Top 88 Quotes & Sayings by Roger Allam - Page 2

Playing a villain would be great.

Practice, learn the lines, work hard, don't be too respectful. Sometimes we can get too hung up on the fact that the material of the play is very finely wrought language.

Corporate jollies are generally speaking the kiss of death to an audience.

At one stage, I wanted to be a folk singer.

As soon as you have two small children, they take up a lot of time and energy.

One of the great things about doing a play, repeating it over and over again, is that you can practice. And you can get really quite good at it for a while.

I have got a big deep voice, and that comes in useful for villains.

My ballroom dancing skills are completely non-existent.

Of course I would like to be more famous. It offers more career possibilities. But then it can prove restrictive. Plus you get hassled when you go shopping.

I suppose there's a particular kind of efficiency about coming from a theatre tradition. You don't make a fuss, and you're cheap.

The acting bug first bit when I went to see 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead' at the Old Vic.

With those long American TV contracts you think, 'yes, at the end of that I'd be rich.' But at the same time you feel inside you a kind of death, because I enjoy playing lots of different characters.

In 1983 I was still playing small to middling parts.

The main thing about the Globe is there's 700 people all standing right in front of you.

The things that impress you when you're a child have an incredible influence on your life.

I did hardly any academic work. I learnt a fair amount, though.

It's important to take risks and challenge yourself. That's why I went into acting, really.

When you are doing pantomime, you're not immersing yourself in anything terribly deep.

Getting a good education was of immense importance to my parents.

It's true you can end up as rich as Croesus but the thing I enjoy about acting is doing lots of different kinds of things.

As so many people seem to have done, I kind of fell in love with Willy Brandt.

I had a serious and rather drunken research session with the great Charles MacLean, who took me through the history of whisky and malts. I can't remember a thing about it now. In fact I don't think I remembered a thing about it the following morning. Very, very entertaining.

But one of the satisfying things about performing a play is you know for that piece of time exactly what you're going to be doing. Your life has a physical pattern. There's something about the odd, repetitious nature of it that I find hugely relaxing. All the problems of life are taken care of for that bit of time.

When I watch my sons play, I think, God, acting's the most natural thing in the world. They take the 'Star Wars' characters and say, 'Let's pretend that I'm Hans and you're Luke and that we're on this planet,' etc.

Bizarrely, someone involved in the children's show 'Sarah and Duck,' which I narrate, recently found a coat with my name on it in a secondhand shop. It's the coat I wore as Theseus in the 'Dream.' So it's back in my possession after all these years, which is rather strange and wonderful.

It's nice to have the creature comforts of home.

I've been choreographed in various musicals before. So I'm not completely two left feet.

I invented this wonderful death scene for Javert of going down on my knees and then leaning back like a limbo dancer to make it look as if I was falling off a bridge. I did it eight times a week for nearly a year and I've had trouble with my knees ever since - they don't even allow me to jog these days.