A Quote by Albert Brooks

I did years of summer stock. I sort of only wanted to be an actor. And then at 19, I was funny, and I had some of these bits that I did for friends, and I immediately could get on television.
I was just 19 years old when I did my first film and had no plan to act, or to become an actor. It was like a paid holiday so that I could earn good pocket money and then party more with my friends.
I really only did theater in school in college. I did summer stock a couple of times in the summer, and plays that the school put on. But I knew I wanted to be in movies.
Shakespeare was the main thing I did in my life from the age of 16 when I first played 'Hamlet' at school. I then did summer stock the next summer and then went to RADA and joined the RSC and ran my own company and then worked at the Globe. That was about 30 years of my life.
For some reason I did something where I realized I could get a reaction. That was when I broke out of my shell at school, because I really didn't have any friends or anything like that and I just kind of was going along, and then finally I did this zany thing, and all of a sudden I had tons of friends.
I wanted to just get a job so I could have enough money for my own apartment and be able to get drunk. And I did. Back then, on $125, you could do that in Manhattan. I was 19 years old the first time I got published and paid. I think it was a hundred bucks. I stared at my name on the check for 20 minutes.
I kind of had a quarter-life crisis before I did 'Rent.' I had done Glinda in 'Wicked' for a while. I had worked for Cirque Du Soleil, and then I did 'Hair.' Then I had a real quiet time, not having work, and it was a time of not only self-discovery of me as a person, but also what I wanted as an artist and actor.
I did a lot of serious plays, and I did the Oxford Review as well, which is supposed to be funny, but I'm not sure how funny we were when we did it. Then, when I finished my course, it was only then that I decided to go to drama school and try and do acting because I was enjoying it so much and so on.
After I found that I had become an actor, slightly to my surprise, I did have some insecurity, and I did take some rather strange acting classes at a place called The Actor's Studio in London. I don't think they did me any good at all.
I'd done some acting in high school. Then I went to Kenyon College and got thrown in jail and kicked off the football team. Since I was determined not to study very much, I majored in theater the last two years. Got my degree in speech; they didn't actually have a degree in theater. I graduated at two o'clock in the afternoon, and at three-thirty I was on the train for Williams Bay, Wisconsin, for summer stock, and then I did winter stock.
It was only after I'd had some injuries that I basically retired from the performing side of show business and then began working in casting. I did that for 19 years or so before a friend of mine decided to cast me as Phyllis Lapin-Vance on 'The Office.'
I did some professional radio acting as a teenager, and I essentially put myself through college with radio acting in Montreal. When I graduated, I got jobs in professional theatres, repertory, and stock theatres in Canada for a couple of years. And then I went to Stratford, Ontario, where I spent three years with a Shakespeare company. We took a classical play from Stratford to New York City, and I got some good notices there and essentially stayed and did live television. And that brings you to the beginning of filming.
I wanted to make Jerusalem as feature film. But we couldn't finance it only through theatrical release, we couldn't get all the money we needed. We had to get some money from television. So we said, ok, let's do it both ways. So we did it in four parts.
What Steve Jobs and I did-and at the same time Bill Gates and Paul Allen did-we had no savings accounts, no friends that could loan us money. But we had ideas, and I wanted all my life to be a part of a revolution.
It never occurred to me that I was a leading man until I was 19 years old. I had been acting since I was 10, so that's nine years and 30 or 40 plays, in school and summer stock, professional theater, too.
I've always wanted to be an actress. At school and in college, I did some things. But then I married, and then I had children, and then there were the political years.
I did a lot of stock before I even went to drama school. I sort of went in the back door of drama school and I had joined in a stock company to get my experience.
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