Quotes About Actress

I didn't want to do a costume drama. It's a great thing to do, but I've done them, and I didn't want to do the same thing again. Of course, costume dramas can be from all different eras, but at the time, I just felt very sure that I didn't want to be boxed in as an English actress. I wanted to be an actress, rather than an English actress.

I think I'm a better comedic actress than I am a dramatic actress, but everybody believes I'm this dramatic actress and I'll take it.

I was so frustrated with my whole life that I walked up this hilltop and screamed at the heavens. It was very dramatic - but then again, I am an actress - and I said, "Fine! I'll be a character actress! Just tell me what you want me to do!" I was so angry at the universe.

I find that I'm just drawn to anything that's going to challenge me as an actress. So any time I get a chance to do a little comedy, that's also a nice change for me. Most of the time people think of me as a dramatic actress and singer. And there's a challenge there because comedy is hard. What do they say? "Dying is easy; comedy is hard."

More than anything else, my mother wanted to be an actress - a famous actress - which in the 1950s was all about being young, sexy, and available. She was all that, and more. She had big blue eyes, alabaster skin, a heart-shaped face, a beautiful figure. She was just a knockout.

The secret is to let the audience feel through the actress, rather than having the actress feel for the audience. When you can do that, you involved the audience almost without their knowledge or awareness.

I don't want my dad to say, 'My daughter is an actress on a TV show.' I want him to say, 'My daughter cares about people.' I would love to know that I'm a role model in Hollywood.

As an actress, there's nothing worse than not knowing your cues.

I made a conscious decision back then that I would rather be the best actress who ever lived than the most famous one.

My mother, Evelyn, was an actress and singer, and my father, Jack, was an actor. My earliest recollection of my father is being taken to see him in a matinee.

I always just wanted to be a movie actress, like Lily Tomlin or Ruth Gordon. I just imagined myself being in a movie, wearing stylish women's clothing the way I saw Amy Irving wearing it.

I think it's actually a misperception that I am a comedic actress. I do more drama than comedy but very little of it has been seen. When you are in big funny movies and they do well and your little part in it kind of explodes people perceive you as a comedian.

Remember picture books are the closest form of writing to a poem. Even though they don't have to rhyme, they must be poetic. They must be written so the worst actress can read with comfort and expression.

The good thing about being shy though as a child is that you become very observant because you're not really actively participating. You're sitting back watching everyone. I think that's really helped me as an actress because I'm good at observing people and then copying them for comic effect.

As a director, I get to have a much broader creative expression than as an actress.

As a black actress you've got to work doubly hard. But it doesn't ever get me to the point where I give up on myself. It just motivates me to be more prepared, focus and disciplined. That's why I care so much about doing black films and making sure that we represent and are represented correctly.

I really believe that what I do as an actress is my God-given talent. This is my calling, not my career.

After all the work I've done, why should I suddenly be treated as a bona fide actress?

You see a lot of interesting visual irony on movie sets all the time, you know duality, set illusions, the reality, all that stuff. You play with interesting materials that you couldn't afford to otherwise. You meet interesting people that you work with, have special machinists or mold makers and make-up people, and people who make prosthetic appliances for actress' faces. It's really interesting kind of witch's brew of people in that business, aside from the sleeze bags you hear about on the financial end.

Jodie Foster did it, Natalie Portman did it. I think it's entirely possible to juggle university with filming... I actually think going to university will make me a better actress. The experience of living like that, working to deadlines, living with other students. It's all the things I want. There are actresses who don't know about things like doing their own laundry and getting a bus. I'm not going to be like that. For me, this is just the beginning. I've only shown a little bit of what I can do. There is so much more to come.

All you have to do is to look like crap on film and everyone thinks you're a brilliant actress. Actually, all you've done is look like crap.

I'd wanted to be an actress my whole life, that was my goal, that was all I cared about.

Most of the people in Ghana wouldn't know me as an actress. They'd know me for my work at the U.N.

Even though I was performing all the time as an actress and I was doing all of these plays as a kid, there's a vulnerability about being a musician that you don't get [when] you perform somebody else's work.

I knew I wanted to be an actress when I was 9 years old.

I've never been a fearful person. When I was growing up, I wanted to be an actress, a writer, and a musician and I never really processed that those are the three hardest jobs - I just never even processed it.

I didn't know whether I wanted to be an actress or a singer then.

We are a very typical Spanish family - a bullfighter, an actress, a flamenco dancer and singer!

The condition of being an actress can be unbearable.

I'm trying to show I'm a trained actress - I can transform myself into different characters. I'm not just an ingenue.

My very first acting job ever, the first time I got paid to be an actress, was in 2001, right between my sophomore and junior year in college, when I was just 19 years old. I got paid $250 every two weeks, 10 shows a week, to be in the Utah Shakespearean Festival. I was Calpurnia in 'Julius Caesar.'

I love theatre - it's where I started - and I've directed a play myself. I'm not sure if I want to direct a film, but certainly, as an actress, I'm always thinking, 'Surely this must be my last film.'

I hope to make acting my career for the rest of my life, if I can. If acting doesn't work out, I'd love to produce or direct or write. I just want to stay in this business, definitely. That would be my number one thing. I always want to be an actress.

Close girlfriends I don't have necessarily, as an actress. Perhaps there is a thing of competition there, you know, when you're doing the same things, and you're the same age. I could be with younger actors, but woman of my age probably - there is and there isn't, one doesn't like to think of it, but I think there is a sense of competition. Which is good, also.

When I was little, I had a feeling that I was going to end up being an actress. I spent a lot of time alone, I was a very shy girl, and I would pretend I was telling someone about this new role that I got.

I didn't want to become an actress because the competition with my mother would have been to much to live up to.

If I hadn't been a model, I couldn't have become a movie actress.

I played football when I was little. I didn't want to be an actress at all, I wanted to be a majorette in an Australian circus. That was my ambition.

I've always wanted a normal life, and this is what I got. Being an actress wasn't a plan at all, so what's happened to me is very strange. Life isn't very normal, even though I'm still very much a normal girl. I ride the subway, I ride the bus, and all of that. It's the people around me that have changed. I love when I go to a restaurant and I walk past, and everyone waves. That's always really funny. It's strange. It just goes to show that whatever plan you have for your life, you are wrong, a lot of times.

Outside of being an actress, I feel like being out is the biggest way that gay people can change perception. There are people that give millions of dollars to gay organizations but are closeted to their own families

I haven't ever felt I've had to divide my 'actress' life from the rest of my life.

I appeared with many leading men. But working with Cary Grant was different from working with other actors. He was much more fun! I think we were a successful team because we enjoyed working together tremendously, and that pleasure must have shown through onto the screen. I will always remember two compliments he made me. He said I had perfect timing in comedy and that I was the sweetest smelling actress he ever worked with.

I'm a more mature actress now.

She was an absolute genius as a comedic actress, with an extraordinary sense for comedic dialogue. It was a God-given gift. Believe me, in the last fifteen years there were ten projects that came to me, and I'd start working on them and I'd think, 'It's not going to work, it needs Marilyn Monroe.' Nobody else is in that orbit; everyone else is earthbound by comparison.

Right now I'm the most famous silent movie actress in the world and I want to keep that for me. So I hope there's not going to be any other silent movies.

It's not that I don't want to become famous or that I'm obsessed by my work as an actress, but it's all about not limiting myself, such as putting myself in a little jail that I can escape from.

Obviously, I'm not a trained actress, and right now I'll come out and say I'm glad I'm not.

A very dear friend of mine great actress named Wendy Rich Stetson was very active in the theater department at Amherst and I went to all the plays she was in, and it became very clear to me that what she was doing was something I wanted to be doing.