I’d rather get a good clean laugh with good material, than an easy laugh by swearing or shocking. That’s not clever or comedic, anybody can get a laugh that way, it’s too easy.
The joy about the recording is that you are your own boss. You don’t have a director telling you how to do it.
There is no spray can called ‘Instant Stardom,’ only talent can keep you at the top.
I feel if some kid has sat down and felt I’m important enough to write two pages of words to and take up a lot of his valuable time, then he deserves a few words back, or even a phone call as I have done on a few occasions.
A career in the theatre demands so much commitment.
It’s a little like casting out hundreds of fishing lines into the audience. You start getting little bites, then more, then you hook a few, then more. Then you can start reeling them in and that’s a loveliest feeling – the whole audience laughing with you.
We talk about theatre museums filled with old costumes and things. What we also need is a theatre museum of the old routines on videotape. We are only the custodians of those techniques, and they should be preserved.
I remember certain people in the audience laughing and I wanted to ask: ‘What are you laughing at? This isn’t funny.’ Now I realize that laughter can come from insecurity. They don’t know how they should be feeling.
You’ve got to love the villain if you have to play him. You’ve got to find something that you can live with in yourself if you’re going to play the villain in a play on stage.
I’d get more applause than some because I was just seventeen. If they didn’t clap at the end of my act I would limp off stage and boy would they feel guilty. They would all burst into tremendous applause as they saw this poor cripple kid walking off.
When I was nine, we’d take a bus to the seaside. Coming back, we’d take turns entertaining, singing songs and the like. I tried some stand-up comedy. I had a captive audience in that bus. Then I realized I wanted to do more than that.
Good acting is consistency of performance.
I’m still a kid inside, and adventure is adventure wherever you find it.
I only travel to good material, a good director and a good company. I won’t work in another country for a year any longer, because I have a lovely wife and I adore her and I can’t bear to be away from her.
You cannot learn anything from success, you only learn from failure.
I was always the clown in school. I had a personal put down sense of humor. I wasn’t vindictive. I didn’t make fun of people.