Quotes

Theater actors are just tolerated. You have to be a movie star to be a celebrity.

I live in fear of being a contented passenger. I'd rather get parts I can't play.

I just play him as myself, I don't ease myself into any role really. I stick a beard on and play me.

I'm an anorak. I've always been an obsessive collector of things. Richard Briers collects stamps. I collect cars and guns, which are much more expensive, and much more difficult to store.

I am a theatre actor, but the last ten years I've taken parts in movies because it keeps me in money.

Yeah, I like causing trouble. It's the teddy boy in me. I used to be a teddy boy. Feeling slightly inferior and wanting to cause a bit of bother and get some action going on in the room rather than get bored stiff.

Oh yeah, I'd love to be a comedian. I've done a lot, but always in the confines of plays.

I promise myself that I would go and do a play every year.

I just hate the idea of being well known. I know that is almost impossible if you're an actor who has done okay, but I've always fought against it.

I learn the lines that J.K. Rowling or whoever writes them, and say them.

I'm very flower-like. I love classical music. I go to ballet and I cry. There's nothing so beautiful.

A child did approach me in a restaurant in Cornwall, but he thought I was Gandalf.

There were no spells at my school, just a smack in the mouth.

I belong to quite a lot of learned societies. We collect firearms and discuss them at dinners and clubs and things.

Every part I play is just a variant of my own personality. No real character actor, of course, just me.

There's no subtext in Harry Potter really; it's all magic, anything can happen. Why do I say this? Because it's a magic spell. It's quite nice in a way. There is a real freedom to it.

You get used to being lazy doing films, but classical theatre's going to finish me off.

Television has dried up for my generation, so it's plays and films.

Paul Schofield said something like, 'If I'm not acting in a play, I don't really exist.' Those weren't the exact words, but he meant it's only when I'm acting in a play that I've got something to say about the world. And then why should I talk, when people can come to see it?

I've always tried to be an actor who... I just plod on and try to keep my mouth shut, mind my own business. I find the whole thing about people's lives... I can't understand it. I'm always astonished that people want to know anything about me.

(On replacing Richard Harris as Dumbledore) Richard was in heavy, heavy costume, he could hardly sit, you know, and I turned up and they put me in two layers of silk, so I played him much lighter - you know, floating around in a pair of slippers, a bit of a hippy.

(On Peter O'Toole) "He was a great actor. His early years were the best I thought. He was great fun to be with. He will be missed badly."

[to Antony Sher, when Sher as the Fool began drawing attention from Gambon's Lear] This play's called King Lear, not King Lear plus a c*** in a red nose.

[on being offered James Bond] I was young and had hair, and was quite thin. George Lazenby played James Bond but wasn't very good, so Cubby Broccoli got ten young stage actors, I was one of them, into an office in the West End and interviewed us. And I said, 'I can't play James Bond because I'm bald, and I've got a double chin, and I've got girl's t**s. I've got all that, you see...'