Exhilaration is that feeling you get just after a great idea hits you, and just before you realize what's wrong with it.
There is always a struggle, a striving for something bigger than yourself in all forms of art. And even if you don't achieve greatness, even if you fail, which we all must, everything you do in your work is somehow connected with your attitude toward life, your deepest secret feelings.
I'm now at the age where I've got to prove that I'm just as good as I never was.
Tomorrow is a thief of pleasure.
The important thing is to learn through experience. The more you do the more you learn. I don't think anyone can teach acting from a podium.
Whatever it is that makes a person charming, it needs to remain a mystery .. once the charmer is aware of a mannerism or characteristic that others find charming, it ceases to be a mannerism and becomes an affectation.
Higgins: I'm an ordinary man, who desires nothing more than just an ordinary chance, to live exactly as he likes, and do precisely what he wants. An average man am I, of no eccentric whim, Who likes to live his life, free of strife Doing whatever he thinks is best for him, Well, just an ordinary man
Acting is bad acting if the actor himself gets emotional in the act of making the audience cry. The object is to make the audience cry, but not cry yourself. The emotion has to be inside the actor, not outside. If you stand there weeping and wailing, all your emotions will go down your shirt and nothing will go out to your audience. Audience control is really about the actor
When you've always worked hard in the theatre, you find that, when you stop playing, at the end of a run, the evenings seem very long indeed. You have to find something to keep yourself occupied with because you're so used to gearing yourself up to that eight o'clock curtain, but to find any kind of real, absorbing alternative is impossible. Nobody is as interesting to spend an evening with as a really good part.
Originally I had a block about appearing in a musical. I went to a voice teacher for a while, but that did no good. My range is about one and a half notes. I ended up talking the musical numbers, which was revolutionary at the time. The lyrics are extremely intricate. They move along like a precisely acted scene. If you miss a word - heaven help you - the orchestra rattles past like an express train, and you've got to run like the devil to catch up.
A woman who utters such disgusting and depressing noise has no right to be anywhere, no right to live. Remember that you are a human being with a soul and the divine gift of articulate speech, that your native language is the language of Shakespeare and Milton and The Bible. Don't sit there crooning like a bilious pigeon.
If we could talk to the animals, learn their languages, maybe take an animal degree.
Because I love the taste of meat I am a reluctant but dedicated vegetarian.
Having been challenged by Colonel Pickering, Higgins: You know, it's almost irresistible. She's so deliciously low. So horribly dirty.
Robert Morley is a legend in his own lunchtime.
