Images
I loved growing up in Ohio.
John Lithgow
My eagerness to please sometimes gets the better of me.
Next to the word 'luvvie' in the dictionary, there's a picture of me. At least in the American editions.
There is less difference than you would imagine entertaining little children and entertaining adults.
Everybody's a dreamer.
I do think - I always tell that to young people - go to college, do theater, work with an audience. Don't try to learn how to act in front of millions and millions of people. Don't make that your first ambition, to be on a sitcom or get into the movies. Learn who you are as an actor, and the best way to do that is to do it in front of an audience.
I'm probably a better granddad than dad because your role as a grandfather is to be fun, and I'm fun.
I'm an avid Boston Red Sox fan.
People have expectations from you - and the whole fun of acting is taking expectations and completely upending them. That's how you get laughs in comedy, and that's how you scare the daylights out of people in a horror film.
Britain has a great sense of its own national pride. It's like the monarchy is the embodiment of that pride.
The first long chapter of my career was almost entirely theater so that, by the time I was 30, 35, I sort of knew who I was as an actor, and I was gradually learning who I was as a human being.
Britain is probably the most sophisticated combination of a monarchy and a democracy.
I was in 20 Shakespearean plays by the time I was 20.
I consider myself a very lucky actor that, approaching 60, I'm still employed and employable.
We moved around a lot when I was growing up. I was always the new kid in class, but I was good at making friends. With an upbringing like that, I was either going to become an actor or a politician. Thank God I became an actor! I'm not cut out for politics.
I'm too much of a Libra. I too often see the other person's point of view and capitulate, even though I have strong political convictions. It's just my liability. Maybe I'm too empathetic. That's the actor in me.
Whenever I play a role, it's like I've been kidnapped inside my own body.
If it's well written and well directed and you've got good actors to work with, acting is easy. But making sure all the ducks are in a row is the hard part. It's very rare.
When I was 13 years old, I went to visit my aunt and uncle in Washington, D.C., and they just deposited me at the National Gallery. I would go from Rembrandt to Picasso - I remember that experience so vividly.
It's a very tough time for the playwright. Broadway has become almost a musical comedy theme park with all these long-running shows.
Academics tend to have wonderfully infantile senses of humor.
What you aspire to on a sitcom is the feeling of live comedy.
I eat way too fast.
I like to rehearse and rehearse and have everything exactly calculated before we start shooting - probably to a fault.
When good things come along, you end up saying yes to them. Because they're rare.
My sense of myself is that I'm a character actor, and character actors are ready, willing, and able to do anything, to be totally different from themselves. That's my job, to be ready. I'm some kind of first responder.
If you read in front of your kids, it's very likely that they'll become readers, too.
I'm a fun father, but not a good father. The hard decisions always went to my wife.
There's no more private family than the royal family. People who can really only be themselves with each other. The rest of us just spend all our time fascinated by them.
Powerful people are always in charge. You have to acknowledge that and deal with it as a reality. They're not devils. They're not monsters. They're human beings, like us, that have their share of insecurities and fears. You have to contemplate that as you go through life.
It's pretty rare that I see a film that I did a long, long time ago.
I grew up with this crazy upbringing of living many places and always being the new kid in town, not like a service brat where you're always going to school with other new kids in town. I was constantly arriving in small towns and going to school with kids who'd been together since they were in kindergarten.
I never get tired of hearing compliments.
Churchill is so particular. He's as different from the rest of the population of Britain as he is from me.
Good acting is really excellent carpentry.
Shakespeare is like mother's milk to me.
My very first role was when I was 2 1/2 years old; I was one of Nora's children in 'A Doll's House', with my father playing Torvald.
I am such a coward when it comes to political arguments. I tend to sort of recoil rather than engage.
In 1995, I proposed the Harvard Arts Medal. The idea was to celebrate the fact that, although it's rare, Harvard men and women do go into the creative arts. Over the years we've had major, major figures, like Jack Lemmon, John Updike, Yo-Yo Ma, and Bonnie Raitt.
I'm a con artist in that I'm an actor. I make people believe something is real when they know perfectly well it isn't.
I find I have to walk a little faster in public these days, but it's very easy to remember when nobody had any idea who I was.
I love New York. I lived there all through the '70s and have lived in L.A. since the early '80s but come back all the time to do theater.
I tell young people, including my own kids, don't do this, it's too difficult. It's a career full of rejection, disappointment and failure. It's murderously hard on the ego. Don't become an actor.
I look on myself as a sort of hybrid, having grown up in the world of Shakespeare out in the cornfields of Ohio.
Time sneaks up on you like a windshield on a bug.
We're in the business of using real emotions to bring pretend emotions to life.
In animation, there's this exhilarating moment of discovery when you see the film and you say, Oh THAT'S what I was doing.
Actors are not necessarily smart people.
I can't imagine doing an hour-long dramatic series because it's so much work. A sitcom is a wonderful gig. You work from 10 to 4 every day, it's fun, and you get to live at home.
I loved playing Roberta Muldoon!
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10