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.

Two of an actress's greatest assets are love and pain. A great actress, even a good actress, must have plenty of both in her life.

I blame it [never taking a break] on my mother. She was a born entertainer. Leave the songwriting, the singing and all that behind, and I still would have found some way to be an entertainer. I would have never been an actress, though, because I realized early in my life, in like sixth grade, I was a terrible actress.

Books are a really fun way to get yourself in a certain mindset or mood as an actress. Also, the way people tell a story is so revealing and I think it's important as an actress to see all the different ways people can unravel a story, and introduce the characters and the way people speak.

In Hollywood, I'm obese. I'm considered a fat actress. I eat like a caveman. I'll be the only actress that doesn't have anorexia rumors! I'm never going to starve myself for a part. I'm invincible. I don't want little girls to be like "Oh, I want to look like Katniss, so I'm going to skip dinner!"

I met with Hitchcock when I was a very, very young actress just starting out and he was making 'Frenzy' in London and I was sent along to meet with him. He was very, very unimpressed with me and I have to say, I was rather unimpressed with him - but only because I was an arrogant, ignorant young actress.

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.

Why, when I was a child, I didn't say, as most children do, that I was going to become an actress. I felt that I was an actress and no one could have convinced me that I wasn't!

I don't know if you ever say to yourself that you want to be an actress. It eventually becomes a social function - you are an actress and you make a living out of it, but at the beginning it's more a matter of how to survive, or how to exist in a certain way.

I was the first actress in the family, and I am still the only actress in the family. I shouldn't be saying it, but it slipped out!

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

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.

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

I don't think every actress in Bollywood has been associated with Lux. A select few actresses, who they felt suited the brand right (have been associated with it) and they all have been actresses of great stature with wonderful careers and some wonderful work. I am very honoured to join the group of people who have been with Lux over the years.

As an actress, it's part of your job to be able to imagine just about anything - even if it's not within your personal experience.

I don't think of myself as a dancer. I think of myself as a singer-actress who moves really well.

I had a band with a girl in New York, and we would go around and do gigs. And then I happened to start getting work as an actress.

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.

I think my work as an actress is less about a director and more about a person. You feel you can trust them instinctively. I met my best friends that way, I knew in a second.

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'm a method actress in my songs, which is why it's hard to sing them.

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.

I am not anti-man. I am married to a man... I have a father and a brother... I love men. But there is something really lacking when Cake is nominated. How does Julianne Moore win for Best Actress but her film isn't nominated for Best Screenplay? How does Gone Girl become such a critically-acclaimed and box-office hit but its scriptwriter, Gillian Flynn, isn't nominated for Best screenplay. It's disgusting!

The impetus behind going to graduate school was a year after graduating from college spent in Dallas working at the dog food factory and Bank America and not having met success in my chosen field, which at that point was being an actress.

I don't want to be an actress, because I think that they have to be really pretty, and I'm not.

Marilyn Monroe gave more to the still camera than any actress, any woman I've ever photographed; infinitely more patient, more demanding of herself and more comfortable in front of the camera than away from it.

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.

"Fish Tank" [my favorite woman-directed film] by Andrea Arnold. The film is so beautifully shot, and I love the raw energy of Katie Jarvis, who plays the main character, Mia. She is not a professional actress and she provides the film with a sense of realism. To me, the film feels so complete and superior.

I think there will always be a double standard between males and females, so I think that an actress is more likely to protect her public persona, so to speak, than an actor would be.

I used up every cent I had earned as an actress.

There is a neuron in your brain that will respond only to pictures of Jennifer Aniston - provided you have had prior visual exposure to the actress. That neuron does not respond to pictures of Bill Clinton or Halle Berry. Only Jennifer. I used the story to explain the almost ridiculous plasticity of the organ. There is no such thing as Jennifer Aniston in our evolutionary history - she was born in 1969, for heaven's sake - but we are flexible enough to devote an entire cell to her if we have previously encountered her in some fashion.

I was a dancer before I was an actress, so I've always been someone who likes to communicate from my body and movement.

The great writers like Chekhov know that tragedy and laughter are just a few steps from each other ... but it took me a long time as an actress to learn that. Actually Arthur Miller taught me in the Seventies. We were making a CBS TV drama of his play Playing for Time about Auschwitz but the characters were laughing. It was a big insight for me to realise that that was what's called gallows humour, in this case worse than the gallows, that humans need to laugh and make jokes in order to survive.

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.

Another thing that's pathetic is this rule that you have to look ugly to get respect as an actress. Jessica Lange had to make herself look really bad to prove that she had amazing talent.

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 am an actress first, a singer second.

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

I don’t think I would ever have been able to be an actress had I not started at nine years old. I would have been the last person to stand up and say, ‘I’d like to star in the play.’

What I love about being an actress is being able to really look into myself and understand another human being.

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.

I had a happier experience of the city as an actress than I had had as a model.

It was really cool because you can tell that she directs in a way that she wants to be spoken to, as an actress. That's really nice, and you appreciate that. Dealing with the actors was more important to her than anything else, which was really nice.

And while I might not always agree with the viewpoint I have to portray, because I play a district attorney, as an actress I can always tell myself that my character is trying to take the moral high ground.

I like being put in embarrassing positions because it's the reason why I wanted to be an actress. I want to try different things and things that make me uncomfortable.

Show me an actress who isn't a personality and I'll show you a woman who isn't a star.

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