Top 85 Quotes & Sayings by Roger Rees - Page 2

You may be modest and un-egotistical in your life; I'm quite ordinary. But I play big egotistical parts.

What I strive to do is to make the theater experience something that people remember and recall rather than dismiss because it was less like their everyday experiences. So, I'm less interested in internal emotionalism and much more in making the audience laugh and cry by the devices that we use as theater actors.

The shields were enormous. In 'Julius Caesar,' I died early in the scene and used to fall asleep under the shield until I was woken up by applause.

'Nicholas Nickleby' is 800 pages long. At one time, the theater production was 15 hours long. So it's an interesting process, about what you leave out and what you select.

Daring to love someone is something we all do.

Gerry Schoenfeld told me 'Les Parents Terribles' was not going to sell, even though we had Kathleen Turner and Jude Law in the cast. So we called it 'Indiscretions.'

You got paid on Friday, go for a late-night poker game, and have no money on Saturday. But the RSC took your rent out of the paycheck, so at least you had a place to sleep.

I don't know why, but I was really good in that first play.

Most of my enjoyable times in the theater have been working in a group.

I've often thought I'm a short music hall comedian stuck in a leading man's body.

If you live in the States, you have to join a gym.

I have a little studio in Chinatown, and I sometimes go there and rearrange my brushes. But I would have to stop acting altogether in order to become a painter. At the moment, I'm still interested and active as an actor and director. Besides, I rather think acting and painting are all part of the same creative urge.

I was a skinny 17-year-old.

'Nicholas Nickleby' was the best example, where 43 people could make an audience of 1,500 look at a fingernail at any given moment. It was so controlled, and yet it was a group of disparate individuals. It was a happy, constructive time, and it seemed to be an active discussion of what makes the theater work.

'Merry Wives of Windsor' is a wonderful machine. It's one of the great farces, and it's astonishing to remember that this is written by the same man who wrote 'Hamlet,' 'The Taming of the Shrew' or 'Cymbeline.' It's so similar, and yet the form is so different.

I like to do really good things. But 'good' - witness Charles Dickens - doesn't mean 'not popular.'

My first acquaintance with 'Peter Pan' was back when I lived in South London. I was at art school, and I needed to earn money, so I got a job as a stagehand at the Wimbledon Theatre, and 'Peter Pan' was on tour there with Donald Sinden, who was playing Captain Hook.

It's a vain craft, acting.

I've learned from the greatest people, and I've got wonderful things to pass on.

I do one thing Gielgud didn't: I play the ukulele.

'Waiting for Godot,' when it first came out in 1950, was a very different sort of play to the plays that were in the West End at that time in London, because most of those plays were what we call drawing-room comedies.

Now, of course, we know there has been an end to apartheid in South Africa, but what excited me was seeing it in the context of history.

I've always thought like I'm really a 3-feet-high comic trapped in a leading man's body... but then I played Nicholas Nickleby, and suddenly I was heroic.

People very often say to actors that they admire their careers, and I rather think that what's implied by that is that we have a choice in the matter. When really, most actors, me included, do whatever comes along next.

I was really serious about painting, so I could never be a Sunday painter. You can't just switch it on and off.