Top 40 Denis Lawson Quotes

What’s it like to have my trousers pulled down? It’s not as awful as it seems. Doing that kind of thing with an actress like Judith Paris, who pulls them down, is easy, because she is very professional about it.

Scotland is extraordinary as a location, the light is amazing, for instance on the west coast.

To make 800 people laugh for a couple of hours is a wonderful feeling, because you know you’re doing them a lot of good.

My family are all Glasgow. I was born there. Govan. When it was very tough. The tenements. All that stuff.

Working on ‘Jekyll’ required a lot of concentration and energy. The script is written in a very filmic way most of the time; unusually for television there are a lot of descriptive pages, tiny little fragmented scenes with no dialogue but huge energy.

My initial impulse was to be an entertainer, a song and dance man.

A big moment for me came when ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ came out. It hit me like a sledgehammer – that’s what I wanted to do.

I hadn’t read Dickens for a while and doing ‘Bleak House’ was great.

I think of myself as a light comedian.

I studied in Glasgow and, when I was young, I spent four years solely in theatre.

I don’t really have a problem at all with doing a show that a lot of people watch.

Ewan was studying in London and he got this huge job in his final year, a part in Dennis Potter’s ‘Lipstick on Your Collar’ for Channel 4. He had no idea what happened on a TV set so I talked him through things.

It’s unusual when you get scripts not wanting to change things – I’m one of those actors who writers must hate as I’m always wanting to rewrite or swap bits about.

In the ’80s, to get a contemporary Scot who was smart, sexy and funny was very unusual.

I was very surprised when I watched ‘Star Wars,’ and I thought, ‘Oh, that’s me. I’ve been blown up.’ Then, I came back again. I really didn’t know what was happening!

Laughter is like surfing; it’s like a wave coming out of the auditorium – before it has died off, you must come in with the next line. But if you come in too soon, no one will hear what you say.

Going from dialogue-driven ‘New Tricks’ to a movie like ‘The Machine’ which has special effects has been brilliant.

My parents came out of Glasgow during the Depression and both – particularly my father – had very tough childhoods. They fought their way out of it.

My mother was a dancer when she was a kid and I gather she was very good, but was never allowed to go into the profession.

I quite like Jackson Pollock, and have a real gut reaction to it, so it does whatever it does to me.

For the first ten years of my career, or up to the point I did ‘Local Hero,’ I was always trying to be somebody else as an actor.

I’m more careful now, but in the past I would always have to give 100 percent of myself to every single show.

I got married on a beach in Italy. It was very romantic getting married in Italian. But I’ve no idea what we agreed to.

Edinburgh is a phenomenal location for movies and should be used more.

Way back at the beginning, I went to see George Lucas when he first came to London for ‘Star Wars.’ I met him months before they started, and he didn’t ask me to do the picture at all. But the actor whom he had employed to play Wedge didn’t work out for some reason.

‘Bleak House’ is like the best soap you could ever hope to watch.

What I’ve always liked as an actor is to do a lot of different kinds of things. I’ve done musicals, stage, TV and lots of different styles of work.

For my money, acting has been over-intellectualized. It’s only playing.

I’ve done a lot of musical theatre, but I equate ‘Mr. Cinders’ a lot with why I became an actor.

When I was a young actor and working in London, I would pop home to see my sister, and Ewan would always be intrigued about what I’d been doing. I think he found my shoulder-length hair and pink, flared jeans glamorous, which they were anything but.

In my professional life, when I started I felt it was very transitory. You meet people, you have to make this very intense connection and then you might not see them for two years. It was kind of odd and when I started out I didn’t like it.

I see ‘Jekyll’ as a very scary comedy thriller, partly because Hyde is violent and frightening as a character but at the same time he’s very funny – and that’s quite an achievement.

When I was very small, when I was five or six, that’s what I wanted to be. I wanted to be a song and dance man. Then I got a lot of inspiration from going to visit my grandparents in Glasgow, where I’d go to see variety. That made me want to do it as well.

Playing the villain is great fun.

My son is a lecturer at Bristol University in anthropology. His degree was in, get this, human mating strategies – sex!

The first four years, I worked exclusively in the theater. I did a great deal of different types of acting – avant garde and classical work. So, it was a very broad spectrum.

I’ve always felt a very strong affinity with Jewish people. Over the years I find I’ve become very friendly with certain people I’ve worked with – actors, producers, whatever – and then two or three years later I discover they’re Jewish.

You just wear the clothes, you don’t let the clothes wear you.

I do some very high energy comedy, vaudeville, music hall stuff, and people who’ve seen my work on camera, on TV and movies, would not really know that.

I began to tell people that I wanted to be an entertainer. Between the ages of five and 11 there was an intense amount of practical drama going on.