A Quote by John Lithgow

The first long chapter of my career was almost entirely theater so that, by the time I was 30, 35, I sort of knew who I was as an actor, and I was gradually learning who I was as a human being.
An important factor to note is that it's rare for anyone to sell a first novel written before they turned 30-35; long-format fiction tends to require a bunch of experience of human life that takes time to acquire. So your average mid-career novelist is in their forties to fifties!
From the time I was five years old, theater was all I knew. I did community theater; I went to theater school. It's like going to the gym as an actor: every single night, you have to recreate the illusion of the first time, so you really have to listen and connect and stay in the moment for an hour and a half - with no breaks.
I never once dreamed of sort of being able to be in an American TV series, you know? It was all about theater and touring and sort of being an actor around Scottish theater.
In my career, I've had kind of a strange trajectory as an actor. I started out doing movies and theater and stuff, but then I had a terrible problem with stage fright as an actor on stage, and I quit stage acting for a long, long time.
If Mother Culture were to give an account of human history using these terms, it would go something like this: ' The Leavers were chapter one of human history -- a long and uneventful chapter. Their chapter of human history ended about ten thousand years ago with the birth of agriculture in the Near East. This event marked the beginning of chapter two, the chapter of the Takers. It's true there are still Leavers living in the world, but these are anachronisms, fossils -- people living in the past, people who just don't realize that their chapter of human history is over. '
Knowing that I was potentially going to be the first black Bachelorette actually held me back from wanting to do it. With the first, there's always so much pressure. And I knew I was going to be new to the audience as a lead for a number of reasons - being over 30, being a career woman, and also being black.
A dancer's life is as peripatetic and unstable as that of an actor's. You're freelancing yourself all the time, and a dancer's lifespan is even shorter than an actor's: once they turn 30 or 35, they have to stop.
I'm a terrible actor. I'm still learning. When I first started, I wish I knew then to trust myself more, really. I was in a terrible panic in the early part of my career.
We all know that the theater and every play that comes to Broadway have within themselves, like the human being, the seed of self-destruction and the certainty of death. The thing is to see how long the theater, the play, and the human being can last in spite of themselves.
People may know me from films, but theater is my first love. I did about 35 plays before I even landed my first screen role. I'm very comfortable on stage, and theater is not something you can just wing.
I knew I wanted to be an actor, and I didn't necessarily need or want to be famous or a celebrity actor. But I wanted to be somewhere where there would be no ceiling on what I could accomplish, and I felt like if I stayed in St. Louis I might have a really great regional theater career or something, but that I wasn't going to be able to get much further than that. And it felt like New York and L.A. were the two places where you could end up being a TV star or you could end up doing regional theater, which would have been fine as well.
Because of the fact that being a professional actor is not a career that is widely pursued back home in the Cayman Islands, I never thought it was a viable profession. It didn't even cross my mind. So when I knew I wanted to do theater, I didn't think 'actress,' even though I loved to perform.
I worked with Jackie Chan for a long time, and seeing how much pain he's in, I realized that that might not be a sustainable career for me. So I started to develop my career as a dramatic actor rather than as an action actor.
I grew up in the theater with my mom and that's how I knew I wanted to be an actor in the first place.
I feel so lucky. When an actor that has been struggling for so long makes the transition into being an actor full-time, it is the most amazing feeling. It's just sort of like a 3,000-pound weight gets lifted from you, and you're able to mostly focus on just being an artist, which is an amazing, blessed luxury I have.
I'd sort of acquired somewhat more mature perspective on what my career is and I don't...not anymore...consider fame and fortune my career. I'm not a star. I'm an actor. So in a way, what I want to do as an actor, I would consider good for my career. Does that make sense?
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