A Quote by John Kani

Any older actor knows the last great mountain to climb is to play King Lear and now, if I ever play Lear, I will have done the pre-preparation because I had to go into the play and read it over and over again.
King Lear by William Shakespeare frightens me. I've never done King Lear, I guess partially because my father dwindled into dementia in his last years and King Lear is such an accurate portrayal of a father figure suffering from dementia - the play was almost intolerable for me.
King Lear is undoubtedly the greatest play ever written by Shakespeare - or anybody else for that matter. Hamlet is certainly great, but it doesn't contain as many elements of humanity as we see in Lear.
I guess if they ever do a remake of 'Sophie's Choice,' I could play the Meryl Streep part. I've got to work on my Polish accent. Maybe I'll be the definitive King Lear one day. You know, if they ever feel that King Lear should be more Jewy.
I have no desire to play King Lear or Hamlet. I never had a grand ambition. I just followed my nose.
The actor is too prone to exaggerate his powers; he wants to play Hamlet when his appearance is more suitable to King Lear.
I want to play King Lear, Macbeth, Benedict, Coriolanus. I wouldn't mind doing Hamlet again. Well, I'm a little old. Perhaps I can rub Vaseline on the audience's eyes.
I admire actors that consistently challenge themselves and play a wide range of different roles. Every actor has a reason for being an actor... it's boring to play the same person over and over again. People like Daniel Day Lewis, who completely transform time and time again, I look up to.
[on playing Walter] It was wonderful to be able to play a character who had so many colors and who was able to play comedy, to play incredibly vulnerable, which he did a lot of the time, to play the love story, and to play the relationship with the son, which is quite unusual. That's a gift to me, as an actor. It was like everything you could possibly hope for, over five years. So, I was a very lucky actor.
I don't wanna keep playing the same song over and over again. It's just thinking about "what's going to be the coolest thing to play on this particular show?" The easiest thing to do is to play the single over and over again.
There is no real scientific debate over what is happening; of course there is debate over exactly how it is going to play out in the decades ahead, because this is a large experiment that we haven't done before, and no one knows precisely how one can ever precisely predict what effects this heat will have. But all the science in the last few years, or almost all of it, really serves to show that the effects are larger and more rapid than we had thought even a decade ago.
I've never been that guy who says, 'Ooh, I have to play King Lear'. First off, that'd be a disaster anyway. I tend to read something and see who's involved, and then know I want to be part of it. But I don't think I'm through with comedy. I still love to make people laugh.
I look at it like this: that if Shakespeare were alive today, he would have written two or three plays about the Kennedy family, and actors would traditionally play JFK like they Hamlet or King Lear. They just would. I mean, people have played JFK, and they'll play him long after I have.
What Metallica always tries to do, as we go around and play a lot of the same cities, over and over again, year after year, is to give a different experience. We try to never play the same venues, or if we play indoors, we'll play outdoors, and all that type of stuff. It's always about just trying to do a different kind of experience.
When I closed in "King Lear" I went into a period of depression for about three weeks, and every actor I've talked to who's ever played a major, major Shakespeare role has done this.
If you look a little punkish, then they’re going to give you the parts. And if you play an iconic villain early on in your career, you tend to get asked to play one over and over and over again.
If you look a little punkish, then they're going to give you the parts. And if you play an iconic villain early on in your career, you tend to get asked to play one over and over and over again.
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