Quotes About Actress

I have an older sister named Haley and she wanted to be an actress. So I wanted to be an actress. It's really funny the way that some people don't give kids enough credit for like really being driven, and really wanting to do things so badly.

The good news for me is that I have an amazing team behind me, and they've been with me for 20 years now - almost 20 years. And they have seen me as an actress, not necessarily just a black actress. So I have been lucky enough for them to see me that way.

I'm just as intrigued by acting as ever. It's an ongoing process. There's no arrival. There's no point at which you say "Oh, OK, done it, got it." It just doesn't happen. And that's true of any creative endeavor. For me, it's just a lifelong interest. I'm very much interested in the craft. I started by doing plays and it took me a long time to feel comfortable doing movies, working with cameras. I felt like I was a theater actress pretending that I was a movie actress for quite a while. Now, I just love the process of working with cameras and being on a set and trying to put a film together.

As part of my job, I got malaria really badly and was put in intensive care, and I had a hallucination because they give you this cocktail of drugs to fix you so you don't die, and I had this hallucination that I was at the Oscars and I won and I was a really good actress, and it was so real that when I came out of the hospital, I started saying to people I'm going to become an actress.

I fell in love with a civilian. Not an actress and not a famous actress at that. Because then the attention doesn't double - it grows exponentially. Because then suddenly everybody wants to be in your bedroom. But I don't really give them anything.

For me, modelling has been an advantage because if I hadn't been modelling, I would never have been spotted as an actress. I didn't have any intention of becoming an actress.

I wasn't even prepared to be an actress. I was 17 when I came out of high school, and suddenly became Miss World and then I became an actress.

I mean, any time an actress gets to work with another actress, it’s like, “Oh, there are two of us in a movie! How are you? Let’s sit in the hair chair together!” We’re lonely, women.

I was trained as an actress. But I wasn't a very convincing actress, so I started doing punk poetry and then fell into doing stand-up.

Kristen is really focused and really quiet, as an actress. She just does her thing, but she's cool. I like her. I know a lot of people have mixed comments about her, but I think she's a rad person. She's just focused on what she's doing, as an actress, and she wants to pick the right roles, and she's committed to her craft. She's really cool. We got along. There weren't any tensions or anything.

I wouldn't say that I was an actress. I tried to be an actress. I really didn't have the gift.

People ask, 'Why would you cast yourself in your movie?' And, for me, it's more like an achievement that I am now not playing all the parts, you know? Like I was for so long, in all my performances and a lot of my short movies. So, that's where I'm coming from, not out of a kind of actress-y sense of myself. I mean, I don't really see myself as an actress, but more from performance: this is how you make something. You do it yourself. You're in it and you write it. I think I keep doing it that way, 'cause it's my way. It's what makes me feel like I know how to do it.

I grew up as a child actress, not a child star. I was an actress - big difference.

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.

I think the hardest thing about the part is the responsibility that you feel playing something that is so real and resonant in our times. There are people coming home right now with those stories, and I'm just an actress pretending to be that person. You hope that you can shed some light on somebody's predicament.

I didn't have any confidence in my beauty when I was young. I felt like a character actress, and I still do.

I'm always interested in something that Helen Mirren is doing. I thought her series Prime Suspect was unbelievable. I think she might be my favorite actress.

Playing good girls in the '30s was difficult, when the fad was to play bad girls. Actually I think playing bad girls is a bore; I have always had more luck with good girl roles because they require more from an actress.

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 'Soul Food' had the biggest impact on me because that's where I was really able to shine as an actress and because I also met my husband there, and that was a huge turning point in my personal life. So, that show will stick with me forever and ever and ever.

I'll always be figuring out what parts I want to play, because I want to play all parts. I'm a very hungry actress.

I didn't choose the fact that I was gay, but I did choose whether to live my life as a gay woman-that was the terrifying thing for me. Especially being a gay actress.

I realised that since I was a child I wanted to be an actress just to dress up in big fabrics and corsets and have adventures riding horses with lots of blood and action!

My dad was an actor, and my older sister is an actress, and so I very much remember thinking, "Well, of course I'll do that as well." But I never imagined myself as an actor who would be in films. I always only thought of myself being in a play or a musical and maybe the odd episode of [U.K. '80s TV drama] Casualty. My backup plan was to do something with children, to start a nursery school or work with underprivileged kids. And I still dream of maybe doing that in some way. I've always got children in my house, always.

It was not easy for my mother, being a struggling actress and raising a child. We were these two sort of vagabonds, never knowing where the money was going to come from. She always says she couldn't afford a babysitter, which is why she put me on the stage.

To establish yourself as an actress, you have to become well known. A girl just starting out, I would tell her to concentrate on acting, but she doesn't have to go around wearing blankets.

When you're an actress you are in a very specific position, cerebrally, I would think you know. You are a thinking person but you are in a certain perception of the world between really being conceptual and completely stupid. So you are in between, with a lot of intuition and instinct. And that's not completely being intellectual because I think intuition is more blurred. It comes from intuition. Instinct. More than really reasoning.

When you're an actress, you become this thing in people's hands that people are trying to manipulate. I cannot stand it.

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.

Ultimately I'll probably end up going out with an actress again. But an architect would be cool. They need to do something creative. I'm attracted to talent. But it would maybe be healthier if it wasn't in the industry.

I think it was really crucial that the actress was age appropriate. There are films, such as An Education, where that wasn't the case, and I think that really affects how you receive what you're watching.

An actress' best friend is a body which responds instinctively to thought.

The three things I said when I came out of school were I want to work consistently, I want to do good work and I want to be paid fairly, and that's happened. But I didn't become an actress for the money. I do it for other reasons.

I don't have any regrets. When I quit college and moved to Los Angeles to become an actress, it was so that I would not look back and have any regrets.

The inability to listen and to depict in the countenance what others have said has spoiled many a good actress.

For a long time, I was almost ashamed of being an actress. I felt like it was a shallow occupation. People would be watching my every move.

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.

When I started off as an actress, I did at a play at the Taper Too Theatre here in Los Angeles, called 'In The Abyss Of Coney Island.' That was more of a dramatic play. It was a small theater house. This was the first time I was literally on the road, doing a play, for four months.

Often, as a young actress, you find yourself being the only girl in a room full of men... and one of the reasons why I like 'Grey's Anatomy' is because they have such strong female characters and the women really drive this show.

Although I did end up trying out several different fields before committing to acting, I knew in the deepest part of heart that I wanted to be an actress.

I didn't choose to be an actress

I'm not a comedienne. I'm an actress.

I was raised by an actress, and I watched all those women turn 60 and ask, "Should I get face work?" And my mother and Anne Bancroft said to each other, "We are who we are, and we're not going to fall into that."

Well, I'm not a method actress by any stretch of the imagination so the best thing that I can do is be as real as possible and find whatever commonality in that character that I can see myself.

[Mackenzie Foy] is really a fantastic actress and she's very professional, but she is still a kid and that's really nice to see, whenever there is a balance and they're able to have fun and play on set, but still go home and hang out with friends her age. I was really impressed with her. I think the biggest change for us is that we had a "swear jar." And she was rich - she made more money than us.

I did The Seagull, the Chekhov play, on Broadway, a couple of years ago, and I had done it in London, and I became completely obsessed with the character, Nina, that I played in that. She's an actress. I couldn't find a play after that, that I wanted to do, because I couldn't think of doing anything else. Every part is a disappointment, once you've done that part.

I may not have been wearing a mink coat, but I was traveling with a dog. That should have made you think I was an actress!

Don't associate me with comedy. And please don't say actress. I would never call myself any of those things. I hate it when people call me that.