Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I rather like contemporary art.
Playing the villain is great fun.
Doing comedy is my favorite thing.
My wife is a lovely Scotswoman called Karen.
'Bleak House' is like the best soap you could ever hope to watch.
My initial impulse was to be an entertainer, a song and dance man.
I hadn't read Dickens for a while and doing 'Bleak House' was great.
Edinburgh is a phenomenal location for movies and should be used more.
This is the best thing that happens to me all night - a pint of cold Guinness.
I had a feeling 'Star Wars' might do well, but I didn't anticipate just how well.
I studied in Glasgow and, when I was young, I spent four years solely in theatre.
I've always been interested in Jewish culture, but never had a chance to dip into it.
In the '80s, to get a contemporary Scot who was smart, sexy and funny was very unusual.
Scotland is extraordinary as a location, the light is amazing, for instance on the west coast.
I had this idea when I left drama school that if I could do everything, I'd always be working.
I've done a lot of musical theatre, but I equate 'Mr. Cinders' a lot with why I became an actor.
I quite like Jackson Pollock, and have a real gut reaction to it, so it does whatever it does to me.
My family are all Glasgow. I was born there. Govan. When it was very tough. The tenements. All that stuff.
I don't know how I ever built a career, really, because I have always been absolutely terrible at auditions.
'Local Hero' was probably the most enjoyable job I've ever done then or since. It's had a very long shelf life.
Going from dialogue-driven 'New Tricks' to a movie like 'The Machine' which has special effects has been brilliant.
I got married on a beach in Italy. It was very romantic getting married in Italian. But I've no idea what we agreed to.
My son is a lecturer at Bristol University in anthropology. His degree was in, get this, human mating strategies - sex!
To make 800 people laugh for a couple of hours is a wonderful feeling, because you know you're doing them a lot of good.
A big moment for me came when 'Singin' in the Rain' came out. It hit me like a sledgehammer - that's what I wanted to do.
My mother was a dancer when she was a kid and I gather she was very good, but was never allowed to go into the profession.
For the first ten years of my career, or up to the point I did 'Local Hero,' I was always trying to be somebody else as an actor.
I get so bored about that, please don't ask me about 'Star Wars.' It was just so unimportant to me as a job, and everyone makes a big deal of it.
What I've always liked as an actor is to do a lot of different kinds of things. I've done musicals, stage, TV and lots of different styles of work.
I began to tell people that I wanted to be an entertainer. Between the ages of five and 11 there was an intense amount of practical drama going on.
I always enjoy the scenes with Dennis Waterman, particularly when we're playing comedy, we're always finding stuff together and he's very immediate.
My parents came out of Glasgow during the Depression and both - particularly my father - had very tough childhoods. They fought their way out of it.
I do some very high energy comedy, vaudeville, music hall stuff, and people who've seen my work on camera, on TV and movies, would not really know that.
It's unusual when you get scripts not wanting to change things - I'm one of those actors who writers must hate as I'm always wanting to rewrite or swap bits about.
I was very surprised when I watched 'Star Wars,' and I thought, 'Oh, that's me. I've been blown up.' Then, I came back again. I really didn't know what was happening!
The first four years, I worked exclusively in the theater. I did a great deal of different types of acting - avant garde and classical work. So, it was a very broad spectrum.
I've always maintained that there's no such thing as period acting, I think that's a class thing. I don't believe that people moved and spoke much differently than we do now.
I see 'Jekyll' as a very scary comedy thriller, partly because Hyde is violent and frightening as a character but at the same time he's very funny - and that's quite an achievement.
Laughter is like surfing; it's like a wave coming out of the auditorium - before it has died off, you must come in with the next line. But if you come in too soon, no one will hear what you say.
My first starring role was in 'Rumpelstiltskin' and the lightbulb moment for me came when I had to stamp my foot at the end and walk off the stage. Everyone laughed and I thought, 'this is great.'
Ewan was studying in London and he got this huge job in his final year, a part in Dennis Potter's 'Lipstick on Your Collar' for Channel 4. He had no idea what happened on a TV set so I talked him through things.
What's it like to have my trousers pulled down? It's not as awful as it seems. Doing that kind of thing with an actress like Judith Paris, who pulls them down, is easy, because she is very professional about it.
I've always felt a very strong affinity with Jewish people. Over the years I find I've become very friendly with certain people I've worked with - actors, producers, whatever - and then two or three years later I discover they're Jewish.
In my professional life, when I started I felt it was very transitory. You meet people, you have to make this very intense connection and then you might not see them for two years. It was kind of odd and when I started out I didn't like it.
When I was a young actor and working in London, I would pop home to see my sister, and Ewan would always be intrigued about what I'd been doing. I think he found my shoulder-length hair and pink, flared jeans glamorous, which they were anything but.
Working on 'Jekyll' required a lot of concentration and energy. The script is written in a very filmic way most of the time; unusually for television there are a lot of descriptive pages, tiny little fragmented scenes with no dialogue but huge energy.
When I was very small, when I was five or six, that's what I wanted to be. I wanted to be a song and dance man. Then I got a lot of inspiration from going to visit my grandparents in Glasgow, where I'd go to see variety. That made me want to do it as well.
In P7, I played Robin in a musical version of 'Robin Hood' and afterwards DO McLean was standing with mum and dad and he told them that I should go into drama. It is still extraordinary to me that a man in that period would think that that was an option for me.
The way the show was conceived originally and developed, has always had good writing at the heart of it, it's very difficult to be good with bad writing. 'New Tricks' has that with the right level of humor running through the series, along with the investigations.
Way back at the beginning, I went to see George Lucas when he first came to London for 'Star Wars.' I met him months before they started, and he didn't ask me to do the picture at all. But the actor whom he had employed to play Wedge didn't work out for some reason.