Roger Rees

“We did a black 'Julius Caesar' in which the predominant accent was Caribbean. This offends many people, you know. I also had a Chinese Marc Anthony. I also managed - this caused a great shock - I also got some white guys in it as well!”

“They said my voice was terrible, nervous, and spotty and that I must go away and learn how to use it properly. I must admit I was rather agape, since I had never thought about making my voice better.”

“The loser, the fool, is embraced in England because there is a recognition of silliness there that allows a person to keep his ambitions and desires at a certain distance. Just being in the race is enough.”

“Anything I do is as theatrical as I can get it.”

“If Shakespeare were alive today, he'd be doing sitcoms.”

“People very often say to actors that they admire their careers, and I rather think that what's implied by that is that we have a choice in the matter. When really, most actors, me included, do whatever comes along next.”

“Rattigan wrote some very good plays.”

“My first acquaintance with 'Peter Pan' was back when I lived in South London. I was at art school, and I needed to earn money, so I got a job as a stagehand at the Wimbledon Theatre, and 'Peter Pan' was on tour there with Donald Sinden, who was playing Captain Hook.”

“Now, of course, we know there has been an end to apartheid in South Africa, but what excited me was seeing it in the context of history.”

“After I left the R.S.C., I did a musical, 'Masquerade,' where I played a rabbit. I was the lead.”

“I joined the Royal Shakespeare Co. with no experience whatsoever - I'd never been to a drama school or anything. But I was strong and could lift things, I could move scenery about.”

“Sometimes I think I'll go off and be a milkman or a greengrocer, some easy job.”

“What I strive to do is to make the theater experience something that people remember and recall rather than dismiss because it was less like their everyday experiences. So, I'm less interested in internal emotionalism and much more in making the audience laugh and cry by the devices that we use as theater actors.”

“I want to play King Lear, Macbeth, Benedict, Coriolanus. I wouldn't mind doing Hamlet again. Well, I'm a little old. Perhaps I can rub Vaseline on the audience's eyes.”

“'Waiting for Godot,' when it first came out in 1950, was a very different sort of play to the plays that were in the West End at that time in London, because most of those plays were what we call drawing-room comedies.”

“The hard thing is making sure you work with wonderful people and that you get something out of it so that you can get better as an actor.”

“That's been the tragedy of my life, actually. I've always looked younger than I am.”

“Mostly, theater becomes blander and blander as everyone wants the same thing they saw before. The good plays are the ones that don't allow you to do that.”

“I was really serious about painting, so I could never be a Sunday painter. You can't just switch it on and off.”

“Gerry Schoenfeld told me 'Les Parents Terribles' was not going to sell, even though we had Kathleen Turner and Jude Law in the cast. So we called it 'Indiscretions.'”