Tyne Daly

“Before 'Cagney and Lacey,' we didn't follow officers home to find out what they did when they took their badges off and emptied their guns. So the idea that these women also had lives outside of work was really interesting to play.”

“I believe imagination to be a uniquely human gift. The reason I like my job, and have liked it for more than half a century, is that I get to use my imagination.”

“I was raised to be in service to something larger than myself. A lot of actors concentrate on what they will get out of the profession, rather than what they can offer it. The way I see it, if you come with something to offer, you can offer it forever.”

“I'm sorry I didn't wear paint this morning. I tend not to wear it unless I'm getting highly paid.”

“My time on television began, and I started playing victims. I did about 10 or 12 years of them, which gets boring, right?”

“There was this wonderful trick of going to the theater with my parents and sitting in the audience under the watchful eye of an usher, and then these other people would come on the stage: They spoke differently and had different clothes and hair. Afterward, they would come back, and they were my parents again. It was magic.”

“I think mothers get a raw deal in American culture, so I've been defending them. I have three daughters, and I know that as they become mothers, they got a lot more gentle towards me!”

“What I like is the acting itself. But I'm a lousy celebrity. I'm not interested in selling my private life. I take my private feelings to the work, but I want there to be a difference between me and whoever it is I'm playing.”

“The first time I was nominated for an award for professional acting, I was in my mid-twenties. I was married and the mother of my first two daughters. I had been working for near to 15 years.”

“I'm not glamorous, I don't have a look, I don't know anything about opera, I have no Italian, and I'm too old.”

“I'm interested in playing old ladies because I am becoming one. And I want to become a very good one!”

“The art of acting is to pitch good. You do the pitching and hope that the other person catches the ball and does some good pitching back to you.”

“Sweat makes good friendship cement.”