Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
In England, I was a Cockney actor. In America, I was an actor.
Lots of middle class people are running around pretending to be Cockney.
I'm every bourgeois nightmare - a Cockney with intelligence and a million dollars.
I actually had a cockney accent before I went to drama school. It's softened up a bit.
It was great to play an ex-marine cockney thug. All my roles are as different as the colours of the rainbow.
Adele's like a beacon of honesty. Doesn't compromise, goes to America and she's still the same sweary cockney.
One of the main things about Cockney is, you speak at twice the speed as Americans. Americans speak very slow.
I don't want to say I'll never play someone with a cockney accent, but I think I would be irritated by me doing it.
The Crafty Cockney had a picture of the owner dressed up as a copper, so I brought it home, wore it on TV and the name just stuck.
People say I've 'retained' my Cockney accent. I can do any accent, but I wanted other working-class boys to know that they could become actors.
I just wanted to be an ordinary, middle-class person. When I was at Cambridge, I made great efforts to lose the last remnants of my Cockney accent.
My parents went through the dictionary looking for a beautiful name, nearly called me Banyan, flicked on a few pages and came to China, which is cockney rhyming slang for mate.
I love my accent, I thought it was useful in Gone In 60 Seconds because the standard villain is upper class or Cockney. My Northern accent would be an odd clash opposite Nic Cage.
There are lots of actors who are posh and stick with that, and there are lots of actors who are cockney, and that's what they do. That's fine, but I don't think that could be said about me.
I grew up with Jilly and Tamsin driving Volvos. But I wasn't one of them... I always felt more comfortable with Cockney and working-class people. My heroes were the Beatles and people like Michael Caine.
Slang has always moved this way. From Cockney rhyming slang to codes swapped among highwaymen, they're tribal badges of identity, bonding mechanisms designed to distinguish the initiated, and to keep strangers out.
Somebody sent me a British magazine listing the 20 worst dialects ever done in movies. I was No. 2, with the worst Cockney accent ever done. No. 1 was Sean Connery, because he uses his Scottish brogue no matter what he's playing.
I was able to make up lots of portementos, literally hundreds and hundreds of words... See, I find that mine don't have any meanings. They're not proper. Although I've got a great dictionary of them. It's like the Cockney rhyming slang or something.
For people to understand, you can't speak 'cinema.' Cinema doesn't have alphabets, so you have to go to the local language. Even in England, if they make a movie in London they have to make it in the Cockney accent, they can't make a film with the English spoken in the BBC. So cinema has to be realistic to the area that it is set in.
