A biography for Denis Lawsonhasn’t been written yet.
“To make 800 people laugh for a couple of hours is a wonderful feeling, because you know you're doing them a lot of good.”
“It's unusual when you get scripts not wanting to change things - I'm one of those actors who writers must hate as I'm always wanting to rewrite or swap bits about.”
“I get so bored about that, please don't ask me about 'Star Wars.' It was just so unimportant to me as a job, and everyone makes a big deal of it.”
“I think of myself as a light comedian.”
“I don't know how I ever built a career, really, because I have always been absolutely terrible at auditions.”
“My initial impulse was to be an entertainer, a song and dance man.”
“My son is a lecturer at Bristol University in anthropology. His degree was in, get this, human mating strategies - sex!”
“In P7, I played Robin in a musical version of 'Robin Hood' and afterwards DO McLean was standing with mum and dad and he told them that I should go into drama. It is still extraordinary to me that a man in that period would think that that was an option for me.”
“Working on 'Jekyll' required a lot of concentration and energy. The script is written in a very filmic way most of the time; unusually for television there are a lot of descriptive pages, tiny little fragmented scenes with no dialogue but huge energy.”
“My family are all Glasgow. I was born there. Govan. When it was very tough. The tenements. All that stuff.”
“My first starring role was in 'Rumpelstiltskin' and the lightbulb moment for me came when I had to stamp my foot at the end and walk off the stage. Everyone laughed and I thought, 'this is great.'”
“'Bleak House' is like the best soap you could ever hope to watch.”
“I'm more careful now, but in the past I would always have to give 100 percent of myself to every single show.”
“Edinburgh is a phenomenal location for movies and should be used more.”
“Ewan was studying in London and he got this huge job in his final year, a part in Dennis Potter's 'Lipstick on Your Collar' for Channel 4. He had no idea what happened on a TV set so I talked him through things.”
“Playing the villain is great fun.”
“Laughter is like surfing; it's like a wave coming out of the auditorium - before it has died off, you must come in with the next line. But if you come in too soon, no one will hear what you say.”
“I'd be very interested to direct myself on film. I think it would be almost impossible on the stage.”
“I studied in Glasgow and, when I was young, I spent four years solely in theatre.”