don't behave wind up in lots of trouble.
I think we've all done things we're not particularly fond of. Everybody goes through it and comes out the other end, and goes on with his life as if it didn't happen.
Subliminally, I had always wanted to act. Although I had only performed in a couple of plays, I was serious about it and was subsequently trained by people like Lee Strasberg and Elia Kazan.
I felt I knew Lugosi. Like him, I had worked for good directors and terrible directors.
It's good to make people laugh.
Harry Dean Stanton, Anjelica Huston - a lot of people have studied with me. It's paying my dues.
The year I got into The Actors Studio, Steve McQueen and I were the only two accepted that whole year.
Nobody knew me. They just knew that I was the guy from 'Mission: Impossible.'
I've turned down a lot of roles. Some of them made stars out of the people. I have no regrets.
Bad actors try to cry, and good actors try not to. Bad actors try to laugh, and good actors try not to.
In film, there are always things that could conceivably create artificiality in any performance.
I'm not speaking, you know, egocentrically at all, but I do have a very wide range.
The average scene in a film, you have to shoot it 15, 20 times. That means you got to laugh or cry 15, 20 times.
I was being groomed to be the theatrical caricaturist. And I know if I got that job, I'd never quit. So I quit. I knew I wanted to go into the theater... I wanted to act.
They were like little palaces: all rococo or art deco. You'd walk in off those hot streets into a nice, air-cooled theater, and you'd spend all day watching Cagney or Jimmy Stewart. It cost all of 17 cents.
You have to be crazy to do theater.
Agents have enormous power that studios relinquished to them. The studios, when I first came to Hollywood, that's where the power was.
A film is not going to change the world. But if it can do that to individuals on an individual level, I think it's a magnificent movie.
Jimmy Dean was my best friend.
'North by Northwest' took two and a half to three months to film. When I look back, I realise I wasn't intimidated by Hitchcock and Cary Grant. They were so accepting of me.
I hung around with Jason Robards, Richard Harris, Robert Shaw, Richard Burton. I knew not to match them for drinks.
People think I'm a very serious actor, which I am. But you know, if you don't have a sense of humor doing what I do, you perish.
