A Quote by Tallulah Bankhead

If you really want to help the American theater, don't be an actress, dahling. Be an audience. — © Tallulah Bankhead
If you really want to help the American theater, don't be an actress, dahling. Be an audience.
I'm conflicted with theater in the city because you want to reach a diverse audience, and that audience doesn't typically go to the theater.
I studied theater in college, and I really wanted to be an actress and play a lot of different roles. Then I made landing on a television comedy my main focus. But when you become an actress, you want to play a variety of things.
The risk for me has to do with the nudity aspects. I'm an American actress in mainstream movies, and I would like to always be able to do them. For some reason, nudity is perceived differently here than it is elsewhere, and I didn't want to lose any American audience that I was building.
The secret is to let the audience feel through the actress, rather than having the actress feel for the audience. When you can do that, you involved the audience almost without their knowledge or awareness.
If the Tony Awards want to remain relevant in the American theater conversation, then they need to embrace the true diversity of voices that populate the American theater.
Musical theater is an American genre. It started really, in America, as a combination of jazz and operetta; most of the great musical theater writers in the golden era are American. I think that to do a musical is a very American thing to me.
In theater, you really work out the kinks and figure out exactly what you want to do and what we want to say, so by the time we have an audience, we're really prepared. With TV, you have a day... Sometimes, just a few hours.
The audience is the most revered member of the theater. Without an audience, there is no theater. Everything done is ultimately for the enjoyment of the audience. They are our guests, fellow players, and the last spoke in the wheel which can then begin to roll. They make the performance meaningful.
When I was doing Shakespeare and I had spent a lot of time and effort in trying to become a great Shakespearean actress. That was how I started my career, was in the theater doing Shakespeare. And my ambition was to be a great classical actress. That was what I wanted more than anything. So, I really pursued that in the first four years of my career. And it was an uphill struggle. It really was. Shakespeare's difficult and Shakespeare in a big theater is even more difficult. So, anyway, it was a struggle for me.
My interest in theater really began in the '70s when American realism wasn't really in favor. I really dreaded going into a play that had a toaster that worked. I just didn't want to see that.
I find theater terrifying. There are no do-overs, you know? It's all happening live. You need to be in it 100 percent at any given moment, and the audience is right there. I'm really intimidated by theater, but it is my first true love. I love theater. I love that anxiety.
I didn't feel like gymnastics were part of The Cars. I certainly philosophically didn't want to prod the audience to react to anything. To me, it was more like negative theater. We didn't really talk to the audience. I didn't see that being a part of this band.
I never want to pigeonhole myself or get typecast. I'm looking forward to my career and showing all of my range as an actress, and I'm looking at other mediums, too. I'm a theater actress first. And I cannot wait to return to the stage.
When you play arenas you can create whatever you want. At a theater the height of the stage and the limitations of the theater can make you feel more separate from the audience.
My mother had been an actress and we came from that world in New York, the theater world and the downtown sort of theater scene, and so I guess we didn't really have what you'd call like a Hollywood kind of life at all.
I really wanted to go back to the theater, the live theater. That was the thing I had never had a chance to do, even though I had trained to be a stage actress.
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