Top 40 Sam Wanamaker Quotes

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

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?
Sam Wanamaker
Shakespeare belongs to the whole of mankind, not just one country.
Sam Wanamaker
Shakespeare is as naturally a part of American culture as it is the British culture; the Americans have a natural interest in their heritage.
Sam Wanamaker
Now I do perhaps three films or 17 TV movies a year.
Sam Wanamaker
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.
Sam Wanamaker
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.
Sam Wanamaker
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.
Sam Wanamaker
I think the Schwontkowski banner will help publicize the construction of the new Globe and probably will also help fundraising.
Sam Wanamaker
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.
Sam Wanamaker
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.
Sam Wanamaker
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.
Sam Wanamaker
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.
Sam Wanamaker
We hope the Bell Shakespeare Company will become an indigenous part of the Globe Shakespeare Centre in Australia.
Sam Wanamaker
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.
Sam Wanamaker
Through the years, I had became involved with social and political issues, such as racial discrimination.
Sam Wanamaker
You can do something almost any minutes that will ruin you, no matter how good you have been.
Sam Wanamaker
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.
Sam Wanamaker
Of course, the Globe will be an international educational center as well as a theater.
Sam Wanamaker
I’ve always been in institutional theater.
Sam Wanamaker
People constantly express surprise that Americans are so hot for Shakespeare. But Britain’s culture is American culture, too.
Sam Wanamaker
The physical nature of the Globe is going to break down a lot of barriers.
Sam Wanamaker
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.
Sam Wanamaker
I am kind of a curiosity in England.
Sam Wanamaker
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.
Sam Wanamaker
I became a producer because of projects I wanted to pursue and develop as a director or actor.
Sam Wanamaker
The Ides of March? That doesn’t worry me.
Sam Wanamaker
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.
Sam Wanamaker
I’ve lived in London more or less permanently since the 1950s.
Sam Wanamaker
Shakespeare is, after all, Britain’s greatest poet and dramatist.
Sam Wanamaker
I’m not a Shakespearean actor really, or a Shakespearean director.
Sam Wanamaker
I had been in 760 performances of 10 different Shakespeare plays by the time I was 17.
Sam Wanamaker
The only thing that I can contribute as director is to

The only thing that I can contribute as director is to work with the performers in a way that brings out the drama.
Sam Wanamaker
The Globe will become an automatic sight like the Tower of London and St. Paul’s.
Sam Wanamaker
My middle daughter is with the Royal Shakespeare Company and was on Broadway several years ago.
Sam Wanamaker
England is a mecca for actors who want to do the classics.
Sam Wanamaker
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.
Sam Wanamaker
What would the world say if the Globe, now that it has at last been found, is not excavated?
Sam Wanamaker
I foresee the Globe attracting scholars from all over the world.
Sam Wanamaker
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.
Sam Wanamaker
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.
Sam Wanamaker