A Quote by Yvette Mimieux

To give a successful character portrayal on stage or on film, the part has to be played inside of you. — © Yvette Mimieux
To give a successful character portrayal on stage or on film, the part has to be played inside of you.
I'm building a career as big as humanly possible so I can be in a 'Star Wars' project. My life goal is to have a character in the 'Star Wars' universe, film or other media. I just want to go to my grave knowing I played some character or some character based on my likeness was part of that world.
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.
I'd never played a character as long as I played Poussey. Spending time with her, so much time embodying that character, it was so - and still is and always will be - so special to me and a part of who I am.
You get to know a character that you play on-stage in a pretty profound way over a length of time. I don't want to sound highfalutin and say you become the character, you just start bringing more and more of yourself to the part until the character and actor, it's hard to tell them apart. It's some weird amalgam. In film, because of the period of time, I don't know that you ever get that deep into it.
I'm not a writer; I'm an actor. My job is to take whatever character I'm given and - especially because I have the responsibility of being a black actress, and I know young black girls are looking up, and everyone's looking to what's on television - to just try to give whatever character I'm playing as three-dimensional a portrayal as I can.
In film, the camera can get an array of shots so the audience can see the emotion the character is giving off. Using close-ups on the character's face really helps get the message across. On stage, you can't do that. But the stage has that live feeling that you can't get anywhere else because the audience is right there.
Improv is such a huge part of my background, and a huge part of character discovery is really being inside the character and trying to think through them without the limitations of the script.
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?
Making a film of a work you've played for six weeks gives you intimate knowledge of the character. By the time you go in front of the camera you've worked out the behavior and life of a character.
Anne Boleyn is certainly the most exciting character I have played on stage.
You can reveal yourself on stage in a way that you can't on TV. If you drop a character on TV, it's death. Each character has to be ruthlessly, faultlessly played. But live, you can hint at what's going on behind. You can let the audience in a bit and go off the script.
I feel like a lot of my work on stage, I've gotten to play a wider range of characters than I have on film. This feels closer to who I am than stuff I've played on stage, or, like, Olive Kitteridge.
The advice that I usually give to young actors is that if you can create a character for the stage and keep that character fresh for at least 6 months that means you're doing the show eight times a week.
I came from stage in high school, and on stage you kind of overdo with putting on a character a little bit. Sometimes you become a character and sometimes the character becomes you.
Plays are literature: the word, the idea. Film is much more like the form in which we dream - in action and images (Television is furniture). I think a great play can only be a play. It fits the stage better than it fits the screen. Some stories insist on being film, can't be contained on stage. In the end, all writing serves to answer the same question: Why are we alive? And the form the question takes - play, film, novel - is dictated, I suppose, by whether its story is driven by character or place.
What I consider a good part for a woman and what some other Hollywood people think are good women's parts are very different. I don't' want to play the supportive girlfriend who has nine scenes and just loves that man, maybe cheats on him in one scene but will always be there, and I mean - give me a break. You'll be offered the "lead" in this new hot film with such-and-such A-list director, "a fabulous part" - a fabulous part? A fabulous part is a character with a soul, who starts here and goes to there, you know? There aren't many of those.
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