Top 70 Martin Landau Quotes

I think we’ve all done things we’re not particularly fond of. Everybody goes through it and comes out the other end, and goes on with his life as if it didn’t happen.

I still care about human behavior and the art that it takes to write a good piece and to get a cast together who cares enough to put 150 percent of their talent into a project.

The fact that I wound up doing television and film was just a thing that happened, but I was trained for the theater, and what goes on in the theater has nothing to do with special effects.

Ageism is something that does exist.

They were like little palaces: all rococo or art deco. You’d walk in off those hot streets into a nice, air-cooled theater, and you’d spend all day watching Cagney or Jimmy Stewart. It cost all of 17 cents.

How a character hides his feelings tells us something about him.

Jimmy Dean was my best friend.

I studied with Strasberg, Elia Kazan. They raised the bar. They weren’t easy to please, and they made you achieve the best you could do. That’s what a teacher does: he infuses you with passion for something.

I hung around with Jason Robards, Richard Harris, Robert Shaw, Richard Burton. I knew not to match them for drinks.

With ‘Avatar,’ you’re beginning to see the need for less and less actors and less of an appreciation for live acting.

I always treat each take as a rehearsal for the next take. That way you can find stuff and keep adding and playing until they tell me to stop.

I run the Actor’s Studio on the West Coast, and one of the things I say all the time to the people I teach – many of whom are acting teachers – is that an actor needs to make choices that make him present.

The modern cineplexes are mundane, dull boxes. But ‘The Majestic’ pays tribute to the movie palaces that made people feel like royalty. It honors a time when pictures helped Americans get through grim periods like the blacklist and the war.

A film is not going to change the world. But if it can do that to individuals on an individual level, I think it’s a magnificent movie.

My mantra is ‘stay perpendicular.’ Horizontal is not as good.

I did theatrical caricatures.

All an audience wants to believe is that what’s going on is happening for the first time.

As a Jew, there’s a need to keep that atrocity alive. There were Catholics and gypsies and homosexuals who died in the Holocaust, too. It’s amazing that people allowed this slaughter to take place. There’s a need to make these films and reiterate it happened.

I’m very proud of Space 1999. Its success paved the way for other sci-fi shows to follow. My hope is that the DVD release will help it reach a new generation of fans.

I had hair down to my shoulders, a beard and mustache. I was crude and rude.

Bad actors try to cry, and good actors try not to. Bad actors try to laugh, and good actors try not to.

My father was an Austrian, and he brought some Torahs over to this country, ancient Torahs that were slipped out of Germany.

I always tried to play the bad guys as guys who didn’t know they were bad guys. There are villains we run into all the time, but they don’t think they are doing anything wrong. If they do, they think they are cunning and smart. When people break laws and ethical rules, they justify it in their own terms.

I trained as an actor with Lee Strasberg, Elia Kazan, and Harold Clurman, and those guys set a very high bar.

Human beings are fascinating with religion and stories about not dying. Or dying and being brought back to life. I think it’s just part of our make up.

If I were a writer, the Pulitzer Prize would be important to me. This is my profession, so an Oscar is important.

I can take scripts directly to actors. Agents don’t like to hear that.

The Italian tough guys, dey talk real deep like dis down in dere chests… while the Irish speak way high-ah, up here in their heads.

I look for roles where there is some kind of an arc to the story.

I’m certainly not going to play any of Matt Damon’s roles in the future. But he will eventually grow into mine, since he’ll be around for a long time.

I don’t like to sound immodest, but I believe in what I can do. Sometimes it’s been frustrating because I haven’t gotten to bat; if you’re on the bench, and an unimaginative person doesn’t see you as right for a certain role, you don’t get the chance to hit the home run.

I’m a big believer that an actor should be able to pick up any piece of material and act it, the way a good musician can.

I always believed that all it would take was a decent role. I felt like a pinch hitter with a leaden bat: that if I got a chance, I could hit a home run.

Dialogue is what a character’s willing to share and reveal to another character, and the 90% they aren’t willing to share is what I do for a living.

People think I’m a very serious actor, which I am. But you know, if you don’t have a sense of humor doing what I do, you perish.

I was being groomed to be the theatrical caricaturist. And I know if I got that job, I’d never quit. So I quit. I knew I wanted to go into the theater… I wanted to act.

Every young actor wants to do ‘Hamlet’ on the West End. Why? Because they can bring something to it.

I always say, if I tell you a joke right now and it’s funny, you laugh. Now, we set the lights, and I tell you the joke again, it’s hard to find it funny the second time.

I love to see lack of clarity in a performance as well as clarity, as well as trust, as well as the kinds of things that human beings go through. I love to see spontaneity and ‘inevitability.’ How it gets there is going to shock the hell out of me, but it will get there somehow.

Mankind, his brain has embraced so many amazing things, and yet we’re still beating each other over the heads with clubs, excepting the bullets now, one bullet can wipe out an entire city.

I’ve worked with a lot of wooden actors in my day, but Pinocchio is the best.

I’ve got so many stories about every film and show I’ve ever been in.

‘North by Northwest’ took two and a half to three months to film. When I look back, I realise I wasn’t intimidated by Hitchcock and Cary Grant. They were so accepting of me.

‘Mission’ was a mind game. The ideal mission was getting in and getting out without anyone ever knowing we were there.

All ‘Hamlets’ are different, and it’s the most overwritten play ever written.

Pictures are packaged and cast by agents.

Years ago on TV, I played people like Doc Holliday and Jesse James on Westerns.

Harry Dean Stanton, Anjelica Huston – a lot of people have studied with me. It’s paying my dues.

I was offered the Gene Hackman role in ‘The Poseidon Adventure’ four times, and I turned it down four times. I didn’t want to do that movie. I called it the upside down boat.

Actors need to trust themselves. If you trust yourself, you can trust others and leave the director outside.

You can’t perish because of your own feelings; you have to embrace those things as an actor because it’s part of your palette.

I played a wide variety of roles.

The real good comedians, like Chaplin, would make you laugh and a second later, cry.

Bad guys don’t think they’re bad guys. Hitler probably thought he was a wonderful guy doing some wonderful and righteous work for Germany.

No one tries to cry. You try not to cry. No one tries to laugh. You try not to laugh.

I’m usually cast by people who are oddly goofy.

As a young actor, I was working much more readily and being offered more things.

A lot of the bad guys I’ve played just haven’t had much dimension to them.

I started teaching when I was in my 20s because Lee Strasberg asked me to, and he didn’t do that with a lot of people.

The way a character sounds is so important to how you’re going to play him.

I don’t know anybody who’s any good who isn’t nuts.

Everything that has happened to me is of value to me. As painful as certain things are, and have been, and were, there’s a use for those things in my life and in my work.

Of course, I remember the Disney ‘Pinocchio.’ I was a little kid then… It was very instructive. Little boys who don’t behave wind up in lots of trouble.

I run the ‘Actors Studio’ on the West Cost. I’m artistic director of that.

I love an actor who comes in, ready to work. It’s like a good tennis player. They hit the ball where you don’t expect it, and it’s great.

I’m not speaking, you know, egocentrically at all, but I do have a very wide range.

Life is a roller coaster. There are ups; there are downs. There are hills; there are valleys, peaks, and so on.

Teachers are important in this world.

I don’t think villains think they are villains.

The idea of death is something that doesn’t make sense to a lot of people. But to bring something back – or vampires who never die – is a logical fantasy for a human being.