Pastoral Resources

The great actresses and actors receive awards for great roles in great films.

It seems extraordinary to have waited so long into one's life to have found the part that actually uses your basic rhythm. And I think that's always sort of what actors connect up with - their own sort of world.

But my favorite period for actors is the 70s. I think so many great movies were made in the 70s. The 90s just seem to be a confused decade. Nobody knows, really, what's going on.

I'm not that complicated as an actor. I have a formula in which I work, yeah. But not like Sean Penn does. Sean is one of the few actors I know who can work like that, actually becoming the character he is playing, and get consistent results. I don't believe you can ever be someone else. You manifest different levels of your own personality to come up with a character.

The fuss that actors began making about the difficulty of shifting to sound struck me as perfectly foolish.

In this country, you have movie actors and theatre actors and television actors.

It's like a cast of actors; you're all working together closely under pressure to produce something everyday. And when we put up an issue, it's like the curtains opening on a new play. I really like that daily sense of surprise.

My father comes from a generation of film that actors my age don't even know about, which is really sad.

The weird thing about this business - and I'm sure this operates in many other things, but it's very present and acute in this business - is that a lot of people don't realize that they have power. Particularly actors.

I have directed good actors and have gone through the process which is more detailed in theater in a way. You have to get people to stay for two or three hours in a performance. They need more talk and rehearsal than in films.

I guess there are very few actors that I've worked with that I would like to work with again. You never think you'll have that chance and, if we didn't do Italian Job together, there wouldn't be another one that could be right.

When you're doing a play you get to go full speed ahead, all night, in front of an audience. It's a roller-coaster ride, responding to other actors, it feeds you.

I'm as anxious as any viewer would be to see what Temple is going to do next. All I know is that in the second half of the season, he's going to have more sexual tension developing. And it's a great cast - they're all Broadway actors except for me. I aspire to that.

Fonda and Gary Cooper had the best sense of timing of all the actors I knew.

It was the fashion of the time, still is, to feel that all actors are neurotic, or they would not be actors.

Only one of us would usually sing lead. Which most of the time was, Mickey or Dave. They thought it was perfectly a natural routine, because Mickey and Dave saw themselves as TV actors.

I got into radio when I was eight, and I was one of the busiest child dramatic actors in America.

I think most actors are shy. I really do. The greatest actors can disappear. I had friends call me the Blend-In Man.

I like actors that are good with pantomime and that can transmit a lot by their presence and attitude more than through their dialogue.

It made me alive to the fact that the most important thing sometimes is what isn't said - to prepare for moments of revelation that can be read entirely on actors' faces without dialogue.