A Quote by Harriet Walter

Some people are instantly brilliant. The Kenneth Branaghs of this world are ready-formed actors at 23 - he has used his success in lots of different ways - but there are people out there for whom acting is: 'Ooh, I can get on the telly and be famous.'
Some people get really worried about non-actors, but I think you can get brilliant performances out of people.
Twitter is a really interesting, useful tool. In lots of ways, it's an exciting place to be. But it's also a megaphone for the kinds of things people used to shout at their telly - and now they send you a message.
I think there are all sorts of ways of turning into an actor, and there are a vast variety of different actors. You know, you interview plenty of actors and you know they come at it from a different direction and acting means different things to a lot of people.
British actors come at acting from a slightly different angle. Because a lot of the films are cast out there, they are so used to the angle from which the Americans, and certainly the young guys from L.A., are coming at it, that I think it's interesting for them to find these English actors who maybe approach acting from a different place.
Some people have therapy, some people are alcoholics or they're in AA. Some people jump out of planes on weekends or find ways to release this kind of thing. And for me, it's acting. I find acting very therapeutic for whatever it is.
I think there are some people who have taken on fame in extraordinary ways, like Madonna, David Bowie, and Michael Jackson. There are other people who have taken it on in a completely different way, like Prince - who is just as famous and has achieved just as much - but is still unbelievably mysterious, which I guess Bowie managed to hold as well. There are different ways of dealing with it, and for some people I think it becomes an art form of how you put yourself out there, and for other people it's literally a way of life, it's who you are, you act like a celebrity.
British actors come at acting from a slightly different angle. Because a lot of the films are cast out there, they are so used to the angle from which the Americans, and certainly the young guys from LA, are coming at it, that I think it's interesting for them to find these English actors who maybe approach acting from a different place.
Acting is a job you can learn a lot in. You get to play lots of different characters with different professions and different backgrounds; they come from different places than you do, so it's really fun when you're immersing yourself in that world of that person to learn about how other people's lives are.
People need to be ready to have truly "global" careers. Just as companies now face world-wide competition, so, too, do people. Therefore, individuals need to get out in the world more - some large percentage of Americans don't even have a passport - and work in different countries.
Famous people I've interviewed - powerful people, brilliant people, people whom you look at and think, 'Seriously, do you not have pores?' - have turned to me after interviews and asked, 'Was I okay? I hope I was okay.'
If you allow someone like Saddam Hussein to get nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, chemical weapons, biological weapons, how many people is he going to kill with such weapons? He's already demonstrated a willingness to use these weapons. He poison-gassed his own people. He used poison gas and other weapons of mass destruction against his neighbors. This man has no compunction about killing lots and lots of people. So this is a way to save lives and to save the stability and peace of a region of the world that is important to the peace and security of the entire world.
It's really hard seeing somebody you love be in pain and be ill and there's nothing you can do. What's interesting is people act in so many different ways. You know, some people run away, some people get angry, some people fall apart. It's like everybody has a different way of dealing with stuff like that.
So many people have to struggle for years, very few bands get success with their first record, but I was instantly successful and famous on a very large scale, which was scary.
I've always looked at famous actors and hope that once they get a part that they have success in, they would reprise it every few years in the way a pop singer will reprise their hits. Like Bob Dylan singing 'Blowin' in the Wind' until he's fed up with it, finding different ways of doing it.
When it comes to social consequences, they've got all different people acting in different ways, very difficult to even have a proper criterion of success. So, it's a difficult task.
A lot of people will always say, 'I really know nothing about the ancient world.' But there's lots and lots of things people know. Partly, they've been encouraged to think they're ignorant about it. In some ways, the job to do is show people that they know much more than they'd like to admit.
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