For me, to be perfectly honest, the part of my brain that was stimulated by directing was much more exciting than a typical day of acting.
When I left school, I got a job in a shoe shop and I used to save 15 quid a week and pay for my own singing and acting lessons.
I'm no relation to Lillian or Dorothy Gish. Not even way back. But when I first became interested in acting, I wrote a letter to Lillian Gish. She wrote back, discouraging me from entering the business.
I just had fun making the movies - just being on set - but I didn't really care about the acting part.
I go to Stanford, and I'm an economics major, not thinking I'm going to do anything with acting. A professor came to the dorm where I lived looking for people to audition for an August Wilson play, 'Joe Turner's Come And Gone.' I gave it a shot, got one of the lead roles in the play.
It's kind of funny, with all of the different outlets that come from acting that you could try, I would love to direct and kind of be involved in art direction, too.
I've learnt that there's acting for film, acting for theatre, and acting for an audition.
It's a career that's enticing because you go on stage, for example, and people clap. You get that affirmation, but you can't go into acting for that because it's really your own self-belief that's going to get you through.
There's no doubt that I owe a lot to my training of stage acting.
I was a bit scared because I came from the acting world. There was a fear that people would think of me kind of as a joke. But really, people think of me as a country artist who can act. That's my favorite compliment.
I don't get acting jobs because of my looks.
Acting is not an important job in the scheme of things. Plumbing is.
Whenever I am acting, it's everything, you know. If I'm researching a role, I'm completely consumed in that and, between action and cut, I live in this suspended time.
The acting training in school was great, but it was mostly fun being young and in New York. Because my upbringing was so transient, New York ended up being my home. I've been living in New York longer than I have anywhere else in my life.
I like doing small parts, because I don't feel I'm that practised in acting. It's like making baby steps towards a bigger goal.
Some directors are interested in acting, and others are only interested in cranes and moving the camera.
Please don't ask which I enjoy more - acting or hosting - because I love them equally.
When I did make the decision to focus on acting, I think my mother was just relieved for me that I had finally started to focus.
Acting is about communicating what it is like to be human: the pain, the laughs, the misery, the joy. I suppose I am searching to have it all.
Acting came from growing up in dysfunction. I mean, a lot of great times, but a lot of dysfunction.
There is a guilty pleasure in being rude and knowing that it's acting rather than you. But you get the same release as if you were being rude in life.
Singing has been a passion of mine, equal to or greater than acting, ever since I was very small.
One of the difficulties you run into is that acting and celebrity are so closely intertwined. People make careers out of being charismatic personalities. It's one of those things that people have come to expect from actors. Personalities that don't change from role to role. I don't want it that way.
I had been a real problem child, but once I got into acting, my parents never had any more trouble with me because all of that energy was directed in a positive way.
You can get a bit world-weary in this job, and 'The Passion' reminded me of what a fantastic job acting is and how lucky I am to be doing it.
When I audition, I understand what it takes and the insecurities that come with it. If I do anything, I put actors at ease. I used to tell directors who weren't actors, the best thing they could do was take an acting class for a couple of months. Just to understand.
I like acting, but I like filmmaking better. I went to film school. I want to make films.
To be an icon is a big job - it's beyond acting. And sometimes it pays, and sometimes it doesn't.
I was really interested in acting and thought secretly I could do it but didn't tell anyone. It was a quite private thing that I wanted to do.
Obviously, writing together is very intimate because it's sort of acting where you need to get to a really deep place to get the most emotional song.
Acting was always my unscratched itch, when I was in college and even afterwards.
I didn't want to be an actress at all, or famous even. I certainly enjoy acting now, absolutely. Time will tell whether or not I enjoy fame.
Acting is one of those things that anybody can do because no one can learn it, but only a few people can really do because it's nothing you can learn.
I was real into theater, and then I tried soccer, acting and ballet. Both my parents didn't want a child-star model, so I didn't get into modeling until I was 14.
When I got out of acting school, I was lucky to have gotten any job at all. A lot of people hiring African American actresses - it was right after 'Roots,' and for society, not me, it was great. Nice richly dark-skinned people was the fashion, and I was not.
I was never an actress in high school. I didn't start acting until I was in my twenties. I was just a funny cheerleader. I hadn't even seen a show until I was in my twenties, so I was very late getting into the business.
