Top 1200 British Actors Quotes & Sayings - Page 3

Here's a viewer's guide to BP media briefings. Whenever you hear someone with a British accent talking about this on behalf of British Petroleum they are not telling you the truth. That's the bottom-line.

Ineptitude and negligence directed British policies in India more than any cynical desire to divide and rule, but the British were not above exploiting rivalries.

I pride myself in being an aficionado of the British seaside. Throughout my career, I have visited and worked in many of the famous British resorts, from Great Yarmouth to Largs.

There are some actors that are great stars and storytellers, but not necessarily good actors. I'm talking about some - not all - of the people you see in action flms or blockbusters. They're film stars, though not necessarily great actors. And there are those who are great actors, but not necessarily big film stars. Jim Sturgess is both. He's quite obviously a star, the audience likes him, he's a great storyteller and he turned out to be one of the greatest actors I've worked with as well.

I believe that a large part of the training in the regional theaters is in imitation of the British style of acting. The British orientation is textual; they start from the language and work toward the character.

I connect much more with theatre actors than with cinema actors - insofar as you can speak of 'cinema actors' in Mexico, because there isn't a big film industry.

The great character actors are now the actors whose work has the element of ritual sacrifice once claimed by the DeNiros of the world, as well as the element of danger - the actors who thrill us by going for broke.

British-built railways in India helped the British to make money and maintain order; but, as a by-product, they served to unite the country, making it ripe for independence.

We've never adopted Americanisms. We are a very British band from a very British cultural scene. We fly that flag and that is something I enjoy.

While you can be trained and groomed to be a better actor, seasoning happens only to TV actors. TV actors shoot every day, and that makes a difference to the project. They are hard-working, but that's not taking anything away from the film actors.

British women's history was never confined to the British mainland; and contesting the narrative around enfranchisement shows us that rights were not bestowed by the state, but extracted from it by force.

I've heard New York actors say Chicago actors intimidate them because apparently we're the real nitty-gritty actors who're in a town where being onstage doesn't necessarily get you anything except your craft.

I'm quite British in the sense of not expressing my emotions much. I save it for my songs. If you ask about a death in the family, or a lover, I will not be emotional. I'd probably answer with a smile. Because that's what we British blokes do.

I remember sitting in front of the British Museum and having a moment - an epiphany, I guess - that I just had to live here. And now that I have grown to understand the British sense of humour here, I love the culture, too.

The use of water cannon could have changed the face of British policing; it would have made a huge difference to British policing.

The laws of England will protect the rights of British subjects, and give a remedy for a grievance committed by one British subject upon another, in whatever country that may be done.

We can safely make one prophecy: whatever the outcome of this war, the British Empire is at an end. It has been mortally wounded. The future of the British people is to die of hunger and tuberculosis in their cursed island.

I think Hellblazer is quite unique. In a comic world dominated by American characters (nothing wrong with that per se) Constantine was unashamedly British. A certain kind of miserablist British

I venture to claim two qualifications for the great office which I hold, which to my mind, without making invidious distinctions, is one of the most important that can be held by any Englishman; and those qualifications are that in the first place I believe in the British Empire, and in the second place I believe in the British race. I believe that the British race is the greatest of the governing races that the world has ever seen.

The actor has to have some degree of craft, along with the talent. No one tries to laugh except bad actors. No one tries to cry except bad actors. How a character hides his feelings tells us who he is. Most people don't know that, and most actors don't do that. Therefore, there are a lot of actors who put me to sleep, that are considered good actors, but they're predictable and boring. I know how the scene is going to end before it ends.

It takes awhile for writers to get to know actors rhythms, not just as actors, but what they bring to the characters. I think it takes a few episodes for the writing room to catch up to the actors and vice versa.

I am attached to a strict approach to Brexit: I respect the British vote, but the worst thing would be a sort of weak E.U. vis-a-vis the British.

There are so many brilliant, trained actors of color in America. If you just think about it, every year in the spring Julliard and NYU and Yale and hundreds of schools across the country graduate classes of trained actors, and in those classes are actors of color. So to say that there aren't enough actors of color is factually inaccurate.

British-built railways in India helped the British to make money and maintain order and, as a by-product, served to unite the country, ripe for independence.

I'm very proud to be British, and my brand is British.

You have actors you've worked with previously, and you have actors you haven't worked with that you've seen in things where you know they can work in these parts. And then there are actors who blow you away, who surprise you.

I love working with actors. I grew up with a lot of actors. All my friends are actors. I love that process.

I think I've actually benefited from Australia being a kind of combination of both British and American culture. We kind of got the best of both British and American television and books, science fiction and fantasy, and so on. So I'm familiar with a lot of, for example, American books and television that a British author of my generation might not be.

I like to work and there's no movies for actors, period, especially black actors. When white actors are like, 'Man, there's no work out there,' then black actors are like, 'Are you kidding me?'

If I'm in a gathering of filmmakers, I'm first and foremost a British Indian; if I'm in a gathering of British Indians, I'm a woman director. There are so many sides to who I am that I change all the time.

The trouble with the British is that they are not interested in ideas. If Jesus came back today and offered to speak for an hour on British television, they would say, "What! Another talking head?

It turns out that understanding the British public is not rocket science. The British appreciate honesty and they also have a bonkers, off-the-wall sense of humour like me.

Even under Poch, he had a different culture to the British. It wasn't that he didn't understand it. You know the British like to have a drink, it was just something that he couldn't get his head around. He wasn't willing to compromise on that, either.

The extraordinary exertions of the colonies, in cooperation with British measures, against the French, in the late war, were acknowledged by the British parliament to be more than adequate to their ability.

But you know we couldn't compare what we do with what the British athletes did at the Olympics. We are very proud to be British and if we have done our bit to promote Britain in a historic year for the country that's brilliant.

British people are surprised that I'm British!

I'm from Norway, but I always felt like I'd grown up with British culture. We had everything from the BBC on our TV, so British drama seems very close to home.

I think Americans still can't help but respond to the natural authority of this voice. Deep down they long to be told what to do by a British accent. That's why so many infomercials have British people.

It wasn't just British gangster films that really did for me as a kid, personally, it was British films in general.

I think a lot of actors, especially actors with a theater background, have a musical ear. A lot of actors just want to be musicians anyway, and a lot of musicians want to be actors.

If the deaf are to hear, the sound has to be very loud. When we dropped the bomb, it was not our intention to kill anybody. We have bombed the British Government. The British must quit India and make her free.

I have always thought we should think less about the British film industry as an entity, and more about getting British talent working.

In British music, you have indie, rock... Grime is now one of those pillars. It's a foundation of British music.

I think it's worse for actors, though, because people have to choose you. As a director, I get to choose the actors, but most of the time, actors have to be chosen in order to work.

Nova Scotia as a British colony also came into being as another result of these adventurous British expeditions to North America in the reign of James I.

After 'The Gamekeeper' I made one other film called 'Looks and Smiles,' but making British films was very difficult. There wasn't a tradition of British cinema.

I have no idea what a British sensibility or a British sense of humor is. I have no concept of what that is. I have no concept of what American sensibility is. I was born in Great Britain, but I was only there for six months, and we moved to Belgium, where I grew up. I love Britain, I lived there for nine years doing shows and things, but I don't know what a British sensibility is. I'd like to have someone tell me what an American sensibility is.

In the 1960s, my first-generation immigrant parents were gifted the olive branch of a blue British passport when working for the British Army in Cyprus. It completely transformed the Paphitis story.

To be honest, I would like to have worked with Peter Sellers, because when people talk about classic British actors, you talk about Lawrence Olivier, and Peter Sellers was just in the most amazing films.

What do actors really want? To be great actors? Yes, but you can't buy talent, so it's best to leave the word 'great' out of it. I think to be believed, onstage or onscreen, is the one hope that all actors share.

That is the next step for out trans actors - to just be treated as actors and not 'trans actors.'

I learned early on to abandon all those preconceived notions you have about other actors and it's served me really well. I usually just try to empty my mind of that. I love meeting actors and I love working with actors.

When I got into the movie business, working with actors was the one thing I was really weak at. I didn't know what to say to actors. They scared me and intimidated me. The actors that I've worked with who have had a lot of experience, or who I've even grown up watching as a kid, were really scary. I was like, "What am I going to say to this person?" But, I've matured. It's fun. I understand what actors do now.

British fashion is self confident and fearless. It refuses to bow to commerce, thus generating a constant flow of new ideas whilst drawing in British heritage.

No man can honestly sit there and say he doesn't care about what people think, doesn't care if he's got the support of the British public or British fans.

I think I come from a theatrical tradition where, if you look at the great theatrical actors of the British theatre, they took enormous pride in being wildly different from one role to the next. That's the tradition I come from.

I was deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq with British Special Forces Units. I have great respect for the British military and the country as a whole, so I don't have anything negative to say about that.

In my view the European culture carries a very heavy responsibility for the creation of Israel... it is a product of both British and Stalin's anti- Semitism, but the British never faced their own complicity in its construction.

The attack on the British embassy in Tehran came just days after the Iranian 'parliament' voted to expel the British ambassador, and therefore reeks of official complicity.

The last person to get across that town in under three hours was yelling "The British are coming! The British are coming!"