I remember I made $22 a week doing dinner theater in Norfolk, Virginia. Back then, in the '70s, that was pretty good for a teenager, for a part-time job.
In theater, you have a rehearsal period and you know just who to be.
I come from a theater background, so usually, at the start, you know what happens and where the character goes and everything. But with TV, it's really unpredictable.
I know about lots of things that have nothing to do with being Asian, that you would never guess from looking at me. I know all about musical theater. I could go on 'Jeopardy!' and knock off the whole Broadway show tunes category. Also the whole Bible stories category.
In the theater, when people hear that you're writing a play, they want to know what it's all about, whether there's a role for them. You write it fairly quickly, and it becomes a group activity before you're really ready to have company.
Nobody has ever called Shea Stadium a cathedral. In style, it was more like the old warehouse or outdated movie theater that Korean worshippers have transformed into a church in the borough of Queens. Not a cathedral - but a place where people go to be fulfilled, nonetheless.
Music, art, theater. I'm just a big fan of beauty.
Toward the end of school I started watching movies. Got a job in a movie theater in Brookline, Massachusetts.
It was an outdoor Shakespeare theater that I grew up at. That feels like home, and the place I'm always trying to figure out how to get to.
I did theater summer camps when I was a kid, and I enjoyed them, but they never felt quite right. But then there would always be a tiny improv workshop towards the end of camp, and I would always feel like I liked it so much better.
I'm doing this play right now, the new David Mamet play. It's called 'Race,' and it's very interesting how people really leave the theater filled with the desire to talk about the play and the issues and the characters, and how they're all navigating their personal views around race.
I see only defects because I'm not following the scene as it were. I'm not following the other person. It's like the best thing to clarify this is the theater.
Now I'm back home, living in London, running my theater. I just want to enjoy all that.
I come from a traditional theater background.
When I doing dinner theater in high school, I was talking to a woman who had been in the business for a while and I said I want to act, that's all I want to do with my life and she said if you're serious then you need to hone every discipline you can.
I've always been really artistic. I went to an all-girls private Catholic school, and one of their biggest things was musical theater.
I did children's theater when I was younger, and then when I was about 14 I started doing theater in New York City.
I came from a really musical family. I studied classical piano because my grandparents were piano teachers, but started doing musical theater at age nine in Fresno, California, and went to a performing arts high school. That was my life.
When I go into a theater, I'm very excited to turn off my phone. But then, of course, I get anxiety.
I might be doing a lot more theater, which is kind of what I love, but there's simply no time for.
The thing that I had saved up for myself and wanted most to bring off was a fully fledged professional production of Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare Theater in Stratford.
Live television drama was like live theater, because you moved without thinking about the camera. It followed you around. In film you have to be more aware of what the camera is doing.
The first rock stars were incredibly theatrical. Little Richard and Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley - they were theater artists.
I did a lot of theater in the South side of Chicago.
I thought that my movie career was finished. I was quite happy to dedicate myself 100% to the theater. Surprisingly enough, I've never gotten so many work offers. It's so exciting, this feeling of a new beginning after 40.
I started out to be a painter and was born into the theater.
I attend surprisingly few shows. The type of theater that is popular today just doesn't appeal to me.
Actors are not a great breed of people, I don't think. I count myself as something of an exception. I grew up in the theater, and my values were about the work, and not being a star or anything like that. I'm not spoiled in that way, and if I fight for something, it's about the work, not about how big my trailer is.
I grew up in baseball stadiums. It was my two brothers and baseball around me all the time. I knew nothing about film or acting or theater when I was young!
There is an intimacy about the Opry Theater that gives an entertainer a special charge.
The Australian film industry is a small industry, so you have to really be flexible within working in different mediums. A lot of actors work in theater, film, and television, because there's not much opportunity in terms of employment there.
Theater is something that as a performance artist you have to hate.
Well, all I can say is thank goodness I had 15 years of theater before ever I did film roles. You build technique that you can rely on.
I was pursuing the arts with theater in school, and I was doing after-school activities, but not in any real movement towards a professional career.
I am constantly asked, 'What's the difference between acting in the theater and acting in film?' The only answer I can give is the space - you adapt to the space. But acting is acting.
In '75, the year both A Chorus Line and Chicago hit Broadway, my head spun around and I became the ultimate theater queen for life.
