I'm Angie to everybody, you've got to learn.
Unfortunately, because the theater is always a poor relation when it comes to making the nut, it's not easy to get the audience in to see a play, unless you have a name that is recognizable, that the audience wants to see and is prepared to pay the $125 to see.
I've worked with the greatest actors, and they're all gone. This is what's so desperate to me.
I think of myself as a journeyman actress. I will attempt almost anything that I think that I can bring off. It could be almost anything.
I was put under contract. A major studio. I got nominated for an Academy Award. Isn't that ridiculous? I mean, at the age of 18!
Psychologically, you learn the values that are inherent in the dialogue, and you learn to apply it to the way you read the lines. That's acting. You're not yourself saying those lines, you're somebody else.
The collaboration really begins once the rehearsal starts. This is when the actor takes his place, because he becomes the one who is going to bring the words of the author off the page.
I started in London, as a kid. My mother knew I had sort of an inbred talent. She was an actress, so I inherited it from her. But I think I got a lot of it from my grandfather, who was a great politician.
As a kid, I just was a contract player at MGM Studios. They put me into goodness knows how many different roles.Some of them were wonderful and some of them were very just distasteful and awful because I was playing out of my age range and I was thoroughly uncomfortable, let's put it that way. So it took me many years to find my acting feet.
Louis B. Mayer and I got along like a house afire. He never chased me around his desk or tried anything with me. Of course, he never gave me any good parts, either.
You learn the values that are inherent in the scene that the writer has written. You learn about who you as a character are in relation to those others who are working with you within that scene.
I just went along for the ride. It was a God-given gift. It is. So you can't say well, you wasted your life because you spent all of it acting, but I think gosh, I've never been to China, I've never been to Japan. I've never been to Yellowstone Park.
I very seldom said no, and I was aided and abetted by my husband, who realized that the one thing I could do was to be a very good actress, by his note.
All I knew how to do was to act. That's the only thing I had in my favor. That was the thing that propelled me forward.
I don't care whether it's a chance meeting or playing a role that you thought was totally wrong but you did it anyway. It will often turn out to be the thing that will lead you to the role which is sublime.
It's better not to try to learn all the lines by rote. It's a very bad idea, in fact. You have to do it by using the process, and as I say, the process is to learn during rehearsals, and that's how you'll do it.
The Manchurian Candidate was the most important movie I was in, let's face it.
A sitcom. I hate that word.
You learn a great deal that you can feed into your craft which gives you the experience that you actually need later on, when you start to get the really great roles. You've played that part to a certain degree in that picture, and you played that one in that, and so on. You add it all up, and you have that experience.
When I opened up in "Gaslight," for instance, playing that narky maid, that all came about from my experience and my training up to that point, and so nothing was wasted.
Now the Gielgud Theater is a very famous old theater, because it was originally called the Globe, and the Globe is where my mother made her very first professional appearance in London, was at the Globe Theater.
I really wanted to go back to the theater, the live theater. That was the thing I had never had a chance to do, even though I had trained to be a stage actress.
I usually arrive at the first rehearsal with a vague memory of most of it. But the real work happens in rehearsal, oddly enough, because what happens is that you match the words to the movement, and once you know where you're moving, then the words that accompany that movement become not locked into your mind and your brain and your whole body.
Actually the years when I was playing totally un - well, they were just roles that just went by the board, you wouldn't want to know. But anyway, I'm glad I had that chance to build my craft.
I'd been out of the movies for years, I had had a wonderful stage career, yes, in musicals and so on, but you don't really make any money in the theater.
