A Quote by Mary McDonnell

Actors are part of a certain percentage of people on this planet who have an emotional vocabulary as a primary experience. It's as if their life is experienced emotionally and then that is translated intellectually or conceptually into the performance.
Often you find actors have big hearts; they're quite emotional people. Talking to actors who date other actors, and talking to people who deal with other actors, they often get emotionally caught up in lots of different things. They often wear their hearts on their sleeves. They feel things quite a lot - often to the nth degree, which I can imagine could make it quite difficult to date some of us. I think it's about having an emotional availability that you can kind of draw on. But I'm also searching for that. I'll be searching for the answer to that question for the rest of my life.
Every time you say yes to a film there's a certain percentage of your yes that has to do with the director, a certain percentage to do with the story, a certain percentage with the character, the location, etc.
People with an impoverished vocabulary live an impoverished emotional life; people with rich vocabularies have a multihued palette of colors with which to paint their experience, not only for others, but for themselves as well.
My kids, they take a lot from me and I always come from an intellectual place. Like intellectually, not emotionally, and most people come from an emotional place and it's unfortunate.
Back when the Bible was written, then edited, then rewritten, then rewritten, then re-edited, then translated from dead languages, then re-translated, then edited, then rewritten, then given to kings for them to take their favorite parts, then rewritten, then re-rewritten, then translated again, then given to the pope for him to approve, then rewritten, then edited again, the re-re-re-re-rewritten again...all based on stories that were told orally 30 to 90 years AFTER they happened.. to people who didnt know how to write... so...
On stage you never watch yourself. You just experience it, and then you go home, and you feel pretty good if you gave a pretty good performance or crappy if you didn't. But in TV and film, you actually have to experience it while you're doing it, and then you have to watch it. And then when you're watching it, you watch it with a different sensibility than how you experienced it.
I find myself skeptical of music that forces you to have a certain experience, emotional reaction, or specific constructive arc of experience. But performers should still take care of that, to a certain extent - how does it add up? What you want from performance, because we're all in a room together, is that somehow we've gotten somewhere at the end, together. You could call that a sense of narrative, but it's not so obvious how that happens. One way it happens is by everyone caring about it happening.
There are certain sorts of jokes which have only to do with the substitution of the unexpected word in a familiar context. If you translated something into French and then had it translated back into English by somebody who didn't know the original, you'd lose what was funny.
The theater is a communal experience, and whatever the emotional connection between an audience member and the actors onstage, it ripples through the whole audience. Part of the fun of the play is being a part of that audience.
I contend that the time has come to develop what I call "integrated spiritual masters." These are individuals that have a full-on experience of all levels of life spiritually, intellectually, emotionally, and yes... physically. In other words they can soar into the realms of the mystic and yet still keep their feet in the sand.
Certain things leave you in your life and certain things stay with you. And that's why we're all interested in movies- those ones that make you feel, you still think about. Because it gave you such an emotional response, it's actually part of your emotional make-up, in a way.
Scientists and religious leaders, activists and first nation leaders, CEOs of corporations and actors, all of us need to come together right now, because the planet is in a lot of pain. My job doesn’t always feel like an integral part of the change that needs to occur. If I can offer, in my profession, to do things that are going to allow more people to connect with certain issues, then I hope it’s useful.
I would really love to direct one day. I think there are certain actors who love the character and the performance and that's all they want to be a part of.
If you have a great part, you have the opportunity to give a good performance. The greatest actors get the best parts, and the best parts make the greatest actors. There are plenty of people who are as talented, who just never got the part.
I've overcome a lot - sexual abuse, death of a loved one, bad parents and experienced life. My nature is such I not only survived all this but I have thrived. I've always been psychologically ambitious in that I've never been willing to settle emotionally for anything less then what's needed. I've wanted more then that from life.
But synthesizer music has been accepted as emotional for long enough that it isn't a huge reach, conceptually, to think of a fake voice as 'emotional', especially since there's a human composing it.
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