Top 50 Roger Allam Quotes

I loved the variety of acting: turning your hand to different things and bringing whoever you were to it. There is something almost amateurish about it that appealed to me.

Be ambitious. The great actor, director and playwright Ann Jellicoe commissioned writers like Howard Barker and David Edgar, and put on magnificent, large-scale plays in Dorset that involved the whole community.

I had done some acting at school, but I wasn’t particularly good at it. What inspired me was going to the Old Vic in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the National Theatre was based there.

Playing a villain would be great.

People are just repeating mantras like, ‘get Brexit done,’ ‘strong and stable,’ ‘dither and delay’. There must be a way of satirizing it, and I long to see it, but it’s gone beyond ‘The Thick of It.’

In the early 1970s, I took singing lessons with John Hargreaves, a leading singer with English National Opera, when I was home from university.

At school I was a disaster academically but being involved in drama helped me to find another pathway into things.

That’s the extraordinary thing about opera: it has the power to elicit a physical reaction. I don’t know if I’d have been any good or not, but I do know that I was never committed enough to find out.

I can do posh.

It’s nice to have the creature comforts of home.

I like to do a wide variety of things, and acting, particularly in the theatre, has given me that opportunity.

I don’t think there are roles that would attract me to do a long run in the theatre.

I’ve been choreographed in various musicals before. So I’m not completely two left feet.

I played Benedick in ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ nearly 30 years ago at the RSC, alongside Susan Fleetwood as Beatrice, and I loved every minute.

What I don’t believe is that DVDs or HD broadcasts can be a substitute for the real thing.

It must be every critic’s dream when you’re at something utterly intolerable to actually get up and intervene and make it stop.

It’s lovely going to Oxford, it’s very difficult to film there as you’re doing a period drama in a city which is very crowded.

When you are doing pantomime, you’re not immersing yourself in anything terribly deep.

I live near a beautiful park, and when I walk around it, the beauty of it can take your breath away. It makes you realize there is something bigger, certainly bigger than me.

Judi Dench told me to shut up once. I was probably going on and on about something, in the way that I do sometimes, so she was being a good friend.

As soon as you have two small children, they take up a lot of time and energy.

I remember as a student going to Covent Garden, where they took out the stall seats and you hunkered down on the floor – I heard Pavarotti in Tosca there, and the experience of being in that same room with that astonishing voice has never left me.

I invented this wonderful death scene for Javert of going down on my knees and then leaning back like a limbo dancer to make it look as if I was falling off a bridge. I did it eight times a week for nearly a year and I’ve had trouble with my knees ever since – they don’t even allow me to jog these days.

In the theatre, there were plenty of people having sex all over the place – wanting to, and doing it quite successfully – but male violence? Personally, I have witnessed very little. Very, very little.

That’s the thing with acting. There are always loads of people who are more successful, richer, more famous and seemingly able to do anything they want.

I have a glass of wine. Red. Generally when I’m cooking.

Never go dead for a second on stage. Even if you are doing nothing, do it actively.

Lots of people are astounded that I was in the first cast of ‘Les Miserables.’ Possibly because I look so incredibly youthful.

I did hardly any academic work. I learnt a fair amount, though.

Writing opera off as intrinsically elitist is absurd.

There’s a particularly British way of going about things that I rather like, which is very different to the American way. It comes out of the amateur rep tradition of actors thinking: ‘Well, I’m only 26, but I’ll put on a beard and have a go at King Lear.’

I listened to a clip someone had put up of me singing ‘I Am What I Am’ in the musical ‘La Cage aux Folles.’ I thought I was absolutely dreadful. It’s like when you see photos of yourself at parties – at the time you thought you looked so cool and glamorous but you just look a bit drunk.

I don’t know who can constantly afford to go and see things. A play, which has five people in it and one set and it cost you 60 quid? And you’re in a theatre that really hasn’t had a great deal of money spent on it in the last 50 or 60 years? It’s kind of weird.

With those long American TV contracts you think, ‘yes, at the end of that I’d be rich.’ But at the same time you feel inside you a kind of death, because I enjoy playing lots of different characters.

It’s important to take risks and challenge yourself. That’s why I went into acting, really.

I began getting these terrible headaches and I thought ‘Oh great, death.’ But it was just tension and tiredness.

I don’t get mobbed in the street or bothered. Well, people do stop and say nice things. ‘I like ‘Endeavour,’ or, ‘I loved The Thick of It.’

Watching your children growing up makes you aware of time passing. You think, ‘Oh, God, look at them now! He won’t be like this for much longer.’

At one stage, I wanted to be a folk singer.

I’ve had some bad reviews, but not as bad as the things I could imagine for myself.

The things that impress you when you’re a child have an incredible influence on your life.

I suppose there’s a particular kind of efficiency about coming from a theatre tradition. You don’t make a fuss, and you’re cheap.

Opera requires an enormous commitment. You must devote your whole life to producing that extraordinary sound.

I’ve been saying for about 20 years, ‘When am I going to get my cop show?’

‘The Judas Kiss’ was really wonderful. I loved that it concentrated on just two events in Wilde’s life, and Rupert Everett was top dollar.

I was very proud of doing Falstaff, because it seemed to go well.

I’m not conscious of having changed my accent.

What I loved about Edinburgh was being able to walk to work through a beautiful place.

Shakespeare is the best writing ever. It’s incredibly rich, dense, expressive language.

‘La Cage’ has got a broad appeal. It obviously appeals to the gay community, but it’s also a good, fun show that appeals across a broad audience, a great big mixture.