I'm sorry I didn't wear paint this morning. I tend not to wear it unless I'm getting highly paid.

When you look at me you don't immediately imagine a very very glamorous icon, so it's only in the theater that I get to do these experiments. I've been an actor about 51 years now. I've played everything from an 8-year-old black boy to a 72-year-old French matriarch, and they hardly hire you to do that on TV.

Both my parents were actors. I was schooled to think that acting was an important social service, that it was something that human beings need.

I went into the family business. To me, it was the norm and not the exception.

Love is as strict as acting. If you want to love somebody, stand there and do it. If you don't, don't. There are no other choices.

I'm interested in playing old ladies because I am becoming one. And I want to become a very good one!

I'm not glamorous, I don't have a look, I don't know anything about opera, I have no Italian, and I'm too old.