A Quote by Harold Pinter

I wrote 'The Room', 'The Birthday Party', and 'The Dumb Waiter' in 1957, I was acting all the time in a repertory company, doing all kinds of jobs, traveling to Bournemouth and Torquay and Birmingham.
My second play, The Birthday Party, I wrote in 1958 - or 1957. It was totally destroyed by the critics of the day, who called it an absolute load of rubbish.
When I was beginning, a young actor could go from repertory company to repertory company. I did that and loved it. I was also lucky.
I wanted to be a classical actress. I plodded along. I went to junior college in San Francisco, I was in a Repertory Company. My hero was Eva Le Gallienne, who was a great theater actress at the turn of the century who created her own company, and she wrote these hilarious autobiographies at the time.
The Room I wrote in 1957, and I was really gratified to find that it stood up. I didn't have to change a word.
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.
When I was about 6, my cousin was very active in a Filipino repertory company, doing musicals and plays. Her aunt was one of the founders of the company, and she told my mom that there were these auditions for 'The King and I,' and that they needed kids. I auditioned, got in and the love affair started from there and just kept going.
I started doing repertory theatre in upstate New York when I was 15, went back when I was 16, and by that time decided that I really wanted to study drama seriously and go to an acting conservatory called Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
For two years I was a member of a repertory company in Los Angeles, doing mostly original material, plays written by the director.
You do some acting in a room for a few minutes, hopefully get something out of it that makes you a bit better at acting, and go home. Maybe the people in the room with you liked the acting you did. Maybe they didn't! Either way, it's not the end of the world; you'll be doing this again soon.
I held down as many jobs as I could find, from being a waiter to working at a yoga studio and as a ticket-taker at a small theater company - anything that would allow me to go out and do auditions.
Democrats are dumb and Republicans are stupid, but the difference between dumb and stupid is dumb isn't funny. Dumb is when you say something and the whole room goes, 'What did he say?'
There's no downside to traveling the world and making money. I'm doing something I love. A lot of people have sucky jobs, but I have a good one, and I'm not trying to lose it any time soon.
That's another thing that's depressing: certain attitudes in Congress. They assume that you're dumb; they can take advantage of you being dumb. I find that offensive. It insults our intelligence. They're playing us for dumb and they're being dumb in doing it. But I believe that's gonna change. I think those people, the McConnells, are not helping us at all. They're taking us backward in time.
The trick to acting is not to show off; it's to think the thoughts of the character. I was lucky because when I started acting, it was doing jobs above pubs. I learned to act in anonymity, so by the time people saw me, I knew what I was doing. I was crap for years, but no one saw me being crap. It's a trade you learn.
With repertory, you had to play all these different characters. The range of roles is really what I fell in love with, every night getting to become somebody different. That was my idea of acting, getting to be part of the company and a family.
If I could be doing anything, I'd be laying on the floor in my birthday suit eating junk food and watching something dumb on TV.
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