Words matter. These are the best Sam Wanamaker Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
What could be more fitting – or more exciting – than to restage Shakespeare’s plays on the very spot where they were first performed, in the shape and style of theater for which they were written?
Shakespeare belongs to the whole of mankind, not just one country.
Shakespeare is as naturally a part of American culture as it is the British culture; the Americans have a natural interest in their heritage.
Now I do perhaps three films or 17 TV movies a year.
When I first went to London to do a film in 1949, I naturally went to visit the site of the Globe. There was this small plaque on the side of a grimy brewery wall in a derelict alley near the riverfront. I was shocked.
I mean, the Globe is the most famous theater in the western world. The British have absolutely neglected it. It’s an embarrassment to them that they haven’t done anything about it.
We will get back to the earlier, instinctive and less inhibited nature of theatre. Today, spectators are passive, but Elizabethan, Greek and Roma; theatre was interactive.
I think the Schwontkowski banner will help publicize the construction of the new Globe and probably will also help fundraising.
Since the theater is going to be reconstructed in the techniques of joinery craftsmanship as it was before, it will take longer to make. It will be a complex of buildings, not just the Globe, with a major permanent exhibition of the Elizabethan theater.
You could argue we are a different audience today,but on the other hand what is it that makes Shakespeare great? It is that he understands the common denominator of man, his emotions and relationships.
In my teens, I saw a terrible production of ‘Die Walkuere.’ To a person of 15, it was just awful, and it put me off for many years. Eventually I became an opera-goer, if not an opera buff.
Unlike young actors, I don’t feel unfulfilled. I’ve had my successes. I don’t have to worry that I won’t have time for other things.
We hope the Bell Shakespeare Company will become an indigenous part of the Globe Shakespeare Centre in Australia.
The British are much more cynical and regard the idea of a Globe reconstruction as an Elizabethan Disneyland. But the Americans have a real hunger for what they see as their history, their culture and their Shakespeare.
Through the years, I had became involved with social and political issues, such as racial discrimination.
You can do something almost any minutes that will ruin you, no matter how good you have been.
Frankly, the British always looked at this as a dumpy industrial area, but this was where Shakespeare lived and wrote and performed some of his greatest works.
Of course, the Globe will be an international educational center as well as a theater.
I’ve always been in institutional theater.
People constantly express surprise that Americans are so hot for Shakespeare. But Britain’s culture is American culture, too.
The physical nature of the Globe is going to break down a lot of barriers.
Two planeloads of California actors and directors flew to Washington in support of the Hollywood Ten, and some of us, like John Garfield, came down from New York. There’s a very famous Life magazine cover with Bogart and Bacall sitting in the hearing room. I was in between them.
I am kind of a curiosity in England.
The Globe is a missing monument. There’s no existing example of a theater from Shakespeare’s time. You have Roman theaters, Greek theaters, all kinds of theaters, but none in which the plays of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and Marlowe were performed. Scholars feel that it would be of immense value to have one.
I became a producer because of projects I wanted to pursue and develop as a director or actor.
The Ides of March? That doesn’t worry me.
Most Britons, and most Americans as well, either thought the Globe was in Stratford-Upon-Avon or didn’t know where it was at all.
I’ve lived in London more or less permanently since the 1950s.
Shakespeare is, after all, Britain’s greatest poet and dramatist.
I’m not a Shakespearean actor really, or a Shakespearean director.
I had been in 760 performances of 10 different Shakespeare plays by the time I was 17.
The only thing that I can contribute as director is to work with the performers in a way that brings out the drama.
The Globe will become an automatic sight like the Tower of London and St. Paul’s.
My middle daughter is with the Royal Shakespeare Company and was on Broadway several years ago.
England is a mecca for actors who want to do the classics.
That first replica of the Globe that I saw at the Chicago World’s Fair was a suspect thing, made of plywood and papier-mache. But I kept seeing other replicas at other fairs in the ’30s, so I developed a longing to see London.
What would the world say if the Globe, now that it has at last been found, is not excavated?
I foresee the Globe attracting scholars from all over the world.
It’s true that I have sacrificed certain jobs, and it’s been a matter of fitting my career into the Globe rather than the other way around.
When I was 15 years old, I saw my first production of a Shakespeare play at the British pavilion at the Century of Progress World’s Fair in Chicago.
