I was a Shakespearean actor, and a well-paid one.

I was in 20 Shakespearean plays by the time I was 20.

I'm not a Shakespearean actor really, or a Shakespearean director.

I majored in Shakespearean studies at a very tiny school in Georgia.

Cheney, Rumsfeld - they were Shakespearean in their attitude of impunity.

Then I got out of the service, and I was going to be a Shakespearean actor.

Trump is like a Shakespearean 'fool': he seems crass because he speaks the truth.

I say this quite deliberately, this is the finest Shakespearean performance I've seen.

If you see the Sopranos, you're not going to be speaking in the Shakespearean English.

Maybe they say they do but I don't think many actors really enjoy trying to do a Shakespearean play.

A lot of London's image never was. There never was a Dickensian London, or a Shakespearean London, or a swinging London.

'Godfather' was very classical - the way it was shot, the style - the whole driving force of it was more classical, almost Shakespearean.

All the characters in 'Rang Rasiya' are inspired from the Shakespearean drama 'Othello.' This is exactly what interested me to take up this role.

My dream as a youngster was to be like Olivier. To be a great stage actor. To be a great Shakespearean actor. To me that is the Olympics of acting.

I like the idea of being caught between things, always being a bit of an outsider, having an outside eye on things - almost like a Shakespearean fool.

I've been on a ranch. I've been in outer space. For a short, unhappy period I was a detective. I've also played Brutus and 14 or 15 other Shakespearean roles.

When I was very young I was never pretty or beautiful and didn't get the chance to play many parts I'd have loved to tackle: the great Shakespearean parts - Viola, Helena.

I'm working now on a collection of Shakespearean sonnets, about 100 of them, that I may publish if anyone's interested. My take on life is a little different from the bard's.

Nobody's ever called me Sir Richard. Occasionally in America, I hear people saying Sir Richard and think there's some Shakespearean play taking place. But nowhere else anyway.

I always love the court fool in Shakespearean times, in Henry VIII's time. The fool can say all kinds of stuff that the other people can't say, so I'm hoping I might take that role.

I had spent four months in Cedar City, Utah, right after graduation as an intern at the Utah Shakespearean Festival. It's a town that has many people living the polygamous lifestyle.

'Animal Kingdom' feels like a suburban Melbourne version of 'The Godfather 'to me. It's epic and Shakespearean in its story, and yet you still feel like you can reach out and touch it.

It's horrid to be called a Shakespearean actor because that's incredibly limiting, and we love acting. We like telling stories; anything that excites us we want to be a part of. Science fiction is fun, too!

A Shakespearean tragedy as so far considered may be called a story of exceptional calamity leading to the death of a man in high estate. But it is clearly much more than this, and we have now to regard it from another side.

As an audience, if you see 1800s or something, it more often seems that the actors are carrying the weight of the time. It always has a Shakespearean tone to it. To me, that always feels very theatrical and very unrelatable.

A British actor will savour every syllable of a Shakespearean line, while a French actor will drive to the end of a sentence or a speech with a propulsive rhythm: the thing you never say to a French actor is, 'Take your time.'

In Shakespearean tragedy the main source of the convulsion which produces suffering and death is never good: good contributes to this convulsion only from its tragic implication with its opposite in one and the same character.

In approaching our subject it will be best, without attempting to shorten the path by referring to famous theories of the drama, to start directly from the facts, and to collect from them gradually an idea of Shakespearean Tragedy.

'Othello' was my first Shakespearean discovery. I was obsessed with drama at school, and I studied the play for my English GCSE. Desdemona is the part that everyone wants, but Iago's wife Emilia is the one I've always been drawn to.

Singers, like Frank Sinatra and myself, we interpret the songs that we like. Not unlike a Shakespearean actor that goes back to the greatest words ever written, we go back to the greatest songs and bring about my interpretation of them.

The best way to prepare for a night out with a Shakespearean tragedy is to do a bit of reading up in the afternoon, eat a light supper - perhaps Welsh rarebit - and then arrive early to do some stretching exercises in the foyer before curtain-up.

Our job is to make manifest the story, to be it. In a sense, the theatre is such a big star itself, bigger than any Shakespearean actor I could hire, that we should take the opportunity to fill it with voice and verse and movement, not interpretation.

What I'm dealing with in 'Hellboy' is a lot different, bigger in a certain way. It's very Shakespearean. It's demons and witches and stuff like that. But it has a similar core to a dude who's trapped in horrible circumstances who's just trying to be a good guy.

I studied religions and all kinds of other things in college. I took a Shakespearean villain course for English literature. It was really intense. I think that sort of rounds a person. In this business, it's really important for us to be interesting... and have interests.

I do feel like anything benefits from character logic. That can be from the dumbest ad to the greatest Shakespearean drama to the silliest 'Saturday Night Live' sketch. There is a certain specificity in detail, which you can get when you're paying attention to stuff like that.

It's a fantastic mirror to us to engage with art, to engage with paintings that are about tragedy, to go see Shakespearean comedies, to read a Greek play... We have always investigated the lightness and darkness of the human soul, in all these forms. So why not do it on television?

You get Don King's point of view in what is almost a Shakespearean, classical technique. He comes across almost like a lovable rogue, like Iago in 'Othello' or Richard III. He's doing all these bad things, but I kind of like him. It's like 'Pulp Fiction': Everybody's a bad guy, yet you like them.

It is jazz music that called me to be a musician and I have always sang the songs that moved me the most. Singers, like Frank Sinatra and myself, we interpret the songs that we like. Not unlike a Shakespearean actor that goes back to the greatest words ever written, we go back to the greatest songs.

My very first acting job ever, the first time I got paid to be an actress, was in 2001, right between my sophomore and junior year in college, when I was just 19 years old. I got paid $250 every two weeks, 10 shows a week, to be in the Utah Shakespearean Festival. I was Calpurnia in 'Julius Caesar.'

I want to keep doing interesting work with interesting people in whatever form that may take, but I want to play the big parts of classical theatre; I want to go on stage and play great Shakespearean roles and, at the same time, do amazing, challenging indie films and comedy, and I want to do it all. I am greedy.

As a child, I would watch 'Frasier' a lot, and there was one episode with Derek Jacobi where he was playing this Shakespearean actor that was a terrible Hamlet. And he reenacted the performance, and for days I went on. I'd perform and do that, and I knew I wanted to do something kind of like that as a kid for awhile.

If you're a classical actor, every Shakespearean part you play, you then say, 'McKellen did it this way,' and, 'Jacobi did it this way.' There's a whole list of Oliviers and people, whether you play Hamlet or Richard II or Richard III, any of those roles. And I found that a bit when I did 'La Cage.' It didn't bother me one bit.

It took a while to decide I wanted to do Hamlet. It wasn't that I was daunted - I'd been acting professionally since my mid-20s and had some pretty big Shakespearean roles under my belt by that stage, at 32: Petruchio in 'The Taming of the Shrew,' Edgar in 'King Lear,' Antony, Richard III. But when it came to Hamlet, I hesitated.

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