In Their Own Words

I don't really like productions in which the audience is told what to think and what to feel. It's very difficult not to be tempted to direct their feelings - but all you've got to do is direct their attention - to say "look at this". I think that's what audience participation is. They are the editors, they are the judges. It's not like a movie where everything is decided. The audience can look where they want. That is why it's important that wherever they look, there should be extremely detailed life.

All I have to do as an actor is believe in what I'm saying at the moment I say it. I have to make decisions. Am I pretending? Am I lying? Do I really believe it? Do I feel it? How important is it that I get the other person to understand what I'm saying? Are they likely to? All those things. It's not up to me whether the character would have been better off if he had or hadn't said that. It's not up to me to say: is he foolish to say that? He just does say it.

Sir Ian McKellen, British Actor, born 1939

In Their Own Words

It was at the [Liverpool Everyman Theatre] in the late Sixties and early Seventies that I realised there was a logic to being an actor. That it wasn't just farting about. The policy at that time was to do things that were only to do with the community in which it was based. So if you were doing King Lear, or whatever, you'd do it in such a way that it was relative to a building site in Liverpool. I followed the miners' strike; I followed the Guildford Four. After reading Gerry Conlon's book I wanted to do the film [In the Name of the Father, with Daniel Day-Lewis] so much that I went to the interview completely in character as Giuseppe and stayed in character all the way through the interview - Belfast accent, old suit from a thrift shop...


I like playing characters that are complex, that are intriguing, that come from leftfield, that do things that are unexpected. I don't like people who just follow one line and that's it – that's why I could never be in a sitcom, I don't think. They're not intriguing enough for me.

Pete Postlethwaite, British Actor, 1946-2011
Read his obituary in The Guardian here

In Their Own Words

Many people, including some working actors, [...] may admire the fact that an actor has a trained voice and body, but they believe that any further training can come only from actually performing before an audience. I find this akin to the sink-or-swim method of introducing a child to water. Children do drown and not all actors develop by their mere physical presence on stage. A talented young pianist, skilful at improvisation or playing by ear, might be a temporary sensation in a night club or on television, but he knows better than to attempt a Beethoven piano concerto. The pianist’s fingers just won’t make it. A pop singer with an untrained voice may have a similar success, but not with a Bach cantata. The singer would rip his vocal chords. An untrained dancer has no hope of performing in Giselle. The dancer would tear tendons. In their attempt the will also ruin the concerto, the cantata, and Giselle because, if they eventually are ready, they will only remember their early mistakes. But a young actor will unthinkingly plunge into Hamlet if he has a chance. He must learn that, until he’s ready, he is doing the same destructive thing to himself and the role.

Uta Hagen, German-American Actress, Director and Coach, 1919 – 2004

In Their Own Words

I was considering taking a portion of this - itself a segment of an entire lecture - and transcribing it, but this woman is so deft with her performance that I realised it would not have done her justice to simply copy and paste. Watch, listen, and enjoy.

With an explanation like that, why wouldn't you want to do theatre?

Patsy Rodenburg, British Acting Coach

In Their Own Words

It’s important that if you are going to make drama it has to speak to a modern, diverse audience and society - and to be bold with it [...] When I started there were hardly any [prominent British black actors] Now, there is a generation who don’t see a colour bar or a barrier to going off to Hollywood or the West End or The Royal Shakespeare Company; it is great that they feel so involved and we should encourage that.

David Harewood, British Actor, born 1965

In Their Own Words

One of the problems with small theatres like the Donmar and the Almeida [is that] they’re wonderful places to work, icons of fashionabilty and all that, but it’s very exclusive. You can’t get in. Plus these places only function if we actors get low wages. The tragedy is that there’s no ticket equivalent of what there was when I was young. I went to see Olivier in The Merchant of Venice for 15 pence... Anyone who says the seat prices don’t make a difference should go to one of the theatres where they have a cheap night on a Monday. The places are heaving. It’s interesting that Olivier, a conservative figure in many ways, was absolutely supportive of the notion that subsidy subsidised seat prices. That’s gone now. Today it’s all about charging the market rate. The market rate cuts people off from the experience. 

Roger Allam, British Actor, born 1953

In Their Own Words

Acting is a mixture of truth and fake. Because none of us are dying on stage; none of us are in love with the person that we're opposite, but you want to get as real a feeling underneath it within a fake environment.

Lolita Chakrabarti, British Actress, born 1969

In Their Own Words

There are as many Hamlets as there are actors to play him. He can be tall, short, fat, thin, black, white, whatever. There's always something in there that you absolutely respond to. It never ceased to frighten me. I always would be very nervous when I went on. In fact, it was the trigger for me "catching" - if that's the right word - stage fright, which stayed with me for nearly three years; and I didn't go on stage in nearly three years.

I'm standing in the wings, waiting to go on, and I suddenly thought, you know, "To be or not to be": that's the speech, they all know. At least they know the first line or the first two lines, the most famous speech. And whenever you got to that speech, there was a particular silence that falls on the audience. Tangible, you can touch it: because this is the moment he's saying "To be or not to be"; and every Hamlet feels it, I'm sure. And I'm in the wings, waiting to do this, and I thought: "What happens if I dry? What happens if I forget it?" I started, and I dried. I didn't know what... Every pore in my body opened. My shirt, my grey shirt turned black with sweat, pouring down my face. I'd asked all those questions that people ask and you think "what a silly question". "How do you learn your lines?"; "How do you get up in front of a thousand people?" Yes. How do I? How do I remember? How do I get up in front...?  And asking those questions was wrong, because I couldn't answer them.


Sir Derek Jacobi, British Actor, born 1938

In Their Own Words

I have to wait to be asked to do something; think if it's a good idea; and then I have to wait to be asked to be told how to do it; and then I don't know if it's any good afterwards. And then I'm sad when it's over.

 Dame Judi Dench, British Actress, born 1934

In Their Own Words

You have to be alive to the changes, and prepared to compromise in some way, I think. And I always have thought the theatre is really a great compromise. I mean, in every production, you have to compromise in some way: you never get the absolutely perfect cast. You've got to compromise with the author, with the director, with the lighting man; the whole thing is a compromise, and it's a kind of miracle when it comes together, like good cooking. And if it happens to be that you have the right ingredients, and they all come to the boil at the right moment, you have a success. But it is an extraordinary profession, in that way. I think there's more luck in it, more hazard, perhaps, than any of the other artistic professions.

Sir John Gielgud, British Actor, 1904-2000