I didn't think that a career in theater was very realistic so I thought the only thing I could make money doing and still be somewhat artistic was, god help me, advertising.
The thing with film and theater is that you always know the story so you can play certain cues in each scene with the knowledge that you know where the story's going to end and how it's going to go. But on television nobody knows what's going to happ...
The theater, bringing impersonal masks to life, is only for those who are virile enough to create new life: either as a conflict of passions subtler than those we already know, or as a complete new character.
Since babyhood, I've always evolved from one thing to another. My mother gave me ballet lessons at 6 as part of her enthusiasm for the arts and for life. We went to museums, to the theater. While her own talent was untapped, she worked for church cau...
Although I'm perceived as very optimistic and upbeat, it comes out of being the opposite of that - feeling isolated or lonely, looking for meaning and the kinds of things that ease that suffering in life, and finding them in large-scale social intera...
I know why people lie to themselves in life, but I'll never understand the appeal of the dishonest theater where the actor doesn't make some earnest attempt to include their own honest humanity in their collaboration with an author. It's so ugly to m...
If you grow up in Britain, you just do Shakespeare. If you go and work in a theater once or twice or three times in your life, you're going to end up doing a Shakespeare, because he's obviously such a brilliant, brilliant writer.
When I hear that young people have come to the theater for the first time to listen to opera, I'm very happy. Because it's the same thing that happened to me as a child. When I first heard the tenor voice, I immediately fell in love with this kind of...
I love theater work because of the immediate effect your performance has on the audience. And I love the repetition; I love getting on the same stage for more than a month and reciting the same lines, trying to make a small or large step towards an i...
It took me years to actually get comfortable on the stage. I prefer the intimacy of screen; it comes easier to me. In theater, you have to be louder and bigger - that was harder for many years in my teens. But now I've conquered that. I eat up the st...
Every week it's another opportunity to really make that work and figure out how to make it work better. And I love that it's like theater, too, and the audience, and it's so short. It's only 20 minutes. It's like a haiku or something.
My favorite part about working in theater is the rehearsal process. I absolutely love the rehearsal process. Working out the characters, figuring the character out, and the relationships between the different characters. I love all of that, which, un...
I started studying theater in school, and then I got into drama school at, like, 19, and it was a national drama school in Montreal, and so it was just you and nine other students for three years, and it was really intense.
I think when I was doing 'Amistad,' I was just too young to really understand what the process was, and beyond that, I hadn't really got involved. It was just somehow - and I thought that the artistry was all in the theater.
I'm hoping that word-of-mouth on the film - people seeing it and liking it - that that will drive more people to the theaters, because I haven't seen the billboards or the posters or anything.
I have a Tony Award now. It hasn't changed too much in the theater world, but it gives me entree for film stuff and TV stuff, where people will see me more easily now because they know me.
I had always wanted to be an actress. I went to summer theater camp from kindergarten on up until high school, and always had the leads in all the plays - even though they were at the YMCA - but it was something I always wanted to do.
I really like reaching out and seeing the audience - they're potential audiences! And on occasion I can make them excited about going to the theater again, if they've ceased or gone less.
All these actors who died before I was born, all the theaters and the artistic movements - all that stuff fills you up and makes you feel like you're the inheritor of all this information and of all its passion.
If you've been in a film that's seen by millions and millions and millions of people, you're more likely to be recognized for that than for your theater performances, which were seen by considerably less people. Why would I get upset by that?
Seeing the road show of 'A Chorus Line' in 1977 at the Orpheum Theater in downtown Memphis was a life-changing event for me: there were gay people, on the stage, and they all lived in New York.
