Quotes & Sayings About Dead Actors

In 'Hamilton,' we're telling the stories of old, dead white men, but we're using actors of color, and that makes the story more immediate and more accessible to a contemporary audience. — Lin-Manuel Miranda

The good thing about not being drop-dead gorgeous is that as time passes, I don't have much to worry about. I have friends who are actors and every day they look in the mirror with trepidation. — Moby

There is no more reason for a room on a stage to be a reproduction of an actual room than for an actor who plays the part of Napoleon to be Napoleon, or for an actor who plays Death in the old morality play to be dead. — Robert Edmond Jones

Actors have to stay optimistic. The moment we start thinking otherwise, we're dead. — Peter O'Toole

I don't have the slightest desire to speak over my dead brother. It gets on my nerves to always be compared with him. My brother was a magnificent person and an outstanding actor. — Joaquin Phoenix

I don't really write with living actors in mind. I guess I write for dead actors. I'll think of like, you know, Burt Lancaster would be good in this part, and so on. With 'L.A. Confidential,' it was like, 'Wouldn't it be cool if Dean Martin played the Kevin Spacey part?' — Brian Helgeland

In my collection, to me at least, the theatre of the past lives again and those long-dead playwrights and actors have in me an enthralled audience of one, and I applaud them across the centuries. — Robertson Davies

I guess that seems like an absurd premise until we consider the possibility that the dead are always with us, beckoning from the shade, reminding us that we're actors in the same drama they have already lived and that they can help us with our lives if we will only let them. — James Lee Burke

I have so much empathy for these young actors that are 19 and all of a sudden they're beautiful and famous and rich. I'm like, 'Oh my God, I'd be dead.' — Philip Seymour Hoffman

Home before the leaves fall' the soldiers all shouted to their families in August 1914 as they marched toward an enemy who felt the same way. Both sides prayed to the same god for victory, with the equal assurance that that god was on their side. Like helpless actors in a play the script of which they seemed to have no role in writing, the leaders of the nations in 1914 helplessly played their parts as hourly Europe lurched toward war until all the major countries on the continent were sucked into a gigantic maelstrom that lasted for a horrendous 1,561 days, toppled four monarchies, destroyed a centuries-old social structure, decimated thousands of towns and villages, and left a number of dead that God alone could count. As for the misery the war caused, it cannot begin to be calculated. The dead can be buried and forgotten and the villages rebuilt, but for the survivors the mental scars could not be erased except by death. — Jamie H. Cockfield

In Montana, when we did 'Return to Lonesome Dove', we rode on the side of a hill at night in the dark; I was afraid my horse would step on one of the actors playing dead. The director said to leave it to the stunt doubles since they got paid for that. — William Sanderson

Despite proclamations and forecasts to the contrary, neither the nation-state nor the international system of states is dead in the new millennium. What has changed are calculations of state interest and state navigation of the international system. Both have become much more complex, owing to the increased importance of such factors as crossnational actors and forces. — Brigid Starkey

You try to follow suit and the directors I work with, like Sidney Lumet (on film in Before The Devil Knows You're Dead and TV in 100 Centre Street) who thinks actors hung the moon, thinks they can do anything, but he also works really quickly, the same like Clint Eastwood, and so you better also do your homework, you know? — Amy Ryan

The three actors I admire the most are all dead. Humphrey Bogart, Spencer Tracy and the French actor, Jean Gabin. They're all very natural, sort of masculine without being overly macho. — Michael Caine

In the production of a good play with a good cast and a knowing director a kind of banding-together occurs; there is formed a fraternity whose members share a mutual sense of destiny. In these five blocks, where the rapping of the tap-dancer's feet and the bawling of the phonographs in the record-shop mix with the roar of the Broadway traffic; where the lonely, the perverted, and the lost wander like souls in Dante's hell and the life of the spirit seems impossible, there are still little circles of actors in the dead silence of empty theaters, with a director in their center, and a new creation of life taking place — Arthur Miller

We shouldn't confuse singers and performers with actors. Actors will say, "My character this, and my character that." Like beating a dead horse. Who cares about the character? Just get up and act. You don't have to explain it to me. — Bob Dylan

I want only dead actors. That way there'll be no jealousy. — Simone Signoret

Edward finds Elinor crying for her dead father, offers her his handkerchief and their love story commences. Ang [Lee] very anxious that we think about what we want to do. I'm very anxious not to do anything and certainly not to think about it. — Emma Thompson

There's a very fine line between underacting and not acting at all. And not acting is what a lot of actors are guilty of. It amazes me how some of these little numbers with dreamy looks and a dead pan are getting away wit it. I'd hate to see them on stage with a dog act. — Joan Blondell

I love working, I'd be dead if I hadn't found myself as an actor I didn't have to be successful. — Dustin Hoffman

We know the original relation of the theater and the cult of the Dead: the first actors separated themselves from the community by playing the role of the Dead: to make oneself up was to designate oneself as a body simultaneously living and dead: the whitened bust of the totemic theater, the man with the painted face in the Chinese theater, the rice-paste makeup of the Indian Katha-Kali, the Japanese No mask ... Now it is this same relation which I find in the Photograph; however 'lifelike' we strive to make it (and this frenzy to be lifelike can only be our mythic denial of an apprehension of death), Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead. — Roland Barthes

Mrs. Astor had long held that artists of any ilk - painters, authors, actors and the like - merit no recognition unless safely dead, and that meeting them risks both needless mental fatigue and the possibility of social contamination. — Paula Cohen

Wait." Amber jumped up wide-eyed. "Is she a - "
"A ghost " I smirked. "Amber you're a necromancer in a show about raising the dead. What did you expect Eerie sounds produced by a computer and a few Hollywood actors in bad makeup Please don't tell me you've never seen a real ghost. — Jayde Scott

My favourite actors are all dead or dying. I just love Jimmy Stewart, Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn - I was named after her - and Cary Grant. I just love old black and white movies and the stars in them. It must have been a great time to be in Hollywood. — Katharine Isabelle

I try to give my work everything I've got, because when you're dead or you're out of the business or you're in an old actors' home somewhere, if you've done a good job, your work will still be 16 years old and dancing and healthy and pirouetting and arabesquing all over the place. And they'll say, "That's who he is! He's not this decaying skeleton." — Mel Brooks

Anymore, no one's mind is their own. You can't concentrate. You can't think. There's always some noise worming in. Singers shouting. Dead people laughing. Actors crying. All those little doses of emotion. — Chuck Palahniuk