Top 58 Quotes & Sayings by Vanessa Redgrave
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English actress Vanessa Redgrave.
Last updated on September 16, 2024.
In my early days, I auditioned a lot. Mostly, I didn't get anywhere.
My uncles and my father were all in the Royal Navy. One of my uncles, as a matter of fact, was drowned in the Sea of Singapore, having been fighting for the Royal Navy behind enemy lines, Japanese lines, in the hinterland of Singapore.
Ask the right questions if you're to find the right answers.
A theater is being given over to market forces, which means that a whole generation that should be able to do theater as well as see it is being completely deprived.
I've still got to do something to help, however tiny it is. I always think of the old Hebrew saying, which is translated roughly into, 'He who saves one life saves the world,' because it's pretty ghastly to think of all the people we're not saving.
A film can open hearts and minds that have been closed, for whatever reasons.
The notion of 'building a career' had never been heard or dreamed of when I was young.
I thought my story, my experiences as a 2-year-old 'evacuee' from London at the outset of the war, could be important. What happened to me as a child was very light compared to what happened to many children, but... in Britain, there are so many people who just don't know our history.
You can get numbed. People can get hardened. It's not their fault; they just get hardened. News media get hardened. Proprietors get even harder.
I think everybody, including myself, are in danger of losing our humanity.
People talk about preaching to the converted, which is total codswallop rubbish. There is no such thing as being converted forever - absolutely no such thing.
The stories of the first refugees that I ever came across in literature - that lots of people ever came across - were in 'The Iliad': the escape of Aeneas with his father on his back, the Trojans, from their burning city, and the defeat of their kingdom and what they had to do to try and find safety.
Politics is about divisions. Wherever you come in on the subject, there are divisions.
I don't want to spend my last few whatever it is, months or years on this earth, giving speeches.
I didn't plan that there'd be this awful situation in which our European governments, just to start the story off, breaking the Geneva conventions on the protection on the human rights of refugees.
Principles aren't something you hear much from politicians these days. Have you noticed? Right across the board, leaders, whatever the political coloring, avoid talking about laws; they avoid talking about principles. They talk about 'our values.' But values can change, and all our packets of 'values' seem to be getting smaller.
Just being alive, staying human, I think that's infinitely precious.
I acted with Albie at Stratford-on-Avon in the 1959 season. We in the acting company tended to hang out at the pub known as the Dirty Duck.
I've been working for refugees for years and years and years.
Theater and poetry were what helped people stay alive and want to go on living.
I don't think my life has been badly lived - but I don't think of it that way. And nor should I.
Integrity is so perishable in the summer months of success.
I've identified all my life with refugees.
Shakespeare lets us see real people undergoing real processes, with real feelings.
The society Shakespeare knew was heading for tremendous change, and he seems to have recognized that and written about it in a coded way. I understand those codes, I think.
I liked film-making, but the most difficult thing was the editing. I found it tormentingly difficult.
We are child-bearers primarily, and we are the weaker sex, and once we've given birth to our children, our life is by necessity bound to them. I wouldn't advocate it any other way.
I got my first film break because the director Karel Reisz saw me at a small theater party.
There always comes a moment where all the departments in a film need to work together. And if a director, his first assistant director, and cinematographer have a very clear vision, then everybody does work together.
We all come to the theater with baggage; The baggage of our daily lives, the baggage of our problems, the baggage of our tragedies, the baggage of being tired. It doesn't matter what age you are. But if our hearts get opened and released - well, that's what theater can do, and does sometimes, and everyone is thankful when that happens.
You can't do what you've been asked to do unless you do the best you can. And roughly speaking, the best you can do is to be very available as a character and actor to the people you're acting with. That's equally important, whether the camera's on the other person or on you.
You can't be striving to please; you must be striving to get to the heart of the matter.
We will always want films ... that basically are centred on young people, because young people is the way we live on, we older people, insofar as we live on.
When somebody can't reveal what they're after - whether by word or by how the camera is set up, lighting, etcetera - it's like an electronic beep beep; it interferes very much with what we actors can do. And, after all, the director wants the actors to be bringing forth the best that they can, according to whatever vision he has.
I was surprised when I was asked to play Miss Daisy and wondered if I could - only in part because she was Jewish but, also because she was a Southern woman who has hardly opened her mouth before she declares she's not prejudiced, and yet everything she does shows how totally prejudiced she is.
As a mother you have got to have a view for now and a view for the future.
One must never comment as an actor, never show that a character is shallow or vindictive, but let that be conveyed. I mean, none of us thinks of ourselves as being vindictive or shallow - perhaps we should.
A conservative frame of mind is very limiting for an actor, and a human being, too.
An awful lot of filmmaking and playmaking is taken over by marketers and publicists, who set about to tell people what to think. And people feel safer that way. But it's not safe, and the whole wonderful thing that cinema and filmmakers can contribute is to go into the not-safe land of real life.
I've opened my mouth on a lot of subjects. And I thought the more prestige you get, I'd have the power to do what I like. It's not true.
A theater is being given over to market forces, which means that a whole generation that should be able to do theater as well as see it is being completely deprived
A deeper truth the camera can see can be more surprising than even the director imagined it could be. That's a wonderful thing that grows and happens in films.
I think the theatre is as essential to civilization as safe, pure water.
Theater helps people keep sane.
Ask the right questions if you're going to find the right answers.
The stage is actor's country. You have to get your passport stamped every so often or they take away your citizenship.
The great writers like Chekhov know that tragedy and laughter are just a few steps from each other ... but it took me a long time as an actress to learn that. Actually Arthur Miller taught me in the Seventies. We were making a CBS TV drama of his play Playing for Time about Auschwitz but the characters were laughing. It was a big insight for me to realise that that was what's called gallows humour, in this case worse than the gallows, that humans need to laugh and make jokes in order to survive.
How can there be democracy if the leadership in the United States and Britain don't uphold the values which my father's generation fought the Nazis, millions of people gave their lives against the Soviet Union's regime, didn't they? Because of what? Democracy. And what democracy meant. No torture, no camps, no detention forever or without trial, without charges. In solitary confinement. Those techniques which are not just alleged, they have actually been written about by the FBI. I don't think it's being far left - I hope that I'm wrong to consider that it's far left to uphold the rule of law.
What a script says that isn't dialogue is as important as the spoken word.
On one occasion, Daniel Day-Lewis, Jeremy Irons and myself were due to appear at the Sarajevo film festival and were turned off a UN plane on orders from Geneva. We had to get local journalists to transport the films in for us. I tell you this only to demonstrate that festivals can be a lifeline. But, after all the difficulties I'd had in getting there, in 1996 I found myself being flown in on a four-seater RAF plane as an official guest, endorsed by the British Embassy. Ironically, the film I was to present was Mission: Impossible.
One of the joys of cinema is that, given the right circumstances, and the genius director, an incredibly wonderfully actor can become the embodiment of his character.
Shakespeare lets us see real people undergoing real processes, with real feelings
The arts stop society going rotten and mad.
The people I admire most are those who struggle for everyone.
My dear colleagues, I thank you very very much for this tribute to my work. I think that Jane Fonda and I have done the best work of our lives, and I salute you and I pay tribute to you, and I think you should be very proud that in the last few weeks you have stood firm and you have refused to be intimidated by the threats of a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums whose behavior is an insult to the stature of Jews all over the world and to their great and heroic record of struggle against fascism and oppression. And I pledge to you that I will continue to fight against anti-Semitism and fascism.
What I didn't understand was that the personal and the political go together. I felt at the time I had to sacrifice my children's present for their future. It seemed an either/or. I didn't realise that by being with one's own children I would have had a better understanding of the ones who are not my own. I was thinking of them but I didn't spend the time that they needed from me. It's a tribute to them that they came out so well.
The society Shakespeare knew was heading for tremendous change, and he seems to have recognized that and written about it in a coded way. I understand those codes, I think
I give myself to my parts as to a lover.
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