Every director should take an acting class.

I'm a character actress, plain and simple... Who can worry about a career? Have a life. Movie stars have careers - actors work, and then they don't work, and then they work again.

I've been acting since I was six years old, but not professionally.

Early on, when I first started acting professionally, it was really important for me to get my parents on board, because they were so against it.

I love accents - I wish I could find an accent for every one of my characters. It makes it so much easier when I don't have to hear my own voice.

One of the things I learnt over the years is that there is a craft to writing, like there is a craft to acting. I hadn't done my apprenticeship as a writer. I did try to be a writer for hire but I'm...

I went to college in Pittsburgh at Carnegie Mellon University... studied acting there. Then I went to New York for about five years. I moved out here about 10 years ago.

With acting, you wanna see if you can get into trouble without knowing how you're gonna get out of it. It's like the exact opposite of war, where you need an exit strategy. When you're acting, you...

I got involved with an acting school and studied for a couple of years. They used to have improv exercises that you would work on and you would do improvs.

I love playing Blair Cramer, and I'm thrilled to see what more they have in store for her. After playing this role for so many years, I still feel like there is so much about her that is still untold.

I used to pre-rehearse everything and then bring my pre-rehearsed performance to the set. Now, I'm learning to let it happen in the moment. American actors are much better at that than British actors....

Somewhere in the '60s, actors became wimps and basket-case psychotics.

Acting is fun, but directing is very stressful.

Oh my goodness me, Daniel Day-Lewis - huge, huge fan of his. I've always loved his philosophy on acting: he always talks about returning to a state of play.

Theater to me is acting but it's more real on film.

In Bengali films, I played my version of glamorous, where I played a wide-ranging characters.

There is no such thing as playing someone else's character. Every actor takes a character and makes it his/her own while enacting it on screen.

You know what black hatred women feel toward me as soon as they see me, until I return inside my shell, they use every possible weapon. As soon as a generous man tries to help me out, a woman is here...

An actor is somebody who communicates someone else's words and emotions to an audience. It's not me. It's what writers want me to be.

A lot of people think I'm that guy in 'Betsy's Wedding', but I'm not. What it is for me is that, on some level, I connect with the character emotionally.

If you're trying to learn how to act from a class, you're analyzing the teachers' movements and their intricacies, and it becomes like a pantomime of you wanting to be them, and that's wrong....

I don't mean to sound - I don't want it to come out funny, but I don't like show business. I love - I love acting in films. I love it.

Leadership is the other side of the coin of loneliness, and he who is a leader must always act alone. And acting alone, accept everything alone.