The Great Acting Blog: “Five Great Actors On Acting”
These quotes don’t offer any easy inspiration but there is a truth in them, even if that truth is sometimes opaque or requires thinking about over time. What they allow us to infer is important, for example, Delon appears to be saying something personal, and yet we are able to understand something in general about acting and actors. They also help to make sense of experience, giving shape to inchoate feeling. I return to them from time to time or they’ll drift into my mind….
“There are musicians who practice all the time but we actors are not able to do that. We don’t have an instrument, except if you say we are our own instrument, and yet I always try to continue searching and working for the moment where you have to deliver.” – Michel Piccoli
“I want the public to realize that above all I am an actor, a very professional one who loves every minute of being in front of the camera. But one who becomes very miserable the instant the director shouts, ‘Cut!'” – Alain Delon
“…. great acting is like painting. In the great masters of fine art one can see the small gesture of a finger, the turn of a head, the vitriolic stare, the glazed eye, the pompous mouth, the back bending under a fearful load. In every swerve of a painter’s brush, there is an abundance of life…not imitation – that is merely caricature – and any fool can be a mimic! But creation is a secret. The better, the truer the creation, the more it will resemble a great painter’s immortal work” – Charles Laughton
“I boil against all definitions. I don’t want to be put in a nutshell, in fact, quite the opposite. Nobody can tell me I couldn’t play….you pick any of two extreme people. I could play the President of the United States or a drooling, retarded woman. Between those poles, I don’t see where my limitations are. Maybe they’re there, but I’m not going to be the one who accepts them or defines them”. – Jack Nicholson
“An actor is at most a poet and at least an entertainer.”
And…
“To grasp the full significance of life is the actor’s duty, to interpret it is his problem, and to express it his dedication.” – both Marlon Brando
