I was born Maurice Joseph Micklewhite. Imagine signing that autograph! You’d get a broken arm. So I changed my name to Michael Caine after Humphrey Bogart’s ‘The Caine Mutiny,’ which was playing in the theater across from the telephone booth where I learned that I’d gotten my first TV job.
I began thinking I would do musical theater because in high school that was really the only sort of curriculum they had as far as getting onstage and doing anything that anybody would see. So that’s what I did.
I moved to LA and decided to do films and television, mainly because the theater in New York is totally dead.
The theater is where I belonged; I simply wanted to be an actress my whole life.
I think every actor should go back and do theater periodically.
Theater has an incredible capacity to move people to social change, to address issues, to inspire social revolution.
We don’t make movies for critics. I’ve done four movies; there’s millions upon millions upon millions of people who’ve paid to see them. Somebody likes them. My greatest joy is to sit anonymously in a dark theater and watch it with an audience, a paying audience.
I joined Tommy Dorsey at the Paramount Theater in New York as a singer. I replaced Frank Sinatra.
I am both proud and honored to be on the Board of Directors for the Texas Ballet Theater.
I don’t like sitting around in my dressing room very much. It feels a lot like theater.
If you really love films, and you really want to get the full impact, there’s a huge difference between watching something on a small screen with a mediocre sound system and watching it on a giant screen in a giant theater with a huge beautiful sound system. I mean, the difference is electric.
When I was doing theater for all those years in New York, I did a lot of classical theater, wearing big corsets and big dresses and doing dialects. It’s interesting that once I moved to TV, I’m playing these scrappy, contemporary toughies.
Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater.
I’ve been performing my whole life. My mom signed me up for a theater program when I was five – I was the evil queen in ‘Once Upon a Mattress.’
I was kind of lucky that I had done so much theater over the years, because basically a sitcom is kind of like a hybrid between a film and a play.
I went to Bard College for a year. And then, even though I didn’t think I should give my blood to the theater, I did go to N.Y.U., which is where I met Michael McKean.
There’s definitely a visual aspect and an emotional aspect to a song. And that harks back, for me, to theater.
Politics, like theater, is one of those things where you’ve got to be wise enough to know when to leave.
Moving out to L.A. for me was a leap of faith. I was very secure in my dinner theater world; I loved it, and I was just like, ‘I think there’s something else out there for me and I just have to go for it.’
Tim Robbins had real confidence in college. He literally stole actors from the theater department at UCLA to be in his plays. The department heads got so mad at him.
The wonderful thing about Food for Thought is that it lets you keep your hand in theater and be in front of a live audience without a commitment of six months, or even three months.
I see only defects because I’m not following the scene as it were. I’m not following the other person. It’s like the best thing to clarify this is the theater.
Thirty years ago, we were in a movie theater and thought it was so cool because we were finally delivered from the horrors of stained glass and wooden pews.
Back when people couldn’t read, other people would take newspapers and turn them into theater so that people would know what was going on in the world. That is a powerful thing.
Music is very influential to my writing, as are theater and film.
I’ve always just gone with the best role, and I don’t care if it’s in theater, film or television.
I think the wonderful thing about doing theater is that it’s more of an actor’s medium. I think that film is more of a director’s medium. You can’t edit something out on stage. It’s there.
I’ve found that musical theater is my passion.
My mother is an actress, and she used to drag me from theater to theater and reading to reading.
When I first started out in Houston, it was theater or bust. And I loved it. I still love it. And then I went to undergraduate and graduate school for acting.
I think as an actor you’re lucky to have any film take on a life of its own long after it’s left the theater.
Everyone town of 100,000 in the United States should have a Classical Theater supported by the town, or the state of the county, or the Federal Government, as they have in every civilized country.
So I think I’ll say the obvious thing: theater is ephemeral. When a production is done, it’s gone forever. You can take pictures of it. You can make a film of it. But it’s not the production. It’s not the same thing.
I started in theater. I did theater professionally for seven years with my company before I started doing ‘Friends.’ I was waiting tables and doing theater.
I’m conflicted with theater in the city because you want to reach a diverse audience, and that audience doesn’t typically go to the theater.
Theaters are always going to be around, and doing fine. With computers and technology, we’re becoming more and more secluded from each other. And the movie theater is one of the last places where we can still gather and experience something together. I don’t think the desire for that magic will ever go away.
I am a lucky regional theater actor who happened to get a good role.
In theater, the wellspring of the character comes from the doing of it, like a trial by fire, but in front of an audience.
Television has some lovely aspects to it – and some ghastly aspects – but the theater itself was a wonderful invention.
I never did theater. I was a theater major at USC my first year because I didn’t get into the film school. I was biding my time, hoping to be accepted to film school, and I ended up transferring to UCLA my sophomore year.
I’ve always been in the theater. I’ve always gone to it. That’s been my way to cope. Early on in my career, I remember running – fleeing – to the theater as a way of coping with all the meshugaas that was going on for me.
The success of ‘Scrubs’ allowed me to pursue anything I felt passionately about without having to worry about money. It allowed me to spend my summer work shopping my show at a nonprofit theater.
I grew up doing musical theater.
From day one, musical theater was my bread and butter.
My first summer at a repertory theater, I was making $20 a week. I was making a living, as far as I was concerned, and I was doing theater. And next season, I made $40 a week. But I don’t think anyone in my family would have considered that making a living.
I was 22 and stopped writing plays, and I didn’t start again until I was 25. I was writing badly. In college, I attempted to write these more conventional plays, but the theater I loved was downtown experimental theater. I didn’t feel like I could do that either. It didn’t occur to me to do my own thing.
If an American audience is given a serious musical theater piece that is well produced, dramatically gripping and wonderfully acted, they’ll respond to it.
Charity in the theater begins and ends with those who have a play opening within a week of one’s own.
There is an intimacy about the Opry Theater that gives an entertainer a special charge.
Every person on the streets of New York is a type. The city is one big theater where everyone is on display.
‘Killer Joe’ provides a lot of red meat for the theater. Pam MacKinnon is the perfect director to shepherd a group of actors who share a certain bloodlust.
It never occurred to me that I was a leading man until I was 19 years old. I had been acting since I was 10, so that’s nine years and 30 or 40 plays, in school and summer stock, professional theater, too.
I have always wanted to work in the theater. I’ve always felt the glamour of being backstage and that excitement, but I’ve never actually done it – not since I was in 5th grade, really. But I’ve had many plays in my films. I feel like maybe theater is a part of my movie work.
Doing that, then doing a lot of theater, which I love. Doing guest stars, did two independent films that are going around to all these festivals. Both of them are going to be at the Lake Tahoe Film Festival.
I smile so much at the theater my face hurts when I leave.
I was a total education geek. I loved school. I loved learning. I loved doing homework. All of my books and notebooks from high school are underlined and highlighted and there are notes all over the margins. And you know, I was a theater kid too. I was all over the place.
In theater, blood is ketchup; in performance, everything’s real.
I’ve never seen a theater community to rival that of Chicago. Neither New York nor L.A. has the raw talent or integrity that Chicago theater has, and I think it’s because Chicago doesn’t have Broadway or the film and TV business to distract it.
I’d also like to do a play. I’ve never done theater, and constantly changing and refining a performance is something I’d like to do, even though it may sound like work to some people – and it probably is work.
