Top 63 Quotes & Sayings by Nigel Hawthorne
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English actor Nigel Hawthorne.
Last updated on December 21, 2024.
I was always a supporting actor. It is nice to know one has the equipment to be a leading actor.
As the years have gone by, I have become more confident, but I'm still not completely at ease with myself.
I'm getting better, but I used to pull away from emotion, and from people.
Surprise! Surprise! An Academy Award nomination and suddenly you're outed? Did I mind? Oh, very, very much.
In my mornings I can do what I like - go to art galleries, museums and things, go to lunch with people.
Jennifer Aniston was a lovely girl, very unspoilt.
Trevor and I had been going to awards ceremonies for years. People knew. Look, if you don't get married by age 65, people know something's up.
I don't have the vocal dexterity, nor do I have the desire to put myself in among the giants.
The monarchy has almost always been unpopular.
I'm not looking at any stage stuff at all. I'm going to give that a break for a while, if not forever, because I've done a huge amount of stage stuff and if the possibility of working in pictures comes along, I'd be silly if I didn't grab it.
I think you start in middle life to recognize your vulnerabilities, if you're lucky. You admit them and people find that interesting.
I've been a homosexual all my life. My partner and I don't want to stand up and say we're gay, because we think that's wrong.
My private life has never been a secret. I've never been a closet queen.
I used to get notes from directors, 'Please, Nigel, smile at the curtain calls.' I hate them so much.
I'm very pernickety about cast and make-up. Continuity things can go dreadfully wrong in film; the beards are different, red waistcoats become blue.
I started to admit vulnerabilities and things that I was trying to hide before. Shyness, anxiety, guilt and all those things that I have in me are now quite freely shown.
One of the things about George III is that he was aware that the monarchy was slipping away. There was revolution in the air all over Europe. Because of the unpopularity of his predecessors, one of the things he wanted to do was to establish some sort of credibility to the monarchy.
When you set yourself up to be apart from rest of mankind, you're in danger of crashing further than they ever could. That's the trouble with royalty, after all.
I can't grumble. I've been very content with the way things have gone. I may have minor quibbles as we all have, but I'm still working at 70.
I did what every other actor did: there were agents all the way up the Charing Cross Road and up St. Martin's Lane, and I would go out each day and do the agents - walk into these buildings, along their corridors, bang on these doors and say, 'Anything today?'
I feel that too much fuss is made about being gay.
I really ran away in 1951 from South Africa, where I lived with my mother and father - who was a doctor - to come back to England to find myself, then hide what I found.
I'm somebody who has a paucity of confidence as a person.
Ian McKellen always said I should come out. But why? I make my living playing heterosexuals.
It's like the Boy Scouts' motto, be prepared. You've got to be ready when the moment is offered. If you're not, you can actually screw it up for life.
There is nobody on earth who could totally impersonate Jack Lewis, because you may look like him from the front or from the side, you may sound like him, but there'll be all sorts of aspects of you that will be very dissimilar to the man.
In America, people come up to me and say, 'Hi, Sir Humph!'
My father was a doctor. I've never been very warm towards doctors.
People still talk about 'Yes, Minister.' Americans, too; they love it. It was a happy period for me and it did change my life.
It was hard to get work when I was a young actor.
If I hadn't done 'Shadowlands,' which was a sort of emotional release for me as a person as well as an actor, it might have been less easy to have done 'George III.'
One advantage of doing Lear at 70 is that you don't have to play an old man.
What I've learned is that the camera can get right into your soul, and you have to be ready for it.
If people crowd me too much, I can't work.
My whole career has been a struggle for dignity and justification, to prove that I'd made the right decision to be an actor in the first place.
We've had other things come up in their place, but I don't think' anything beats morals.
I was quite a plain boy. I stayed in work and eeked out a living, bit parts on TV, walk-ons in films, repertory companies.
I really don't like talking about me - me as me, that is. Me in relation to what I do is another matter. But me as me is boring.
I'm very lucky in that my feet are firmly on the ground.
I do a play a year, or every 18 months, and you get your comedies and your dramas, but you hardly get anything that touches some kind of core in you.
My father was a man very much like Arthur Winslow. He was a very stern man and very much the authoritarian figure.
I've never been afraid of being vulnerable on stage. It's a large part of life, and I think it's being dishonest to disallow an audience to see that side.
I would never have told my father a lie. We were brought up to be very truthful. I would never lie today. It's impossible.
I'm not a big classical actor.
The best way to get people to accept you is to move about the community and show them there's nothing to be afraid of.
Alan Bennett is a very quirkish man. He laughs in a self-effacing way, which stops you getting close. If you embrace him, he'll laugh in an embarrassed way and pull away, not to shrug you off, but because he finds it awkward.
I don't want to hear that Harry Belafonte is out there. It forces me not to see the audience as an anonymous mass.
On the stage you can get away with imposing the emotions on yourself, but with film it really has to come from inside. It's much more intense.
I live in the country, and I have a very happy life. I just do the job and go home.
I am 65 now and the world is just ahead of me at a time when most people are retiring.
The Hollywood machine is unfamiliar to me and unfriendly.
Just as Jack Lewis could go through a whole life without meeting someone that he loved, so you can go through whole career on the stage, never meeting a play that says the kind of things you feel deeply about!
My father was a Victorian product. He didn't marry until he was over 40. I knew him more as a grandfather than a father. You didn't lie or cheat with him. I would never have defied my father.
I had my doubts about 'Yes, Prime Minister' being successful in the U.S. because your system of government is so different than ours. But the show does seems to have a very good audience in the states.
I know people say plays are only an evening's entertainment. But you can make it mean a lot to the audience, even a farce or comedy.
Clint Eastwood was a most delightful man to work with.
I used to bury myself in character parts and put on a lot of makeup and use a lot of props. At first I thought it was clever to put on false noses and to do funny voices, but then I suddenly thought, no, that's wrong, you don't do it from the outside, you work from within.
I would never shortchange an audience. I believe in doing every single performance with as much integrity and concentration and feeling as I can muster.
I went into acting because I was hiding from myself, and although acting has become more of a habit now, I think I am still hiding.
As an actor I don't like to keep things the same.
Related Authors
Arnold Schwarzenegger Quotes
Austrian
Actor
Benedict Cumberbatch Quotes
English
Actor
Bruce Lee Quotes
American
Actor
Clint Eastwood Quotes
American
Actor
Daniel Radcliffe Quotes
British
Actor
Dwayne Johnson Quotes
American
Actor
Jeff Bridges Quotes
American
Actor
Johnny Depp Quotes
American
Actor
Kevin Hart Quotes
American
Actor
Kevin Spacey Quotes
American
Actor
Leonardo DiCaprio Quotes
American
Actor
Rob Lowe Quotes
American
Actor
Robert Pattinson Quotes
English
Actor
Sylvester Stallone Quotes
American
Actor
Will Rogers Quotes
American
Actor
Zach Braff Quotes
American
Actor