A biography for Denis Lawsonhasn’t been written yet.
“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.”
“Doing comedy is my favorite thing.”
“Going from dialogue-driven 'New Tricks' to a movie like 'The Machine' which has special effects has been brilliant.”
“Ewan was auditioning to get into acting college and asked me for advice as he wasn't connecting with the piece he was learning. I told him to think about a time he'd been beaten up in Glasgow and how he felt when the guy had punched him for no reason. He then made the connection between emotion and the words he was saying, which is what acting is.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I had this idea when I left drama school that if I could do everything, I'd always be working.”
“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.”
“I don't really have a problem at all with doing a show that a lot of people watch.”
“I quite like Jackson Pollock, and have a real gut reaction to it, so it does whatever it does to me.”
“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.”
“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 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 hadn't read Dickens for a while and doing 'Bleak House' was great.”
“For my money, acting has been over-intellectualized. It's only playing.”
“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.”
“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 had a feeling 'Star Wars' might do well, but I didn't anticipate just how well.”