It's a vain craft, acting.
— Roger Rees
I like to do really good things. But 'good' - witness Charles Dickens - doesn't mean 'not popular.'
'Merry Wives of Windsor' is a wonderful machine. It's one of the great farces, and it's astonishing to remember that this is written by the same man who wrote 'Hamlet,' 'The Taming of the Shrew' or 'Cymbeline.' It's so similar, and yet the form is so different.
Most of my enjoyable times in the theater have been working in a group.
I have a little studio in Chinatown, and I sometimes go there and rearrange my brushes. But I would have to stop acting altogether in order to become a painter. At the moment, I'm still interested and active as an actor and director. Besides, I rather think acting and painting are all part of the same creative urge.
If you live in the States, you have to join a gym.
I don't know why, but I was really good in that first play.
I've learned from the greatest people, and I've got wonderful things to pass on.
Daring to love someone is something we all do.
I'm astonished to say, but people are really pleased to hear what happened to me, the way I got a little bit more confident, the people I've met, and the things I didn't know.
I used to be the voice of Virgin Atlantic in America, and some people only know me for that.
The sense of popularity in an actor is essential.
I've been with Shakespeare all my life.
Mostly, theater becomes blander and blander as everyone wants the same thing they saw before. The good plays are the ones that don't allow you to do that.
So, suddenly I was an actor. I don't remember being nervous. I learned to be nervous later.
They said my voice was terrible, nervous, and spotty and that I must go away and learn how to use it properly. I must admit I was rather agape, since I had never thought about making my voice better.
We did a black 'Julius Caesar' in which the predominant accent was Caribbean. This offends many people, you know. I also had a Chinese Marc Anthony. I also managed - this caused a great shock - I also got some white guys in it as well!
You may be modest and un-egotistical in your life; I'm quite ordinary. But I play big egotistical parts.
You got paid on Friday, go for a late-night poker game, and have no money on Saturday. But the RSC took your rent out of the paycheck, so at least you had a place to sleep.
What I strive to do is to make the theater experience something that people remember and recall rather than dismiss because it was less like their everyday experiences. So, I'm less interested in internal emotionalism and much more in making the audience laugh and cry by the devices that we use as theater actors.
I've always thought like I'm really a 3-feet-high comic trapped in a leading man's body... but then I played Nicholas Nickleby, and suddenly I was heroic.
I was really serious about painting, so I could never be a Sunday painter. You can't just switch it on and off.
People very often say to actors that they admire their careers, and I rather think that what's implied by that is that we have a choice in the matter. When really, most actors, me included, do whatever comes along next.
I was a skinny 17-year-old.
Now, of course, we know there has been an end to apartheid in South Africa, but what excited me was seeing it in the context of history.
I do one thing Gielgud didn't: I play the ukulele.
The Elizabethan mind wanted and demanded that one word could mean 50 things. What Shakespeare offers us is not ambiguity; it's choices.
The whole point is it's about getting as many people to come and see the play as you can.
It doesn't seem Shakespeare works if you turn him into a religion.
Now, when I talk about Shakespeare, I can't talk too much about Gielgud or Olivier. Because nobody knows who I'm talking about.
I like working with authors who are a bit pesky.
The loser, the fool, is embraced in England because there is a recognition of silliness there that allows a person to keep his ambitions and desires at a certain distance. Just being in the race is enough.
There's something very fine and lucid and rich in this tradition of the English actor.
All this thing that L.A. doesn't have any love for the theater isn't true.
'Nicholas Nickleby' is 800 pages long. At one time, the theater production was 15 hours long. So it's an interesting process, about what you leave out and what you select.
The shields were enormous. In 'Julius Caesar,' I died early in the scene and used to fall asleep under the shield until I was woken up by applause.
'Nicholas Nickleby' was the best example, where 43 people could make an audience of 1,500 look at a fingernail at any given moment. It was so controlled, and yet it was a group of disparate individuals. It was a happy, constructive time, and it seemed to be an active discussion of what makes the theater work.
My first acquaintance with 'Peter Pan' was back when I lived in South London. I was at art school, and I needed to earn money, so I got a job as a stagehand at the Wimbledon Theatre, and 'Peter Pan' was on tour there with Donald Sinden, who was playing Captain Hook.
I've often thought I'm a short music hall comedian stuck in a leading man's body.
'Waiting for Godot,' when it first came out in 1950, was a very different sort of play to the plays that were in the West End at that time in London, because most of those plays were what we call drawing-room comedies.
I love to see people blossom.
Gerry Schoenfeld told me 'Les Parents Terribles' was not going to sell, even though we had Kathleen Turner and Jude Law in the cast. So we called it 'Indiscretions.'
History is with us until we learn from the suffering of the past.
If you take away a lot of the pretension and grandness from Shakespeare, a true poeticism is revealed.
You might be the best Hamlet of your generation in the bathroom, but unfortunately, you have to come out and do it on stage, and it's best to do it to people who would fill the house.
Some of the finest Shakespeare has been done recently by college theater programs. I'll tell you what these young kids have: They have a natural authority in Shakespeare. They feel a right to do it. And once they honor the humanity of it, the rhythm of the verse comes with it.
Exercising choice is a good thing.
In Tom Cone's work nothing is easy.
I thought acting was just going on and remembering all of one's lines.
I want to play King Lear, Macbeth, Benedict, Coriolanus. I wouldn't mind doing Hamlet again. Well, I'm a little old. Perhaps I can rub Vaseline on the audience's eyes.
