Words matter. These are the best Roger Rees Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
After I left the R.S.C., I did a musical, ‘Masquerade,’ where I played a rabbit. I was the lead.
They said my voice was terrible, nervous, and spotty and that I must go away and learn how to use it properly. I must admit I was rather agape, since I had never thought about making my voice better.
Rattigan wrote some very good plays.
I like to do really good things. But ‘good’ – witness Charles Dickens – doesn’t mean ‘not popular.’
Mostly, theater becomes blander and blander as everyone wants the same thing they saw before. The good plays are the ones that don’t allow you to do that.
‘Nicholas Nickleby’ is 800 pages long. At one time, the theater production was 15 hours long. So it’s an interesting process, about what you leave out and what you select.
The Elizabethan mind wanted and demanded that one word could mean 50 things. What Shakespeare offers us is not ambiguity; it’s choices.
You got paid on Friday, go for a late-night poker game, and have no money on Saturday. But the RSC took your rent out of the paycheck, so at least you had a place to sleep.
I just do what I’m asked, really.
I’ve been with Shakespeare all my life.
The sense of popularity in an actor is essential.
I’m astonished to say, but people are really pleased to hear what happened to me, the way I got a little bit more confident, the people I’ve met, and the things I didn’t know.
I love to argue and share bright ideas in a rehearsal room, and when you live with somebody who is working on the same show, the delight can go on all evening!
I joined the Royal Shakespeare Co. with no experience whatsoever – I’d never been to a drama school or anything. But I was strong and could lift things, I could move scenery about.
No lens is quick enough to track the movement of the human body. The molecules are always moving.
I got out of this school and went to Camberwell College of Arts, a terribly prestigious thing to do. I was there to be a painter. And I sketched so well that, a year later, I was sent to Slade School of Fine Art, one of the great art schools.
I’ve learned from the greatest people, and I’ve got wonderful things to pass on.
I directed Bebe Neuwirth in ‘Here Lies Jenny’ at the Post Street Theatre. I was gobsmacked – the audiences were extremely knowledgeable, affectionate, interested, and not cynical.
I was 36 when I played Nicholas Nickleby.
My neighborhood in South London was very Dickensian.
If Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be doing sitcoms.
I am an anthologist, you see. I sort of make anthologies for people.
You might be the best Hamlet of your generation in the bathroom, but unfortunately, you have to come out and do it on stage, and it’s best to do it to people who would fill the house.
When it was announced I had won the Tony Award, I was in Bangkok doing a movie with Judi Dench. I remember coming back from the location to the Oriental Hotel and hearing someone yelling across the reception area, ‘You’ve won the Tony!’ It was wonderful and strange to be halfway around the world.
In the Victorian age, actors played Romeo until they were 60 or 70 years old.
I was really serious about painting, so I could never be a Sunday painter. You can’t just switch it on and off.
You may be modest and un-egotistical in your life; I’m quite ordinary. But I play big egotistical parts.
Most of my enjoyable times in the theater have been working in a group.
Gerry Schoenfeld told me ‘Les Parents Terribles’ was not going to sell, even though we had Kathleen Turner and Jude Law in the cast. So we called it ‘Indiscretions.’
Even Shakespeare gives you a scene off.
Television is an important part of how we communicate.
I don’t know why, but I was really good in that first play.
So, suddenly I was an actor. I don’t remember being nervous. I learned to be nervous later.
I usually played comic lovers or losers – weak, ineffectual men.
The classical actor in England makes roughly the equivalent of a bus driver.
Sometimes the most excruciating experiences in rehearsals and performances yield the most beautiful work.
Everything happens every night for this audience, and it’s a very special occasion to come to the theatre.
I do one thing Gielgud didn’t: I play the ukulele.
History is with us until we learn from the suffering of the past.
Arthur Winslow is one of the great parts.
There’s something very fine and lucid and rich in this tradition of the English actor.
I thought acting was just going on and remembering all of one’s lines.
All this thing that L.A. doesn’t have any love for the theater isn’t true.
Daring to love someone is something we all do.
More people saw me in one episode of ‘Cheers’ than would ever see me in a play.
I’m really interested in the form, putting one piece up against another and finding something corroborative in another voice. I’ve done a lot of that.
I think like an actor when I’m acting, and I think like a director when I’m directing.
People very often say to actors that they admire their careers, and I rather think that what’s implied by that is that we have a choice in the matter. When really, most actors, me included, do whatever comes along next.
Exercising choice is a good thing.
I’ve often thought I’m a short music hall comedian stuck in a leading man’s body.
Sometimes I think I’ll go off and be a milkman or a greengrocer, some easy job.
I don’t think perfection is possible. I think you can attempt to reach perfection, but I don’t think it’s a possible thing. I think perfection is a moving point, and we spend our artistic lives chasing it.
‘Waiting for Godot,’ when it first came out in 1950, was a very different sort of play to the plays that were in the West End at that time in London, because most of those plays were what we call drawing-room comedies.
I was an art student when I was a boy, and as an art student you don’t have to talk to anyone – you just have to paint really wonderful paintings. It’s very unlike being an actor, where you have to talk all the time.
Nothing in the world in perfect. Even a still photograph.