Citations

Acting on the screen is like acting under a microscope. The slightest movement becomes a gesture and therefore the discipline has to be very severe.

I don't like my face at all. It's always been a great drawback to me.

I've never been one of those stage chaps who scoff at films. I think they're a marvellous medium, and are to the stage what engravings are to paintings.

My idea of a director is a chap who puts me in the middle of a stage and shines a bright light on me.

The art of acting lies in keeping people from coughing.

Actors never retire; they just get offered fewer parts.

Film is a wonderful medium and I love it, but I find that I cannot increase my talent by working in pictures, any more than a painter can do so by increasing the size of his brush.

I have put on so many make-ups that sometimes I have feared that when I go to wipe it off there will be nobody left underneath.

You've got to perform in a role hundreds of times. In keeping it fresh one can become a large, madly humming, demented refrigerator.

Acting is the ability to dream on cue.

Did you ever have a vision of the place we came from before we were born? I did, when I was about three years old. I used to dream about it. I even drew pictures of it. It looked rather like Mexico.

[Alexander] Korda was the nearest thing to a magician that I ever met. He could make the impossible seem possible.

[on acting] The most precious things in speech are pauses.