In my final year at Bristol University, I wrote a play called ‘White Feathers.’ It was produced in the studio theatre at the students’ union in early 1999, when I was 21. It’s 100 pages long: a very traditional play, with an interval, about deserters in the First World War.
I’ve never been a really big fan of theatre. I don’t know why. It’s so much for effort. It’s much more difficult for me than stage acting just because of the pressure that’s piled on you and you have to learn the entire performance by heart.
I like going to New York. I like the galleries and the theatre and the restaurants and bars and music. I think that city is more alive than Los Angeles.
The theatre was created to tell people the truth about life and the social situation.
Look at a football field. It looks like a big movie screen. This is theatre. Football combines the strategy of chess. It’s part ballet. It’s part battleground, part playground. We clarify, amplify and glorify the game with our footage, the narration and that music, and in the end create an inspirational piece of footage.
When someone goes to watch my film in the theatre, they won’t remember the last four articles they read about me. Instead, they will think about the last film I did.
I love the instantaneous nature of filming rather than the repetition of working in the theatre, but that maybe because I haven’t had great experiences working in the theatre.
To be honest I don’t think I was any great shakes as a theatre actor because everything I was doing was really small in size – intimate.
I’m trained in musical theatre and ‘Pitch Perfect’ is the first movie where I get to really belt out. I beat Adele for that role.
Because Chicago was to radio what Hollywood was to films and Broadway was to the theatre: it was the hub of radio.
I like the ephemeral thing about theatre, every performance is like a ghost – it’s there and then it’s gone.
I think the same way about theatre, you go out there and you are creating a world for a moment that can actually have a real impact on people, present some kind of story that gives you something to think about when you walk away, feeling enriched – if it works out well.
I temporarily became a surgeon for ‘Memory of Love’. I spent two weeks in an operating theatre, watching amputations, and I loved it.
‘Go Back Home’ encompasses not only actual geographic location but also, for me, back home in the worlds of music and theatre, and back home in terms of making albums again. There are lots of meanings to that.
I have a dialect myself; it’s more pronounced, because I have studied theatre and been in England. It’s half-British, half-Indian.
In my opinion, Christian Dior was never, ever theatre.
When I write, I am not giving a lecture, I am speculating on behavior. Sometimes this is dangerous, but it should be. As I say often, theatre is a dark place and we should keep the light out of it.
The theatre is a spiritual and social X-ray of its time.
A lot of people think theatre must be much harder work than film, but anything histrionic or superfluous gets seen on camera so you have to work to distil it into a complete sense of what’s true.
It’s really a grand old, legendary theatre where the spirits of like Judy Garland and all these great performers have been. The clubs are way more underground.
Television is great but for me, as a performer, nothing compares to a live theatre show.
You know, this isn’t theatre like it used to be.
I got amazing training both with Theatre Sports… back in Edmonton, Alberta – I can’t give those people enough credit – and the daytime drama I did. Incredible training, both of them.
I love test screenings. Some directors don’t, I know. But I love it. I think it’s because I come from the theatre and in the theatre, previews are where you really have to listen to the audience and really feel how they’re responding. I found our test screenings incredibly useful.
But theatre is always a difficult experience.
There’s little money in theatre.
I wouldn’t just come home from school and watch TV everyday, they had me involved in lots of local theatre. I was a very dramatic, talkative child. And that was part of my mother’s creative solution – to put me in workshops and classes and children’s theatre programmes.
I know I am the first female celebrity in the world who has allowed herself to be filmed like that in an operating theatre.
Rather than disliking theatre, I’ve expressed a preference for television because it tends to deal in its small way much more with issues and is able to reach a broader church of people than theatre.
The National Youth Theatre did one very simple but incredible thing for me: it made me realise I had choices.
If you swap it about, do television, theatre, film, you can go on surprising yourself. The problem is you get employed to do something you’ve already done. They want something from that sheep pen of performances they’ve seen you do.
Because theatre is a story-telling art form, we feel entitled to assume that the playwright got there before we got there.
I love theatre, and you learn too much as an actor and enjoy too much of it not to want to go back a lot.
In 1969, I wrote a musical called ‘Mother Earth.’ It was a rock musical with an ecology theme. We did it at the South Coast Repertory Theatre in Southern California where I was a member. It was a smash hit in this small theater.
Then I heard this genius teacher Stella Adler – I recommend you read anything you might find about her and if you have anyone interested in theatre, you get them one of her books.
As an actress and comedienne, I’m a huge fan of he theatre and the Tricycle in Kilburn is my favourite in London. I dragged my kids to a performance of ‘Twelfth Night’ there, where they handed out pizza. Who knew that all it takes to get children interested in Shakespeare is a snack?
For a long time, it was hard for me to get my work done in Chicago. Silk Road gave me opportunities to do shows like ‘Golden Child’ – shows that nobody else seemed interested in. And they bring an artistic integrity to the work that matches anything you’ll find at a bigger theatre.
The ending is really the most important part of the movie. If the first hour and 20 minutes is terrific and the last ten minutes stinks, everybody walks out of the theatre and says: ‘That was a lousy movie!’
I am auditioning again – getting back to theatre would be amazing.
Hollywood was a detour, although my mother was an aristocrat from Tokyo who ran away to join the theatre, so acting is in my genes.
I’ve loved every minute of every hour I’ve spent doing theatre.
My first Broadway show was with Elizabeth Taylor and Maureen Stapleton. Maureen Stapleton, a legend in the theatre; Elizabeth Taylor, a legend, period.
I hope it’s always going to be a mix between theatre, film and radio. I’ve been very lucky living in London that you can do all that – in New York and L.A., there’s more of a structure for film in L.A. and theatre in New York. In London, our industry is smaller, but it produces brilliant work all in one place.
I was a football player at college and dislocated my thumb. I was out for a bit and passed the theatre and saw some lovely drama students walking into an audition for ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ and thought: ‘That’s what I’ll do when I recover.’ I joined that production and was hooked.
In the theatre, once you’ve gone about eight rows back, everybody else is just listening to you. You’re very small, and nobody can really see what you’re doing.
The money is better in films and television. But in terms of acting, theatre is more rewarding.
In a world of iPads and emails, nothing has really changed in the theatre. You still get in an hour early, do your wardrobe, put an old pair of tights under your wig, and you have, ‘This is your call, Miss Jensen’. I got exhilarated by that.
I grew up doing musical theatre in Orlando, Florida. When I was 14, I just happened to be in the right place at the right time – a deliveryman heard me singing and offered to deliver my demo tape to Sony Music. I was just really lucky.
I love going to the movie theatre, seeing live comedy, and going to amusement parks.
I was doing TV work, theatre work, and some film work in the Philippines when I left.
I’ve been told if you’re an actress you can’t sing, if you’re a dancer you can’t act, you can’t do theatre and be respected if you’ve done a TV soap, you can’t have a No. 1 record. All these different things they’ve told me I can’t do, but I wanted to do them, so I’ve done them.
Characters in TV and theatre tend to experience a lot of conflict, so I push myself through sport to physical and emotional levels that hurt so I’ve some other reference for extreme experience that isn’t me shouting at my girlfriend or my mum. It’s a way of controlling the uncontrollable.
Dance and theatre afforded me the opportunity to discover my passion for acting, for telling stories.
Theatre gives you wings as an actor.
I began with dance, doing ballet at 3, then tap, jazz, modern. Then I sang in church choirs, learned how to play clarinet and drums, sang with rock bands and only then did I get into musical theatre.
There’s a great charm in theatre; I enjoyed doing it for twelve years and did lots of plays. At this chapter of my life, I am a cinema actor, and I would like to continue to be so, and at some point I would return to the theatre.
