A Quote by Lydia Leonard
Anne Boleyn is certainly the most exciting character I have played on stage.
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There's a part of my heart that forever has Anne Boleyn written on it, who I played in 'The Tudors.'
In one sphere above all others, Anne Boleyn still had the power to influence him, and that was in the case of church reform. Anne was a passionate and sincere evangelical, the owner of a library of controversial reformist literature, and she was sympathetic to radical and even Lutheran ideas.
Anne Boleyn is an intriguing character. She seems to appeal to modern-day women in a very potent way. Because she was such an independently opinionated and spirited young woman, which at the time was unheard of.
History has done a great disservice to Anne Boleyn.
Anne Boleyn isn't a sympathetic character, but I like that she isn't a people pleaser. She's ambitious and manipulative, but she's honest. I'm biased, but I don't think a woman who has said 'no' to the King of England for six years would jump into bed with four of his best friends. She was a slick political mind.
As a curator, I've met endless people who feel a 'special connection' with Anne Boleyn, or Victorian prostitutes, or various other unlikely candidates.
People ask me if I think Anne Boleyn was a feminist... but she wasn't striking out on behalf of women, and she wasn't particularly keen on them.
You get all of your neuroses worked out on stage. I haven't actually played very many nice characters, certainly not on stage. It's not a quality that attracts me.
I have played some wonderful leading roles on stage and had the whole 'China Beach' years where I really played a leading man on that. That was a fun change for a character actor. But I'm perfectly happy going back to building my gallery of memorable character roles.
Famously, Anne Boleyn was not a beauty: she was more about quirkiness and an innate sensuality, and there are a lot of references to her eyes. Which sends out a great message for women, because life is not about the aesthetic all the time.
Anne Boleyn was a warrior forced to use the only tools available to a woman in her position at that time. She was bold and ambitious, and had she had a son, history would have been very different.
I think the thing about Anne Boleyn is there is an exotic quality to her. This is a woman who wasn’t raised in the English court. She was in the French court and Hapsburg court. She has a continental exotic quality to her. She’s quite a fiery woman and incredibly intelligent. So I think Anne really stood out – fire and intelligence and boldness – in comparison to the English roses that were flopping around court, she would’ve stood out. And Henry noticed that.
Stage is so important because it teaches me how to convey character with words - how to convey how a character reacts by the way they appear on stage. I can usually tell a playwright from someone who has never written for the stage. Did the character work? Did the dialogue reveal who the character is?
It's all very well to go out there and put on an exciting match, while some of my matches are the most exciting out there, but having a character like mine that people can relate with is very important. I feel like that is a good reason why my character has worked.
One of my favorite experiences in my career, certainly one of the most interesting characters I've ever played, was Simon Lee on 'The Event.' That was a show I was quite proud of and a character I really enjoyed playing. It was one of the most three-dimensional characters that was ever written for me and that I'd ever gotten to play.
I was never much into knights and sorcery and that kind of thing. It's not because I was into anything cooler. I certainly wasn't. I played with LEGOs. I played with LEGOs way past when most people played with LEGOs.
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