Quotes

Some people call me a ham - in my day it was called acting.

We actors are born at the rise of a curtain, and we die with its fall, and very night in the presence of our patrons we write our new creation, and every night it is blotted out forever. What use is it then to say to our critics 'Ah, but you should have seen me last Tuesday?'.

Life is a long rehearsal for a play that is never produced.

[describing 16-year-old Orson Welles' audition for Dublin's Gate Theatre]It was an astonishing performance, wrong from beginning to end, but with all the qualities of fine acting rearing their way through a chaos of inexperience. His diction was practically perfect; his personality, in spite of fantastic antics, was real and varied; his sense of passion, of evil, of drunkenness, of tyranny, of a sort demoniac authority, was arresting. A preposterous energy pulsated through everything he did.

The minor dramatist echoes his age; the dramatist of genius is he who stands outside his age or, it may be, creates it.