I have done 16 films with David Dhawan and I have tried to do every character differently, be it Sharafat Ali, Mutthu Swamy or Calender, because of my theatre experience.
What theatre people love about theatre – and I totally understand it, I just don’t share it – is that they feel they mint something afresh every night. Because I would rather do something until I’ve done it and then know it’s done. New day, next thing!
Class I to XII wasn’t much help; I was always a mediocre student. But when I pursued higher education and studied economics with theatre or psychology with science fiction, I got a whole new world view.
Theatre is castigated for wallowing in self-indulgence, but it’s curiously unsentimental. You simply have to move on. Everything passes. Something in me likes that.
Though I acted in hundreds of productions, appeared at the Guthrie Theatre and on Broadway in Amadeus, I discovered in my thirties that I didn’t really like stage acting. The presence of the audience, the eight shows a week and the possibility of a long run were all unnatural to me.
I don’t know, on a sitcom, and in theatre especially, you have to really be listening to an audience. And if you’re losing them, you can hear the sniffs, and the playbills shuffling and whatnot.
I was in the National Youth Theatre, too, but there was no dancing there. I was doing plays like ‘Julius Caesar’ and playing the lute very badly.
All of a sudden Kevin told me that the movie got bought and was gonna be shown in a movie theatre. I was shocked. I was psyched. It was just weird.
What I do believe is theatre is a medium with a peculiar ability to air vital issues.
In high school, I was very active in extracurricular activities such as art, theatre, and choir. I also wrote for the school newspaper, but not regularly, because I never liked writing non-fiction very much.
I love doing movies but I loved doing theatre just as much.
I just am committed wholeheartedly to theatre with no intermission.
What draws me to the theatre, and what appealed to me about Too Much Light, is that you have no idea what’s going to happen. That’s the most exciting part of theatre, it’s never the same. If it were, it would be like watching a movie.
The idea of doing theatre always terrified me because I get terrible stage fright. In the early 1970s I was offered a panto but the thought of going on stage was just too mortifying.
Doing ‘EastEnders’ wasn’t exactly suffering, but my soul’s not in quick-fix TV. Theatre doesn’t pay like TV work pays, though. We all have to live, don’t we?
Dance, theatre, etc. as art, will disappear along with the dominating ‘expression’ of tragedy and harmony: the movement of life itself will become harmonious.
The first time I stepped on stage in the local theatre I knew what I needed to do – I knew I had found the right place to be.
I have never seen a game’s graphics look so sharp and clean. The sound design for the game is also unique on the Xbox. The memory on this system allowed us to provide the user with 5.1 Dolby surround sound for home theatre owners.
We talk about theatre museums filled with old costumes and things. What we also need is a theatre museum of the old routines on videotape. We are only the custodians of those techniques, and they should be preserved.
My old manager of the Irish National Theatre said ‘Don’t worry about being a star, just worry about being a working actor. Just keep working.’ I think that’s really good advice.
Hollywood is a very interesting place to deal with. And having been a theatre person, I was quite surprised by the slipperiness of some people in Holly-weird. There was a part of me that just said, ‘If this is the way the game is played, I’m not sure I want to play it.’
Film acting is so different from theatre acting, and TV is about letting things pay off and not winning every scene.
I didn’t go to drama school to be a musical theatre performer. I enjoyed it, but I didn’t go to do that; I went to be an actor.
The way the world is, I think a silly evening in the theatre is a good thing, to take our minds off terror.
It seems like pop singing has sort of influenced musical theatre in so many ways – you could argue good or bad, really – and musical theatre is written for that style so often, which is a completely different style.
I’ve done movies with Oliver Stone and Michael Mann. And I’ve done quite a few dramas in my time, from the theatre to film work. I just think the audience is used to seeing me on ‘Saturday Night Live,’ and ‘K-9,’ and ‘Curly Sue’ and of course, ‘According to Jim.’ I think that my comedies have been the most popular.
It’s very lucky to be able to do a job where I get to sit about writing plays all day and going to the theatre. The downside, I suppose, is that you put it out there, and people are invited to like it or loathe it.
The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place. It is the place people come to see the truth about life and the social situation.
I’ve directed enough in the theatre and a couple of films to know that – to feel fairly secure that if I find a story that I really like I can probably get it done somewhat.
I’d like to think that we strive in film and theatre to tell great stories, and I believe in the power of storytelling in our culture.
Most of the competition was into bulk popcorn because of the major increases in the Drive-In Theatre Outlets.
I feel a lot more comfortable on stage in the theatre. It just reminds me of being a kid and doing pantomimes.
I had worked in this New York theatre company for my first eight or nine years out of college, acting and directing there, and I’d begun to write a little bit.
This visible world is wonderfully to be delighted in, and highly to be esteemed, because it is the theatre of God’s righteous Kingdom.
In my opinion, there’s nothing new in the theatre, ever. Theatre-makers are thieves, in the honourable tradition of charlatans. They fake it very, very well indeed for the entertainment of everybody else.
I started off dancing and playing sports, and I joined the drama stuff, the theatre stuff in middle school because my friends were involved, and it was kind of the cool thing to do.
Hollywood can be brutal, inhuman, the opposite of what the theatre is, and I had little desire to be part of it.
You get used to being lazy doing films, but classical theatre’s going to finish me off.
A prose writer never sees a reader walk out of a book; for a playwright, it’s another matter. An audience is an invaluable education. In my experience, theatre artists don’t know what they’ve made until they’ve made it.
I don’t like going for more than a year without doing theatre. I don’t mind falling flat on my face so long as I feel I’m open to the possibility of something extraordinary happening.
I think theatre helped, only because it was acting experience. I got to work with a lot of directors.
I was used to theatre classes. I studied with my mother; she was a theatre teacher and directed, too, so it was very family-like. Then I studied with a great teacher in Paris, and she was wonderful; she pushed me, but she was a warm soul.
Theatre’s great. It’s such an act of faith. It’s a wonderful art form where you suspend disbelief for a couple of hours. It’s a lovely art form because the actors and the audience are alive and in the room at the same time together. That’s why I love the theatre.
Two days before I got the audition for ‘Extras,’ I was offered a theatre role, and I asked my husband, Terry, whether I should take it or not. He said, ‘No, wait and see what else comes in.’ Lo and behold, along came ‘Extras.’ Now that was lucky!
I was hugely formed by stories I was told as a child whether that was in a book, the cinema, theatre or television and probably television more than any medium is what influenced me as a child and formed my response to literature, story-telling and, therefore, the world around me.
I’ve never done stand-up; I came via small-scale touring theatre, through the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre, then I got employed on that as an actor who had a humorous sensibility.
I can’t do theatre in the US,’ she says, ‘because I don’t have a green card.
I was supposed to go to drama school and then go to New York and do theatre. But I grew up on all those fabulous movies and had read all the bold Hollywood books, and I thought I just had to take a look.
Ever since I was little it was programmed into me that London is where great theatre occurs and all the big shows you love start there.
I might have had my highs and lows in cinema and television but in theatre the response has always been positive.
The play is on top of me all the time, and I am constantly thinking about it. Even when I leave the theatre, I’ll mumble the lines to myself or think about the way the character walks or holds himself.
I come from the New York theatre world, and I have a lot of gay male friends, so this friendship of Will and Grace’s isn’t such a stretch.
I think film likes me better than the theatre does for some reason.
For a long time, I thought I was going to go into law, but theatre just kept being so present in my life.
I said I would like to do some theatre, so people started searching for some jobs for me, and I didn’t think it would be the lead role in ‘Equus.’
