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 never wondered whether I should be a stage actress or a movie actress.

I became an actress because my mom wanted me to become an actress. It took me until my mid-30s to realize I actually didn’t. I actually wanted to write and direct and be more involved in politics and humanitarian issues.

I'm not just considered a former child star. I'm not considered a black actress. I'm not considered an actress. I've done roles that were written for men. First and foremost, is God, I definitely believe in Him, having kind of mapped out what my destiny was going to be. Therefore, I wasn't just going to be put in just that one box or kept in that one place.

I'm really silly. That's the thing that people don't get. I think I'm a stronger comedic actress than I am a dramatic actress. I'm not really pigeonholed, but I'm known for drama. I do comedy so easily, and people relate to my humor. I'll be glad because I don't have to stay sexy and young forever. I don't care if I'm big, as long as I'm funny.

Being an actress hasn't made me insecure. I was insecure long before I declared I was an actress.

I've joked that I would have either become schizophrenic or an actress, but as an actress you can do both.

I regard myself as an actress but, obviously, not in the Dame Judi Dench league. That isn't a problem because I don't think we are ever likely to be up for the same part!

At an early school, when I was about 5, they asked what we wanted to be when we grew up. Everyone said silly things, and I said I wanted to be an actress. So that was what I wanted to be, but what I was, of course, was a writer.

I was not interested in what I could bring to myself by being an actress, but in what I could bring out of myself.

It was my life, playing Juliet. From that moment on I was convinced I was going to be an actress. That was all I really wanted to do.

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.

I've done a lot of serious roles, but they're, like, independent, so it's harder for them to come out. The big ones have been comedies, but I would love to get a big drama to let people see the other side of me, that I am a serious 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 started out as a lousy actress and have remained one.

I'm not attempting to be a role model but I accept that roles I've played put me in that position. I don't feel a huge responsibility as an actress to put my young fan base first.

I've been in showbusiness all my life, but as an actress I have never been overly driven.

The only thing that I could think of to do was to be an actress.

As a performer, you can't just sit around waiting for the phone to ring. You have to write and develop projects for yourself, because casting people aren't always going to see you the way you want to be seen. Write a one-person show, shoot a short film, do plays, whatever - activity breeds activity. No one's interested in a stay-at-home actress.

Teenage girls, please don’t worry about being super popular in high school, or being the best actress in high school, or the best athlete. Not only do people not care about any of that the second you graduate, but when you get older, if you reference your successes in high school too much, it actually makes you look kind of pitiful, like some babbling old Tennessee Williams character with nothing else going on in her current life. What I’ve noticed is that almost no one who was a big star in high school is also big star later in life. For us overlooked kids, it’s so wonderfully fair.

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.

Hermione is so close to who I am as a person that I've never really had to research a role. I'm literally rediscovering what it means to be an actress.

When I was 8 years old, I knew what I was going to be—an actress.

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

I was 21 years and 218 days old when I received the Academy Award for Best Actress. I had just stepped into an imaginary world that I'd seen at a distance for years.

In order to help those around you, and in order to even be a good actress and a good mother at the same time, you have to know your worth.

Every actress has to face the facts there are younger, more beautiful girls right behind you. Once you've gone beyond the vanity of the business, you'll take on the tough roles.

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.

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.

I didn't choose to be an actress

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

I never planned on being an actress, just as I never planned on being a model. I went to law and international-relations school. It wasn't my direction. It kind of happened to me. And because it wasn't my dream when I started, I wasn't starstruck.

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."

Even when I was young I wanted to be an actress. I knew the actors and the paparazzi. It was just kind of always in my landscape. It was never directed at me, but it was always somewhere so I could see how it operated and I could see it from afar and go 'Wow, that's not really glamorous, it's kind of exhausting not having any privacy.' So it was never something I pursued. The first time I saw the billboard for Pretty Little Liars I almost got into a car accident!

If I weren't doing what I'm doing now, the actress thing, the star business, if you want to call it that, whatever it is, I'd be in an asylum. I'm sure of it.

Not to get overly psychological about this, but it's probably why I became an actress in the first place: for that kind of freedom and refuge, as well as for the fact that I just love acting so much.

As an actress, you're living something through the duration of the play and its geography. I've always seen writing the same way. It's like somehow I'm moving through the terrain of the book as a performer.

My wife, the actress Megan Mullally, was an English major at Northwestern University and loves fiction. Like so many things in my life, she curates things for me. For example, I have the daunting prospect of Donna Tartt's "The Goldfinch" waiting for me when I get through my current reading pile.

Elizabeth Taylor is, in my opinion, the greatest actress in film history. She instinctively understands the camera and its nonverbal intimacies. Opening her violet eyes, she takes us into the liquid realm of emotion, which she inhabits by Pisces intuition. Richard Burton said that Taylor showed him how to act for the camera. Economy and understatement are essential. At her best, Elizabeth Taylor simply is. An electric, erotic charge vibrates the space between her face and the lens. It is an extra-sensory, pagan phenomenon.

After I finished 'E.R.', I wanted to concentrate on re-examining what kind of actress I am and taking time for real-life things.

I was cast in a movie [originally] called Mr. Spreckman's Boat, starring Marcia Gay Harden and Jennifer Connelly. I felt like an "actress." Both of them have won Oscars - maybe that means I might one day.

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.

I was always, as a younger actress, very conscious of not wanting to act sexy. I didn't see myself like that. But I think as a woman, you get older, you feel more confident in your sexuality. You're not as intimidated by it, not as embarrassed by it.

I like to look like a person. It drives me crazy when you see women in movies playing teachers, and they have biceps. It totally takes me out of the movie. I start thinking, Wow, that actress playing this part really looks great!

You're an actress! It's not about your ideas! You're there to tell other people's stories.

Trust me, baby, you weren’t that good. I was just a better actress than you were actor. (Zephyra to Stryker) Ew! No offense, Mum, I don’t want to know who you’ve slept with. Kill the sexual bantering and him before I go deaf from it. (Medea)

I want to keep growing and I want to be an actress for as long as I can.