Actors Actresses Quotes

I always am in a role, lovely – for you, for them – even for myself. Yeah... Even when I’m alone, I am still in a role – and I myself am the most exacting audience I have ever had.

Are we not all actors playing parts in another person's play?

Sometimes in the afternoon sky the moon would pass white as a cloud, furtive, lusterless, like an actress who does not have to perform yet and who, from the audience, in street clothes, watches the other actors for a moment, making herself inconspicuous, not wanting anyone to pay attention to her.

an actress can only play a woman,I'm an actor I can play anything

Trust me, baby, you weren’t that good. I was just a better actress than you were actor. (Zephyra to Stryker) Ew! No offense, Mum, I don’t want to know who you’ve slept with. Kill the sexual bantering and him before I go deaf from it. (Medea)

People never forget two things, their first love and the money they wasted watching a bad movie.

Audience can live without a movie but a movie cannot live without an audience.

Actors and actresses make magic,' I said. 'They make things happen on the stage; they invent; they create.

I became an artist because I wanted to be an active participant in the conversation about art.

Even the world’s greatest actor cannot fake an erection.

One big bonus: e-mail! Just like the days back on Hermes, I get data dumps. Of course, they relay e-mail from friends and family, but NASA also sends along choice messages from the public. I’ve gotten e-mail from rock stars, athletes, actors and actresses, and even the President. One of them was from my alma mater, the University of Chicago. They say once you grow crops somewhere, you have officially “colonized” it. So technically, I colonized Mars. In your face, Neil Armstrong!

Here is to all the brilliant minds that love deeply, for they write the stories that make us dream of true love. Here is to all the visionaries that create a miracle when others give up hope. Here is to all the artists, musicians, actors, singers, songwriters, dancers, screenwriters, philosophers, inventors and poetic hearts that create a perspective of heaven we can experience in this lifetime. But most of all, here is to the wild souls that the world calls broken, insane, abnormal, weird or different because they are the ones that renew our faith, by what they overcome and create, in a world that needs a sign that God doesn’t forget the least of us.

A sex worker deserves a billion times more respect, than the mystical fraudsters of the society, such as astrologers, psychics and tarot card readers.

I do a public access show with puppets. Puppets called actors, TV and movie stars.

Actors, actresses, singers, sportsmen &women, and all the rest of this pile; why the hell do they call them stars?!! I guess because there are so damn plenty of them, more than you can even count!

You have to be a wonderful actress or actor to survive in this world.

Make films that purify the soul with the flow of rational, vigorous and compassionate thinking.

An actress can only play a woman. I'm an actor, I can play anything

Living in California, everyone learns to adapt their actor or actress within.

The word ‘actress' or ‘authoress' always struck me as condescending. A doctor's a doctor, right? So I've always referred to ‘actors' and ‘writers,' regardless of their sex.

I taught how to be sociable with ink on paper. I told my students that when they were writing they should be good dates on blind dates, should show strangers good times. Alternatively, they should run really nice whorehouses, come one, come all, although they were in fact working in perfect solitude. I said I expected them to do this with nothing but idiosyncratic arrangements in horizontal lines of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numbers, and maybe eight punctuation marks, because it wasn't anything that hadn't been done before. In 1996, with movies and TV doing such good jobs of holding the attention of literates and illiterates alike, I have to question the value of my very strange, when you think about it, charm school. There is this: Attempted seductions with nothing but words on paper are so cheap for would-be ink-stained Don Juans or Cleopatras!They don't have to get a bankable actor or actress to commit to the project, and then a bankable director, and so on, and then raise millions and millions of buckareenies from manic-depressive experts on what most people want. Still and all, why bother? Here's my answer: Many people need desperately to receive this message: "I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people don't care about them. You are not alone.

Lindsay [Doran] goes round the table and introduces everyone -- making it clear that I am present in the capacity of writer rather than actress, therefore no one has to be too nice to me.

Use filmmaking for a greater purpose, than to just entertain some drowsy minds. Wake the whole world up with your movies. It has been sleeping for long. Its eternal sleep has become its darkest nemesis. Now is the time to wake it up.

gymnasts retire at 20, cricketers at 34, actresses at 32, actors at 75, salesmen at 50, other employees at 58 or 60 years, and doctors and lawyers when their bodies do not listen to their minds. Of course, one class beats them all — politicians retire at 90!

Dash it all, she’s an actress! Don’t take her so seriously. Actors don’t have opinions, my dear chap, still less do actresses. They have moods. Fads. Poses. Twenty-four-hour passions. There’s a lot wrong with the world, dammit. Actors are absolute suckers for dramatic solutions. For all I know, by the time you get her out there, she’ll be Born Again!

Give people films, they will forget after a few weeks, but give people ideas, they will assimilate them into their consciousness.

A Film has the potential to kindle such a spark of inspiration in an individual that it can alter the course of human progress.

Entertain, but also, give the viewer something to think about.

Creativity without discipline will struggle, creativity with discipline will succeed.

Acha alama katika dunia baada ya kuondoka.

When I see an actress or actor drag deeply in a movie, I imagine the pyrenes and phenols ravaging the tender epithelial cells and hardworking cilia of their bronchi, the monoxide and cyanide binding to their hemoglobin, the heaving and straining of their chemically panicked hearts.

You can say the Jesus Prayer from now till doomsday, but if you don't realize that the only thing that counts in the religious life is detachment, I don't see how you ever move an inch. Detachment, buddy, and only detachment. Desirelessness. 'Cessations from all hankerings.' It's this business of desiring, if you want to know the goddam truth, that makes an actor in the first place. Why're you making me tell you things you already know? Somewhere along the line - in one damn incarnation or another, if you like - you not only had a hankering to be an actor or an actress but to be a good one. You're stuck with it now. You can't just walk out on the results of your own hankerings. Cause and effect, buddy, cause and effect. The only thing you can do now, the only religious thing you can do, is act. Act for God, if you want to - be God's actress, if you want to. What could be prettier?

As a logical thinker, I cannot help thinking, based on the evidence, that many people who exhibit dramatic reactions to bad news involving strangers are hypocrites. That troubles me. People like that hear bad news from across the world, and they burst into wails and tears as though their own children have just been run over by a bus. To me, they don’t seem very different from actors and actresses—they are able to burst into tears on command, but does it really mean anything?

Actresses talking about characters they’ve played often use the phrase “strong woman”, which kind of irks me. Firstly, the description appears to be reserved for two kinds of female: the gun-toting chick in tiny-vest-and-shorts combo, or the tough-talking businesswoman who secretly longs for a man to bring out her softer side. So obviously, our idea of strength is pretty narrow and one-dimensional. Secondly, why isn’t Brad Pitt ever asked about how much he enjoys playing a “strong man”? Is it automatically assumed that men’s roles will be complex and interesting?

Joel did not quite believe in picture actresses' grief. They have other preoccupations—they are beautiful rose-gold figures blown full of life by writers and directors, and after hours they sit around and talk in whispers and giggle innuendoes, and the ends of many adventures flow through them.

It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall, The dark threw its patches down upon me also, The best I had done seem’d to me blank and suspicious, My great thoughts as I supposed them, were they not in reality meagre? Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil, I am he who knew what it was to be evil, I too knitted the old knot of contrariety, Blabb’d, blush’d, resented, lied, stole, grudg’d, Had guile, anger, lust, hot wishes I dared not speak, Was wayward, vain, greedy, shallow, sly, cowardly, malignant, The wolf, the snake, the hog, not wanting in me, The cheating look, the frivolous word, the adulterous wish, not wanting, Refusals, hates, postponements, meanness, laziness, none of these wanting, Was one with the rest, the days and haps of the rest, Was call’d by my nighest name by clear loud voices of young men as they saw me approaching or passing, Felt their arms on my neck as I stood, or the negligent leaning of their flesh against me as I sat, Saw many I loved in the street or ferry-boat or public assembly, yet never told them a word, Lived the same life with the rest, the same old laughing, gnawing, sleeping, Play’d the part that still looks back on the actor or actress, The same old role, the role that is what we make it, as great as we like, Or as small as we like, or both great and small." -from "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

For everyone, though, the persona must relate to objects and protect the subject. This is its dual function. While introverts can be very outgoing with a few people, in a large group they shrink and disappear and the persona often feels inadequate, particularly with strangers and in situations in which the introvert does not occupy a defined role. Cocktail parties are a torture, but acting a role on stage may be a pure joy and pleasure. Many famous actors and actresses are quite deeply introverted. In private they may be shy, but given a public role they feel protected and secure and can easily pass as the most extroverted types imaginable.

Use filmmaking to eliminate racism – use to it terminate misogyny – use it to destroy homophobia and all other primitiveness.

Take the clapper and become the alarm that the world so desperately needs.

Whatever genre you deem suitable for your taste – romance, comedy, action, mystery, sci-fi or anything else, make sure it has the plain everyday human kindness.

Filmmaking has the power to fortify the feeble, unify the divided, raise the abandoned and inspire the ignorant.

The role of the director is to create a space where the actresses and actors can become more than they have ever been before, more than they have ever dreamed of being.

Just been told that I've been in a car crash with Stephen Merchant. I was eating cereal in my pj's when I heard. I hope I'm ok.

ARE YOU A MOVIE STAR? Prerequisite for Laziness: Creativity, award winning actor/actress, convincing speech

I am not an actress. I am a mistress of disguise. Acting happens to be one of the perks

Some of the world's best actors and actresses don't work in the cinema.

This world has got followers for every type of personality, right from the stupid saint to smart terrorist, talented comedian to non-sense politician, beautiful actress to ugly actor

Mrs. Carbuncle had talked a great deal about “The Noble Jilt,” and could boast that she had discussed the merits of the two chief characters with the actor and actress who were to undertake them.

Looking back, I could probably have been more sympathetic. I could see why Lana was disappointed—as Barbara West used to put it, “An actress is a little bit more than a woman. An actor, a little bit less than a man.

Today...major actors and actresses develop their own projects or, at the very least, cherry-pick their roles carefully to suit not only their tastes but also whatever image they have cultivated to present to their public. Most major stars have their own production companies through which such projects are developed and even financed. While the biggest male stars of that time did in fact have their own production companies--Jimmy Stewart, Kirk Douglas, John Wayne, and Burt Lancaster, to name a few--and thus exerted creative and financial control over their careers, that was not the case with female stars. But Marilyn Monroe was about to change that.

Lauren and Alexis each had their own, and Ed and I shared one, which was great fun. He was smart and funny and a real professional, and we quickly discovered that we had a lot in common. We were both happily married, with homes on the East Coast. Not only did we both come from New York theater backgrounds, but I’d forgotten that we actually won Tony Awards on that same magical night in 1976—mine for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical in A Chorus Line, and his for Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play called Mrs. Warren’s Profession. We were even mutually addicted to the New York Times crossword puzzles, which we did together every day we worked.

And for the first time in years, Rick realizes how fortunate he is and was. All the wonderful actors he's worked with through the years—Meeker, Bronson, Coburn, Morrow, McGavin, Robert Blake, Glenn Ford, Edward G. Robinson. All the different actresses he got to kiss. All the affairs he had. All the interesting people he got to work with. All the places he got to visit. All the fun stories he got to live. All the times he saw his name and picture in the papers and magazines. All the nice hotel rooms. All the fuss people made over him. All the fan mail he never read. All the times driving through Hollywood as a citizen in good standing. He looks around at the fabulous house he owns. Paid for by doing what he used to do for free when he was a little boy: pretending to be a cowboy.

Like most actors, she was hysterical when unemployed and resentful when appearing every night to full houses. She also entertained the common belief that a writer is only working when he can be seen head down at his desk. Why are you drinking/dreaming/farting/fornicating instead of making typewriter noises?

You know, one thing I learned about actors and actresses - I mean the big stars. They can be the most ignorant people if they get caught up in it very young. Some of them are damn near illiterate. And emotionally they're like people who have grown up in the penal system. I mean, they cannot control their emotions at all.

But you'll see producers and theatre owners with a billion dollars worth of theaters come in here for lunch and you know why? Because it's cheap. You see those pictures on the wall? All young actors and actresses who you will never hear about in your life... And when 'dis place is gone, the entire Broadway will slide into the East River.

I knew exactly when the fever had struck. I had been reading Hamlet in an English class at school. Everyone else stumbled, puzzling over the strange words. Then it had been my turn, and the language had suddenly woken in me, so that my heart and lungs and tongue and throat were on fire. Later, I understood that this was why people spoke of Shakespeare as a god. At the time, I felt like weeping. Somebody had released me from dumbness, from utter isolation. I knew that I could live inside these words, that they would give me a a shape, a shell. I had no idea, then, that I would never play Hamlet…. I’m an actor, and in a good year I earn eleven thousand pounds for dressing up as a carrot.

A play that would have had a fair chance of success a few years back failed now to draw at all, and screen stars from Hollywood bathed in the glamour that had once invested English actors and actresses. The new talkies had seized the public fancy, developing into as great a craze, and with the same popular appeal, as the dancing boom of the immediate postwar years.

Which do you prefer, Sir Gerald?’ asked an anxious and hopeful reporter, his stub of pencil in his hand. ‘Acting for the films or acting on the stage?’ ‘I prefer strolling down the street,’ said Gerald, smothering a yawn. It was a typical reply, and must have astonished the young journalist, used to interviewing actors and actresses who declaimed about their Work with a capital letter.

Celebrities are our heroes and heroines now, discussed the next day over latte or lunch. We have such a strong need to talk to each other, to have some commonality of story, that we're finding it in celebrities. In effect, we're turning reality into fiction. Using actors and actresses, just off duty. And how is this working for us? Not great. It leaves us with a perennially empty feeling. We find the celebrities empty, and at some level, we find ourselves empty for paying them so much attention. We've become reluctant voyeurs, and at some level, we know they're just people trying to live their lives. Our culture begins to lack content, depth, and substance. We miss the richness of human experience that story embodies, reflects, and carries forward. We might have to go back to reading books. Yay!

After these walk-ons, she would banter with announcer Ken Niles and perhaps indulge in more stargazing. In her memoir, radio actress Mary Jane Higby recalls working the show. The “underpaid radio actors” soon took to calling themselves “the Gay Ad-Libbers.” They “would circle the microphone, trying to simulate people having a marvelous time. ‘What fun to be here!’ they would cry. ‘My, doesn’t Myrna Loy look gorgeous! Whoops, there’s Bette Davis!

One of the most interesting accomplishments of the film community, it seems to me, is that it has made real for America the exquisite beauty of incompatibility. Divorce among the gods possesses the sweet, holy sadness that has long been associated with marriage among the mortals. There is something infinitely tender about the inability of an actor to get along with an actress. When it is all over, and the decree is final, the two are even more attentive to each other, are seen oftener together, than ever before.

When someone tells me that cigarettes are sex, I think of Nevada. When I see an actress or actor drag deeply in a movie, I imagine the pyrenes and phenols ravaging the tender epithelial cells and hardworking cilia of their bronchi, the monoxide and cyanide binding to their hemoglobin, the heaving and straining of their chemically panicked hearts. Cigarettes are a distillation of a more general paranoia that besets our culture, the awful knowledge of our bodies' fragility in a world of molecular hazards. They scare the hell out of me.

If you like to wonder about what you have done in life...know that wondering is about weighing the worth of your actions. To be able to do so would mean having the knowledge of that what constitutes action. Or even inaction. For somewhere in the realm of knowledge, you cease to be the actor or actress. Deeper within, you would realize that you never were for you could never be the actor or the actress! For you have done nothing since you can do nothing! But it is good to begin wondering in the first place. It already puts you ahead in the path of progress!

Actress Winona Ryder, who starred in Beetlejuice, Mermaids, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Little Women thought she had it all. She was famous, making lots of money, and was romantically involved with actor Johnny Depp. But it wasn’t enough. She shared in an interview in October 2000, “When I was 18, I was driving around at two in the morning, completely crying and alone and scared. I drove by this magazine stand that has this Rolling Stone that I was on the cover of, and it said, ‘Winona Ryder: The Luckiest Girl in the World.’ And there I was feeling more alone than I ever had.

Wild Times Since Mexico accepted communism as a legitimate political party during the 1920’s and allowed refugees greater flexibility of thought, it became a haven from persecution. Moreover, living in Mexico was less costly than most countries, the weather was usually sunny and no one objected to the swinging lifestyle that many of the expats engaged in. It was for these reasons that Julio Mella from Cuba, Leon Trotsky from Russia and others sought refuge there. It also attracted many actors, authors and artists from the United States, many of whom were Communist or, at the very least were “Fellow Travelers” and had leftist leanings. Although the stated basic reason for the Communist Party’s existence was to improve conditions for the working class, it became a hub for the avant-garde, who felt liberated socially as well as politically. The bohemian enclave of Coyoacán now a part of Mexico City, where Frida Kahlo was born, was located just east of San Angel which at the time was a district of the ever expanding City. It also became the gathering place for personalities such as the American actor Orson Welles, the beautiful actress Dolores del Río, the famous artist Diego Rivera and his soon-to-be-wife, “Frida,” who became and is still revered as the illustrious matriarch of Mexico.

In a YouTube video made by actor Ashton Kutcher just after Obama’s inauguration, dozens of Hollywood celebrities pledged “to be a servant to our president and all mankind.”28 It was like something out of an Aztec festival of the gods—if what the Aztec gods wanted was for Hollywood actresses like Eva Longoria to use “less bottled water.” I don’t remember Frank Sinatra and Bob Hope producing a video pledging themselves to be servants of Ronald Reagan. In fact, if anyone had ever made a video with people reading the exact same lines as Demi and Ashton’s friends about a Republican president, MSNBC would be running specials on the rise of fascism in America.

I have spoken of reinventing marriage, of marriages achieving their rebirth in the middle age of the partners. This phenomenon has been called the 'comedy of remarriage' by Stanley Cavell, whose Pursuits of Happiness, a film book, is perhaps the best marriage manual ever published. One must, however, translate his formulation from the language of Hollywood, in which he developed it, into the language of middle age: less glamour, less supple youth, less fantasyland. Cavell writes specifically of Hollywood movies of the 1930s and 1940s in which couples -- one partner is often the dazzling Cary Grant -- learn to value each other, to educate themselves in equality, to remarry. Cavell recognizes that the actresses in these movie -- often the dazzling Katherine Hepburn -- are what made them possible. If read not as an account of beautiful people in hilarious situations, but as a deeply philosophical discussion of marriage, his book contains what are almost aphorisms of marital achievement. For example: ....'[The romance of remarriage] poses a structure in which we are permanently in doubt who the hero is, that is, whether it is the male or female who is the active partner, which of them is in quest, who is following whom.' Cary grant & Katherine Hepburn "Above all, despite the sexual attractiveness of the actors in the movies he discusses, Cavell knows that sexuality is not the ultimate secret in these marriage: 'in God's intention a meet and happy conversation is the chiefest and noblest end of marriage. Here is the reason that these relationships strike us as having the quality of friendship, a further factor in their exhilaration for us.' "He is wise enough, moreover, to emphasize 'the mystery of marriage by finding that neither law nor sexuality (nor, by implication, progeny) is sufficient to ensure true marriage and suggesting that what provides legitimacy is the mutual willingness for remarriage, for a sort of continuous affirmation. Remarriage, hence marriage, is, whatever else it is, an intellectual undertaking.

had read a description of this ability to act so well in public in Czeslaw Milosz’s book The Captive Mind, in which he describes life in 1950s Poland under the authoritarian influences of Nazism and Stalinism. He writes that in such circumstances people must, of necessity, become actors and actresses. ‘One does not perform on a theatre stage,’ says Milosz, ‘but in the street, office, factory, meeting hall, or even the room one lives in. Such acting is a highly-developed craft that places a premium upon mental alertness. Before it leaves the lips every word must be evaluated as to its consequences. A smile that appears at the wrong moment, a glance that is not all it should be can occasion dangerous suspicions and accusations.

All that day we went about stunned – we, the small town of real people behind the corporate logo of a ringed blue planet spinning through starry space. In the studio's Corner Store, in small groups that met on the company streets and in a hundred offices, we pieced our own experiences together with what was coming to light in the media. The suspect: a deranged, 43-year-old drifter who two days earlier had allegedly killed three people in Albuquerque, NM. He had fled to California where for reasons unknown he had been trying to contact actor-producer Michael Landon on the day of the shootings. The employees he had approached had repeatedly turned him away, since Landon had no particular connection with our studio. But just after dark the man had come back to the main gate again. He had walked up to a young actress waiting for her ride after an audition, said "hello" to her and then stepped over to the guardhouse. "I heard a shot and looked up," a secretary who had been passing nearby told me. "I saw Jeren fall and heard him groan. And there was this guy in a gray jacket just standing over him, pointing down at him with a gun. Then he raised the gun and pointed it at the other guard and shot again, and I saw Armando fall out the other side of the guardhouse. For a split second – just because we're at a movie studio – I thought it must be a movie they were filming. But there weren't any lights or cameras, and I realized it was real, and I thought, ‘He's gonna come after us because we saw it!' So I ran. I felt I was running for my life.

In a press interview at the time, Gable said, “My days of playing the dashing lover are over. I’m no longer believable in those parts. There has been considerable talk about older guys wooing and winning leading ladies half their age. I don’t think the public likes it, and I don’t care for it myself. It’s not realistic. Actresses that I started out with like Joan Crawford and Barbara Stanwyck have long since quit playing glamour girls and sweet young things. Now it’s time I acted my age. “Let’s be honest,” he continued. “It’s a character role, and I’ll be playing more of them. There’s a risk involved, of course. I have no idea if I can attain the success as a character actor as I did playing the dashing young lover, but it’s a chance I have to take. Not everybody is able to do it.

Lovers of God possess intense concentration. In prayer their attention rivets itself so completely onto God that nothing can tear it away. Even a suggestion of the divine may draw them into a higher state of consciousness. Occasionally this can be somewhat inconvenient. Sri Ramakrishna once went to see a religious drama produced by his disciple. The curtain went up and a character started singing the praises of the Lord. Sri Ramakrishna immediately began to enter the supreme state of consciousness. The stage faded; the actors and actresses faded. As only a great mystic can, he uttered a protest: "I come here, Lord, to see a play staged by my disciple, and you send me into ecstasy. I won't let it happen!" And he started saying over and over, "Money... money...money," so as to keep some awareness of the temporal world.

Question number four: I read somewhere that you were an actor before you became an author. CC: That sounded more like a judgement than a question. MG: It was. Usually people pick a career in medicine or business to fall back on. With your chosen professions, it's like you decided to sail upstream without a paddle or a canoe. CC: Well, performing and writing have always been the same thing to me. You get to be a storyteller in both fields, and at the end of the day, I suppose a storyteller is what I consider myself the most. MG: Well, la-di-da. I know what you mean, though. I was an actress myself back in the golden days of Hollywood - you know, before all this streaming trash. CC: Would I recognize your work? MG: Did you ever see the film Gone with the Wind? CC: Of course! MG: I supplied the wind. CC: [A beat of silence.} How much longer is this interview going to take?

SOME GREAT ACTORS are like musicians who just happen to be brilliant at their instrument. They are, in every other way, perfectly normal, but they have this extraordinary ability, and the instrument they’ve learned to play is their own emotions. Sandrine Bonnaire is like that. So is Sandrine Kiberlain. Others are people whose emotional lives are so interesting in themselves that there is no question that they belong on screen. Valeria Bruni Tedeschi falls into this category. Their craft consists of transforming their hypersensitive natures into a kind of instrument, flexible enough to assume the shapes and contours that their various characters require. Karin Viard, who emerged as a major star in 1999, is not in either of those categories. She is not playing an instrument. She is not creating an instrument. It is more as if she is the instrument. Her talent is so huge, and her access to it so immediate that she requires no process to turn Jekyll into Hyde. Obviously, this is too facile a description to be completely accurate or to do justice to the effort that her performances require. But one really does get the impression that Viard could get thrown into any artistic ocean and end up doing an Olympics-worthy butterfly stroke in record time.

So now George has arrived. He is not nervous in the least. As he gets out of his car, he feels an upsurge of energy, of eagerness for the play to begin. And he walks eagerly, with a springy step, along the gravel path past the Music Building toward the Department office. He is all actor now—an actor on his way up from the dressing room, hastening through the backstage world of props and lamps and stagehands to make his entrance. A veteran, calm and assured, he pauses for a well-measured moment in the doorway of the office and then, boldly, clearly, with the subtly modulated British intonation which his public demands of him, speaks his opening line: "Go od morning!" And the three secretaries—each one of them a charming and accomplished actress in her own chosen style—recognize him instantly, without even a flicker of doubt, and reply "Good morning!" to him. (There is something religious here, like responses in church—a reaffirmation of faith in the basic American dogma that it is, always, a good morning. Good, despite the Russians and their rockets, and all the ills and worries of the flesh. For of course we know, don't we, that the Russians and the worries are not really real? They can be un-thought and made to vanish. And therefore the morning can be made to be good. Very well then, it is good.)

It is a painful irony that silent movies were driven out of existence just as they were reaching a kind of glorious summit of creativity and imagination, so that some of the best silent movies were also some of the last ones. Of no film was that more true than Wings, which opened on August 12 at the Criterion Theatre in New York, with a dedication to Charles Lindbergh. The film was the conception of John Monk Saunders, a bright young man from Minnesota who was also a Rhodes scholar, a gifted writer, a handsome philanderer, and a drinker, not necessarily in that order. In the early 1920s, Saunders met and became friends with the film producer Jesse Lasky and Lasky’s wife, Bessie. Saunders was an uncommonly charming fellow, and he persuaded Lasky to buy a half-finished novel he had written about aerial combat in the First World War. Fired with excitement, Lasky gave Saunders a record $39,000 for the idea and put him to work on a script. Had Lasky known that Saunders was sleeping with his wife, he might not have been quite so generous. Lasky’s choice for director was unexpected but inspired. William Wellman was thirty years old and had no experience of making big movies—and at $2 million Wings was the biggest movie Paramount had ever undertaken. At a time when top-rank directors like Ernst Lubitsch were paid $175,000 a picture, Wellman was given a salary of $250 a week. But he had one advantage over every other director in Hollywood: he was a World War I flying ace and intimately understood the beauty and enchantment of flight as well as the fearful mayhem of aerial combat. No other filmmaker has ever used technical proficiency to better advantage. Wellman had had a busy life already. Born into a well-to-do family in Brookline, Massachusetts, he had been a high school dropout, a professional ice hockey player, a volunteer in the French Foreign Legion, and a member of the celebrated Lafayette Escadrille flying squad. Both France and the United States had decorated him for gallantry. After the war he became friends with Douglas Fairbanks, who got him a job at the Goldwyn studios as an actor. Wellman hated acting and switched to directing. He became what was known as a contract director, churning out low-budget westerns and other B movies. Always temperamental, he was frequently fired from jobs, once for slapping an actress. He was a startling choice to be put in charge of such a challenging epic. To the astonishment of everyone, he now made one of the most intelligent, moving, and thrilling pictures ever made. Nothing was faked. Whatever the pilot saw in real life the audiences saw on the screen. When clouds or exploding dirigibles were seen outside airplane windows they were real objects filmed in real time. Wellman mounted cameras inside the cockpits looking out, so that the audiences had the sensation of sitting at the pilots’ shoulders, and outside the cockpit looking in, allowing close-up views of the pilots’ reactions. Richard Arlen and Buddy Rogers, the two male stars of the picture, had to be their own cameramen, activating cameras with a remote-control button.

Lillian was determined that her next role would be Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and assumed she only needed to find the right actor to play opposite her as Reverend Dimmesdale. Mayer informed her there was a much larger issue at stake; The Scarlet Letter was on the Hays office “blacklist” of books that could not be filmed. The very idea of a blacklist was ridiculous to Lillian and she took up the matter directly with Will Hays. While he would occasionally publicly chastise the studios, Hays never forgot that the full name of his office was the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America and worked to smooth the path any and every way he could. He told Lillian that the major source of objection was “the Protestant Church, especially the Methodists,” and directed her to the heads of several church and women’s organizations where she forcefully presented her case. Even with Hays’s assistance, no other actress had the personal and professional reputation pure enough to garner the response she received: the ban would be lifted if she was “personally responsible” for the film. Lillian turned her attention to finding the consummate Dimmesdale and Mayer suggested she watch Lars Hanson in The Saga of Gosta Berling. The studio boss had seen Mauritz Stiller’s film in Berlin the previous December and he immediately put the director and the film’s three stars, Hanson, Mona Martenson, and Greta Gustafsson, all under contract. Lillian agreed Hanson was “perfect” and was enthusiastic when Thalberg suggested the experienced Swede Victor Seastrom (Sjöström) direct, for she believed he had “Mr. Griffith’s sensitivity to atmosphere.” And so the ban was lifted from The Scarlet Letter, Lars Hanson was coming from Sweden, Victor Seastrom was assigned to direct, and now it was Irving Thalberg’s problem. He had no script. Lillian would later say that Irving “told me that Frances Marion and I could adapt it,” but it was hardly that simple.

John Cusack made some startling comments about Hollywood. “The culture just eats young actors up and spits them out,” he said, also remarking that many female actresses are looked at as menopausal once they turn thirty-years-old. He also called Hollywood “a whorehouse that makes people go mad.”658

To be a bathroom singer, one need not have an enthralling voice, need not sing in tune or have the right rhythm or beat. All it takes to qualify is to have a love for music and enthusiasm. It is not rare to come across bathroom singers in one's own family whose genuine efforts to sing a popular song could come across as braying to others as they are often loud, out of tune and out of breath. What we overlook in such situations is that they are connoisseurs of music. Fans of Bollywood and Hollywood films have no problems accepting actors and actresses, who in their roles of common men and women sing in the shower in perfect pitch, like a nightingale or a cuckoo.

It does not take a scholar, David, to know such saints were made by other saints in centuries to come as actors and actresses chosen for a Passion Play in a country village.

...An actor or actress in politics is very dangerous because politics exaggerate the native dramatic instinct with the intoxication of substantive command.

The Reagan administration took away federal funds for the arts, suggesting that the performing arts seek help from private donors. In New York, two historic Broadway theaters were razed to make way for a luxury fifty-story hotel, after two hundred theater people demonstrated, picketing, reading plays and singing songs, refusing to disperse when ordered by police. Some of the nation’s best-known theater personalities were arrested, including producer Joseph Papp, actresses Tammy Grimes, Estelle Parsons, and Celeste Holm, actors Richard Gere and Michael Moriarty.

The question at all times is: How are you helping to make sure this movie is amazing? The best it can be. Are you making your fellow actors and actresses better? Is that your intention?

She knew about pity. Every day, every day, people walked on clouds of illusion. In that play at the Theatre Royal there was an actress who thought herself lovely, and who was plump and too old for the part. The leading actor meant to be brilliant and subtle, yet no single gesture or inflexion was inspired by talent. Clare’s heart was wrung. She suffered for them, loved and shielded them. When they bowed before the curtain and beamed at the applause, tears rolled down her cheeks. It was unbearable. They must never know.

He came up to where Dasyel stood with the actress, near enough to see the mending in the sky armor and the starry dress, the black actors’ paint round both their eyes, the young and flawless skin of both, smooth as metal and brown from the road. Volk smiled at the actress and she took half a step in retreat. Volk looked harder at Dasyel; Dasyel did nothing, only looked back at him with his water-color eyes, unflinching, confident, open. And Volk felt that same passage of non-sexual yet demanding lust go through him as he had felt when he saw the maiden from Yevdora.

4. Who cares if you can nail your performance once. I want you to be able to do it over and over, as you would on set when they move from the master shot to the medium shot to the close up and then do the same thing again in the turnaround. That would be impressive to me.  

The potential for your artistry when truly tapped, will evoke certain specific reactions in the body, such as temperature change, a flight or fight response and even a change in saliva production. If you can commit to your craft this deeply, the level of specificity and authenticity of your performance will scale new heights.

Who cares if you can nail your performance once. I want you to be able to do it over and over, as you would on set when they move from the master shot to the medium shot to the close up and then do the same thing again in the turnaround. That would be impressive to me.  

Robby did a ballerina twirl, then cutely skipped toward the actress like skipping’s a perfectly fine way of locomotion.

In acting, talent is a euphemism for the ability to pretend … convincingly.

There are people who will tell you you're too old, you're too fat, you're not pretty enough, you're too pretty, you have no talent, you're too weird - you're too something. Prove them wrong.

Always remember people with limitations will attempt to put their limitations on you. People who operate on a positive, encouraging, inclusive level within their own life will never tell you that you are not good enough.

Maybe when a person turns into a vampire, they acquire an encyclopedic and instantly updated understanding of how best to dress for purposes of blending into modern society and attracting victims." He gestured to himself, giving me a broad, dazzling smile. His eyes twinkled with amusement. "What you see before you is the result of millennia of vampire genetic evolution, Cassie. Nothing more." I raised a skeptical eyebrow at him and folded my arms across my chest. "Spare me," I said, though I was on the verge of laughing. "There is no such thing as vampire osmosis or I wouldn't be here. And we didn't buy you those clothes at the mall." He gave me another smile, more bashful this time. "Fine, fine. You've got me." He pointed at the television. "I've been watching subtitled Korean dramas on Netflix." A pause. "Korean dramas?" "Yes," he confirmed. "Did you know that about a decade ago, South Korea's government began investing massive sums in its entertainment industry? It's an entertainment powerhouse now. It has made a science of dressing its actors and actresses attractively. Between our trip to the mall and Crash Landing on You, I've learned an incredible amount." I hadn't seen any Korean television before. But if Frederick had learned how to dress by watching it, I wasn't about to complain.

We came to earth to fulfill certain roles or characters, so that future actors and actresses can gain knowledge and insight from the experiences of those who came before them.

An author is similar to an actor. They play many characters in their lives—photographer, nurse, dancer, doctor, writer, etc. As an author, you have to learn your craft, know each and every element to become that character you’re writing about to be able to live and breathe what they do.

Why South Asian actors could be funny or nerdy but never sexy, yet South Asian actresses had to be.

In the Bible, the word hypocrite shows up 33 times. Interestingly, hypocrite was a common Greek term for an actor who worked behind a mask. Stage players in antiquity wore masks to hide their true identity as they played the part of their characters. We live in a society today where people are paid millions of dollars to be hypocrites. A friend of mine, before he passed away, built movie sets for a living. Many movies are filmed on studio lots, but these designed sets are not the reality you might think they are when watching a movie. Actors and actresses play the part of someone they really are not. The better they are at pretending or lying, the more convincing they will be as an actor, and typically, the more money they make. I rarely darken the door of a movie theatre because I don’t want to give those liars my money, and I don’t want to support the totally ungodly world of Hollywood. This is also why I don’t own a television. I don’t want my cable or satellite fees funding that wicked industry. In the time of the Greeks, it was easy to figure out the real identity of the actors. You could walk up to them, take off their masks, and see their faces. Jesus is doing the same here. He is unmasking the Pharisees. He is showing us their real character. He is revealing their true colors. Don’t live a lie. Don’t be a hypocrite. It is not a healthy way to go through life, and you will have regrets when the time of unmasking comes.

Make movies my friend – make nice, inspiring and bold movies that will penetrate the darkest corners of the human mind and illuminate the soul.

The art of filmmaking is the most influential form of art that has ever existed throughout the history of human artistic endeavors.

A movie is not a movie, it is a potential nuclear furnace of inspiration, courage and conscience.

Healthy entertainment does not evoke raw emotions in the mind of a viewer only to make them wreak havoc, rather it guides those emotions in a healthy direction.