A biography for Tim Pigott-Smithhasn’t been written yet.
“I seem to get cast as one of two extremes. Either I play the butch heavy or totally nice guys.”
“Villains are always the best roles, but that meant that for months afterwards, all I got offered were absolute cads and bounders and really nasty pieces of work, as well as a lot of people who only had one arm. Such is the limited imaginative power, you see, of a great many casting directors.”
“When 'Jewel' was screened, old friends from school and university got back in touch. More than one of them told me that their partners hated Merrick so much they could not think of having me in the house. This kind of audience identification does not happen in any other medium.”
“One of the functions of drama is to teach.”
“I was really uncomfortable with fame. I mean, it's lovely and flattering, and you enjoy all the razzmatazz and being flown around, but when people suddenly call you a star, you think, 'I'm not a star, I'm just playing a star role.'”
“When you're in a good play and a good production, you find that you're in something that has a life beyond you. You think, 'Oh my goodness, this play's alive.'”
“I earn a lot of money in England doing voice-overs, especially in documentaries. Turn on the Discovery Channel here, and you'll hear my voice a lot. It subsidizes my vice of acting in the theater.”
“America is very generous, but it's also a bit wacky, you know.”
“People wrote about me and started calling me a star, and I just hated it. There are aspects of it that are great - I mean, you can ring up any restaurant and get in, can't you.”
“Your response to literature is to do with maturity; if you don't respond to a book or a poem when you are 12, you might when you are 13.”
“It's not legally possible to put an image of a member of the royal family on the Tube!”
“Sometimes I Rollerblade to work, but it's most lovely in the park, and it's really quite safe there. I do it quite carefully, and I wear all the gear.”
“Performing King Charles in Mike Bartlett's astonishing play in London and New York has been one of the high points of my career.”
“My wife is a fantastic traveller. She's good fun and very optimistic. Even if things get bad, she's good at seeing the light side.”
“I didn't like my first primary school in Leicester very much. As I was going home on my tricycle one day, I said, 'There's no reading, no writing and no arithmetic - it's really boring!' So I was sent to St John the Baptist Church of England Primary.”
“You wouldn't read 'Anna Karenina' and try to work on the computer at the same time, would you?”
“I would say that the money that was invested in me by Warwickshire Education Authority, which they did for five years, has been repaid a hundred times over. I have paid a lot more back to them in tax than they paid in support to me, but they helped me on my way - they launched me; they got me going.”
“Occasionally, there are programmes - like 'The Office' or 'Gavin and Stacey,' perhaps - where you get the feeling everybody's seen it.”
“Fame changed my life completely because, for a while, I was in a position to choose what I did. I miss that aspect. But I always felt uncomfortable with it.”
“You never learn to act in front of a camera. You never learn anything in front of a camera. But you learn to act in a rehearsal room with a good play and a good cast and a good director.”