I always thought that Elvis could have been a great actor, and that he was put in a lot of unimportant movies when he could have done a lot of great ones.

I had admired Richard Burton for years and years before I had ever worked with him. He was a great, great actor. It was a joy to get to know him as a person.

A great actor is independent of the poet, because the supreme essence of feeling does not reside in prose or in verse, but in the accent with which it is delivered.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, I don't know if you'd call him a great actor, but he's amazing in terms of his presence, and he is interesting enough that you want to watch him.

People told me, when I was coming through the ranks, that a mark of a great actor is one who deals with the period of unemployment as well as they deal with the period of employment.

Aidan Gillen is such a great actor, and it was so nice to have an opportunity to work with him, even if it's his last scene, because he had a tone that he'd never had before on the show.

Iwan Rheon is a great actor, and he's going to go on to a long brilliant career. And most of the characters he'll play will not be evil. He's not one of those who can only play a bad guy.

What I hope in my ideal world is that with each project, I'll either get to work with a really great script that would force me to grow, or work with a really great actor who will make me better.

In Partho's comedy, 'Ami Montri Holam,' I am a minister. This is basically a play and a great actor like Jahor Roy had essayed this role years back. I hope I can deliver five per cent of what he did.

Doing ensembles and shows is one thing, but being able to front a feature is totally different. You can be a great actor, and supertalented, but there's something about carrying a feature that's unique.

You don't just win an Oscar because you're a great actor. You campaign for that Oscar: you engage with it; you go on the David Letterman show, and you do the interviews, and that's how you get out there.

You can have good writing, but a great actor will make it feel and sound like great writing. You can have great writing, and mediocre actors will make it feel mediocre. Without the actors, you have nothing.

Be ambitious. The great actor, director and playwright Ann Jellicoe commissioned writers like Howard Barker and David Edgar, and put on magnificent, large-scale plays in Dorset that involved the whole community.

Listen, I like great actors. You can be a movie star without being a great actor - this has been proved several times - and I like my casts to have great actors. Acting is more important to me than being a star.

Mel Blanc is a hero because of what he could do with his voice for all the Looney Tunes, the Warner Brothers cartoons, to be the voice of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, Porky Pig. To me, he's a great actor.

I sort of have open invitations from a lot of people to do TV. But it's very hard for me to do roles in sitcoms and movies because I'm not a great actor, so if the material isn't good, I'm in torment while I do it.

In America, they often don't know where I am from. The important point is the audience should not be able see through it. It should be so natural that your close friends may even think that you are not a great actor.

If I have enough ego to say I'm a writer, a director, a producer, and an actor, I should have the energy and the knowledge to write a scene for this great actor named Henry Fonda and direct him in it and have it work.

I certainly don't like to play a bad guy. There are no bad people. It's only shades of grey. Also, I am not a great actor who can transform completely into a totally different character for a movie. I am not a trained actor.

I suppose it's whether you want to be a famous person, or whether you want to be an actor. You have to decide what your priorities are. Great actor, huge star. Sometimes, the two walk hand in hand. Most of the time, they don't.

This new movie, 'Full Moon in Blue Water,' I loved the idea of working with Gene Hackman, who is a great actor, but when I read the script, I threw it right into the trash can, because I didn't like this woman. She was just a doormat.

I'm not a great actor - let's face it. I don't have a great deal of scope. There are certain things I can do, but when I'm bad, I stink. There's something about my shaggy dog eyes that makes people think I'm good. I'm not all that good.

My brother was scouted for a commercial when he was three, and it was just because he could speak clearly and was well behaved, basically. I don't think he had any amazing acting ability at that age - although he is actually a great actor.

There's one thing better than having a great actor, and that's having a great actor who's never done this kind of role before and is hungry to do it. They're testing themselves every day. They want to get out of their trailer and get to work.

Superstars come and go. I want to make sure I am always a producer's actor. I may be refused to be called a great actor but I have never troubled any of my producers in my life. Honesty always catches the camera, and that is what my strength is.

I think Ryan Gosling is a really great actor who's meticulous about his work. And I'd love to have the guts that Johnny Depp has to actually go outside the box on a character. When he plays a character, he plays it in a way that nobody else would.

'Shaadi... ' made people see me as an actor. A lot of filmmakers called and said I was really good in the film... People from the industry - who never spoke to me, didn't think I was a great actor because they hadn't seen my work - said I can act.

To be a great actor, you really don't need to go to acting school or learn dance classes or work on your body. You have to be intelligent. You have to draw on a lot of emotions that you go through in life that you can tap into once you work on a set.

A really great actor, in a lucky performance, can transform himself or herself. I've seen actors do that. But often it's a mechanical transformation, which isn't as interesting, and you've got to be careful how you go about something like that, I think.

Ritesh Deshmukh is rock star. He has a lovely family. He works so hard, and he's a great actor. He's funny, friendly, doesn't have an ego, and is so nice to everyone. He's a fine professional, a good husband, and a good father. That's a rock star for me.

When you talk about a great actor, you're not talking about Tom Cruise. His whole behavior is so shocking. It's inappropriate and vulgar and absolutely unacceptable to use your private life to sell anything commercially, but I think it's kind of a sickness.

Look at Kartik Aaryan, Ayushmann Khurrana - they aren't from the industry, they worked very hard. Varun Dhawan is a great actor. I know how hard he works on his craft and even in the gym, so you can't ignore that and just talk about him being a director's son.

Jamie Dornan is one of those guys who has no idea how gorgeous he is. He's crazy in love with his girlfriend and a crazy talent and a great singer and a great actor; just a lovely, lovely human being. It kind of makes you want to throw up a bit, but in all the right ways!

It's a risk casting anyone against type or what they're known to do. But there's one thing better than having a great actor, which is having a great actor who's never done what you're asking him to do. He's hungry to get out of the trailer every day and hungry to test himself.

I think part of what makes someone a great actor is being able to walk into a situation emotionally available and open, and have all your guards down, and just have that level of trust and security in yourself to know that you could walk out on that limb with someone else and be safe.

There are many interactions that an actor like me has in public when he gets recognized. The best are 'You're a great actor, good work,' and move on. A very good interaction could be when they say 'You were awesome on 'The West Wing,' 'Loved 'In Her Shoes,' great movie,' 'What Women Want,' good job dude.'

I believe we all have the capacity to be masters of many things, and there's nothing that we can't do. You can be a great actor and also be a great writer. There's so many things that all of us have the capacity to do. But somehow, life tries to convince us that we'd be lucky to do even one thing well, and I disagree.

A close friend of mine, Annie Leibovitz, who I've known for forty years, photographs celebrities every single day of the week but they all seem to look the same even though she's one of the most creative photographers alive. They all just look the same. Brad Pitt is a great actor but all the pictures of Brad Pitt look the same.

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