I came from a family where I felt great pressure to be financially successful, and I felt that staying in Chicago and doing theater, I was, in all likelihood, not going to find financial success.
I am concerned about the musical theater, selfishly, because I love it.
I was really bored in school because I couldn't do what I wanted to do, which was act. And then when I was 14, a local TV company came to the youth theater, and they were auditioning kids to be in this new TV series.
To me idealized characters are so boring to play, especially having grown up in the classical theater. That's a great experience, but as a woman, especially, you've played a lot of idealized characters. So when you've got someone who has weaknesses as well as strengths, that's interesting.
When you're an actor working in the theater, you would never say anything to the writer, never alter the dialogue, never dream to ask for changes.
I would definitely go back and do theater; I talk about theater all the time.
It was the '50s, and the card catalog and the Dewey Decimal System were in fashion. I hung out in the 812 section - American theater and plays. This is where I first read Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman' and was transfixed. I remember staring into space for what seemed an eternity after reading Linda Loman's final speech.
When I die, it's going to read, 'Game Show Fixture Passes Away.' Nothing about the theater, or Tony Awards, or Emmys. But it doesn't bother me.
I learned how to turn it on and turn it off. You learn that in theater, too, but for film work, I learned from doing 'Henry,' I learned how to leave work at work and go home. There's always spillover. Actors speak of this.
I don't read reviews, and it's not because I don't think I can learn something, I'm sure I could learn a lot. I just that I feel very passionately about the work and especially when you're doing theater, you really only need one director and when you read reviews, you feel like you have twelve, because you respond to them, naturally.
Originally, theater was my life. It was what I assumed I'd spend my working life doing - if I was lucky. Then along came movies.
I wasn't a glamour-puss, and there were more interesting roles for an actress like me in the theater and in live television.
When I came back from filming 'Abduction', I told my agent: I'm staying in London now. If it takes doing children's theater from the back of a van in Kilburn, that's OK. I need to be with my family. My job is to keep the family together and provide for them.
I love 'Sunday in the Park with George.' I saw that when I was just, just starting theater school, and I remember singing 'Finishing the Hat' or at least reading the lyrics to 'Finishing the Hat' and other songs from 'Sunday in the Park with George' to my mom to try to explain why I wanted to be an artist.
I wore goofy hats to school and did musical theater. Most people thought I was a dork. But if you have a sense of humor about it, no one can bring you down.
I think I've definitely found a niche working in comedy, but dramatic films are what brought me here. After I saw 'Titanic' in the theater, I got the bug.
In my theater, I'm not trying to change the world.
Anybody that goes to the theater, I think we're all misfits, so we ended up on stage or in the audience.
The big difference between TV and theater is that you get to do a new play every week, so it's quite challenging, but it keeps you fresh. There's never any fear of getting stale in your performance.
When I was doing ensemble theater and comedy work, I felt I had some talents. But when I started doing my shows in Berkeley and found that I could be funny on my own, I was shocked.
I've seen such great material, and now I'm more picky with the type of jobs that I take because it's gotta be there. There's an old theater saying: 'If it's not on the page, it's not on the stage'... You gotta have some type of standards as far as the jobs that you take and the roles that you take on.
'Yosemite' opened doors for me in the New York theater community in amazing ways. There's a whole world of fearless young theater makers here who put shows together on a shoestring budget and with gigantic hearts.
I never studied anything about film technique in school. Eventually, I realized that cinema and theater are not so different: from the gut to the heart to the head of a character is the same journey for both.
I feel like I just have such the blood and bones of a New Yorker that I can almost imagine better, like, giving up the fight and not being able to afford the city and going out West, keeping a small place here, and then when I'm like 80, coming back here, living on the park and going to the theater.
I did theater at Carnegie, and in Pittsburgh and New York.
I believe in things that move people, if the audience isn't deeply caught up and moved to either laughter or tears then I don't think it is theater.
Music is very influential to my writing, as are theater and film.
Chaos is the natural state, and theater tries to make sense of it, but it's got to be a little messy to be believable.
My goal was not to be famous or rich but to be good at what I did. And that required going to New York and studying and working in the theater.
As a boy, I was never interested in theater because I came from a working-class Scottish home. I thought, 'I want to do movies.' Then it was finding the means to do it.
I'm baffled when young actors aren't familiar with current film, television and theater, or aren't interested in older films or plays and the history of the craft in general. If you don't know what's out there, and what came before, then how can you picture yourself working, and how can anyone else?
The theater of the mind is impossible to compete with, and I like the idea that with a few suggestions, each reader forms in his or her own mind what a character or a place looks like.
All I listened to until age 18 growing up was musical theater. I liked the escapism of it.
For me, if its television, if it's theater, if it's film, and it's good, I don't make much of distinction between the 3. I think there's only so many great stories out there. If you get the chance to be a part of one, it doesn't matter what it is.
The Lord Chamberlin was censoring scripts when I first came into the theater.
I love multi-cam. I grew up in a border town in South Texas right next to Mexico, a million miles away from this world... and to me, multi-cams are just like theater.