Have you ever lost hope in your situation dealing with constant hardships and problems that never seem to end? You’re stuck in your job because you need the money to survive, but then again, you are still barely making ends meet, and you can’t seem to catch a break. You can’t help but feel like that’s the life you can only live.
Truth is, you are not alone in your sentiments. After all, every person will go through something in their lives that will challenge their resolve. But here’s the thing. If people gave up on their dreams and succumbed to their weaknesses, there won’t be industry shakers and successful individuals in this world.
Take the case of many Hollywood actors. They may be living their fabulous lives now, earning millions doing what they love, which is the best life anyone can imagine. However, it was not easy for most of them before all that fame and fortune.
Every struggle in your life has shaped you into the person you are today. Be thankful for the hard times, they can only make you stronger.
Keanu Reeves
Despite his personal tragedies happening in a short span of time, which are enough for someone to reach his breaking point, Keanu Reeves was able to better his craft by channeling his pain of bereavement in the roles he played. It is important that we shouldn’t allow such difficult phases to deter us from carrying on because that power remains within us which can still change our lives dramatically.
Was I always going to be here? No I was not. I was going to be homeless at one time, a taxi driver, truck driver, or any kind of job that would get me a crust of bread. You never know what’s going to happen.
Morgan Freeman
The same goes with Morgan Freeman, whose success came much later in his life. He once shared that he still gets nervous about the box office outcomes of his movies because only then that he will continually get calls for jobs. It tells us that we shouldn’t be complacent, even after we have seemed to reach our goals. If you don’t maintain that sense of paranoia, you could end up going back to where you were.
Remember that just because you hit bottom doesn’t mean you have to stay there.
Robert Downey Jr.
Robert Downey Jr was fired from a TV show because of wandering in the streets under the influence, and served time for it. He credits his incredible comeback to his tenacity as well as a strong support system from his loved ones. So whatever you are going through at the moment, remember that such tough times are not forever.
Famous Actor Quotes
Without wonder and insight, acting is just a business. With it, it becomes creation.
Bette Davis
Study, find all the good teachers and study with them, get involved in acting to act, not to be famous or for the money. Do plays. It’s not worth it if you are just in it for the money. You have to love it.
Philip Seymour Hoffman
The best acting is instinctive. It’s not intellectual, it’s not mechanical, it’s instinctive.
Craig MacDonald
Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.
Oscar Wilde
That’s what makes acting so attractive. You get to break all your own rules.
Gerardine Clark
Acting isn’t something you do. Instead of doing it, it occurs. If you’re going to start with logic, you might as well give up. You can have conscious preparation, but you have unconscious results.
Lee Strasberg
Acting should be bigger than life. Scripts should be bigger than life. It should all be bigger than life.
Bette Davis
If you have the emotion, it infects you and the audience. If you don’t have it don’t bother; just say your lines as truthfully as you are capable of doing. You can’t fake emotion.
Sanford Meisner
Acting is standing up naked and turning around very slowly.
Rosalind Russell
To fulfil a dream, to be allowed to sweat over lonely labor, to be given a chance to create, is the meat and potatoes of life. The money is the gravy.
Bette Davis
Acting is not about being someone different. It’s finding the similarity in what is apparently different, then finding myself in there.
Meryl Streep
I think the most liberating thing I did early on was to free myself from any concern with my looks as they pertained to my work.
Meryl Streep
Good acting — real acting is impossible to spot. Do you ever catch talents like Robert Duvall or Kathy Bates acting? No. I defy you to show me where.
William Esper
If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.
Bruce Lee
Stop explaining yourself. Shut up and act!
Craig MacDonald
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
Marianne Williamson
Find in yourself those human things which are universal.
Sanford Meisner
You have to understand your best. Your best isn’t Barrymore’s best or Olivier’s best or my best, but your own. Every person has his norm. And in that norm every person is a star. Olivier could stand on his head and still not be you. Only you can be you. What a privilege! Nobody can reach what you can if you do it. So do it. We need your best, your voice, your body. We don’t need for you to imitate anybody, because that would be second best. And second best is no better than your worst.
Stella Adler
The more personal, the more universal.
Gary Ballinger
An actor has to burn inside with an outer ease.
Michael Chekhov
The actor has to develop his body. The actor has to work on his voice. But the most important thing the actor has to work on is his mind.
Stella Adler
Use what you know. Don’t worry about what you don’t know.
Michael Shurtleff
What sets you apart can feel like a burden, but it’s not. A lot of the time it’s what makes you great.
Emma Stone
The actor has to develop his body. The actor has to work on his voice. But the most important thing the actor has to work on is his mind.
Stella Adler
Accept your lack of knowledge and use it as your asset.
Natalie Portman
An ounce of behavior is worth a pound of words.
Sanford Meisner
When you do something that people respond to, and then you start altering the blueprint for what worked, it’s pretty fear-inducing. But sometimes, you have to do that, in order to push the boundaries.
Rami Malek
Conflict is what creates drama. The more conflict actors find, the more interesting the performance.
Michael Shurtleff
There is a kind of invisible thread between the actor and the audience, and when it’s there it’s stunning and there is nothing to match that.
Maggie Smith
If you really do want to be an actor who can satisfy himself and his audience, you need to be vulnerable.
Jack Lemmon
If you know you are going to fail, then fail gloriously.
Cate Blanchett
Creating relationship is the heart of acting. It is basic. It is essential.
Michael Shurtleff
You can’t learn to act unless you’re criticized. If you tie that criticism to your childhood insecurities you’ll have a terrible time. Instead, you must take criticism objectively, pertaining it only to the work being done.
Sanford Meisner
Listening is not merely hearing. Listening is reacting. Listening is being affected by what you hear. Listening is active.
Michael Shurtleff
I think the crucial thing about being an actor is to be doing it.
Chiwetel Ejiofor
Whatever you decide is your motivation in the scene, the opposite of that is also true and should be in it.
Michael Shurtleff
Once you are gold, you need to keep yourself golden. Even the best of it needs to be cleaned and re-exposed and put into the world again.
Susan Batson
Humor [in a scene] is not jokes. It is that attitude toward being alive without which you would long ago have jumped off the 59th Street Bridge.
Michael Shurtleff
To grasp the full significance of life is the actor’s duty, to interpret it is his problem, and to express it his dedication.
Marlon Brando
Every scene you will ever act begins in the middle, and it is up to you, the actor, to provide what comes before.
Michael Shurtleff
I think that young women and little girls need to see that they don’t have to be the damsel in distress. They don’t have to not show their strength. They don’t have to be whatever the stereotype is or the tropes that we go to in our minds.
Octavia Spencer
The first step to a better audition is to give up character and use yourself.
Michael Shurtleff
Acting requires faith. You just have to believe that you are the person you’re playing and that what is happening is happening to you.
Ivana Chubbuck
Competition [in a scene] is healthy. Competition is life. Yet most actors refuse to acknowledge this. They don’t want to compete. They want to get along. And they are therefore not first-rate actors.
Michael Shurtleff
Life has to be everything. It can’t be all sad. It can’t be all peaches and cream. Because the lows have you appreciate the highs. And the highs give you perspective on the lows. If it’s not everything, it becomes flat or mundane.
Sterling K Brown
Honesty isn’t enough for me. That becomes very boring. If you can convince people what you’re doing is real and it’s also bigger than life — that’s exciting.
Gene Hackman
The thing I like about acting is being able to lose yourself completely in someone else. I’m not that comfortable when I get recognised.
Ellen Page
Take nothing for granted. Make an emotional discovery as often as you can find one in every scene. Ask yourself: What is new?
Michael Shurtleff
I think you should take your job seriously, but not yourself. That is the best combination.
Dame Judi Dench
There’s only one reason why a character drinks: to seek confrontation. To fight for what they want in ways normally denied them.
Michael Shurtleff
Be in the moment. Period. Just be there. Because if you get all like, ‘Oh I got to do this big thing.’ It just never works. It just doesn’t work. You’ve just got to let go. If it happens, it happens. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. Whatever you do is ok, just be truthful, honest, real, and that’s all you can ask for.
Robert De Niro
My job is usually to express emotion as freely as possible.
Meryl Streep
As an actor you try to bring as much of yourself to a part to try and create a feeling of authenticity and emotional truth and resonance.
Jesse Eisenberg
I’m curious about other people. That’s the essence of my acting. I’m interested in what it would be like to be you.
Meryl Streep
Acting is really about having the courage to fail in front of people.
Adam Driver
I think the most liberating thing I did early on was to free myself from any concern with my looks as they pertained to my work.
Meryl Streep
Acting is not about being famous. It’s about exploring the human soul.
Annette Bening
I believe in imagination. I did Kramer vs. Kramer before I had children. But the mother I would be was already inside me.
Meryl Streep
Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.
William Shakespeare
All an actor has is their blind faith that they are who they say they are today, in any scene.
Meryl Streep
Never stop fighting. Never stop dreaming. don’t be afraid of wearing your heart on your sleeve – in declaring the films that you love, the films that you want to make, the life that you’ve had, and the lives you can help reflect in cinema. for a long time… maybe I felt inauthentic or something, like my voice wasn’t worth hearing… So if you’ve got something to say, say it from the rooftops.
Tom Hiddleston
The most difficult character in comedy is that of the fool, and he must be no simpleton that plays that part.
Miguel de Cervantes
Acting is a form of self-expression, it’s not becoming someone else, and it’s not playing make believe; it’s about using the fiction of being someone else to express something about yourself.
Maggie Gyllenhaal
Actors think more with their hearts than with their heads.
William Esper
It’s tough, acting. you have to walk two lines of a tightrope. there’s the all consuming fear of failure… and there’s also confidence – you have to be confident to try new things – And they fight each other all the time.
Jessica Chastain
Show me a great actor and I’ll show you a lousy husband. Show me a great actress, and you’ve seen the devil.
W. C. Fields
Every movie I make I find kind of excruciating. I get a lot back from it, but I feel like I’m kind of always working at the edge of my ability. I guess that’s what I’m looking for when I go to work. I am trying to become the edge.
Michelle Williams
Acting is all about honesty. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.
George Burns
I think there was something in me at a young age that was not worried about success, but was worried about becoming a better actor.
Paul Dano
The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.
W.H. Auden
No matter where you are from, your dreams are valid.
Lupita Nyong’o
Actors die so loud.
Henry Miller
You pray for rain, you gotta deal with the mud too.
Denzel Washington
I love acting. It is so much more real than life.
Oscar Wilde
When you work on anything, you want to find the range of impulses. which ones get portrayed is another question, but you want to have that complexity and that fullness, even if you’re playing a cartoon character.
Willem Dafoe
If I wasn’t an actor, I’d be a secret agent.
Thornton Wilder
Flip it. Hit the stage and go; “Keep up”. But you’ve got to do the work. You can’t do that without preparing the work. The great ones work that hard all the way to the end.
Jeff Daniels
The word theatre comes from the Greeks. It means the seeing place. It is the place people come to see the truth about life and the social situation.
Stella Adler
I’m sure acting is a deeply neurotic thing to do.
Ralph Fiennes
I’m a skilled professional actor. Whether or not I’ve any talent is beside the point.
Michael Caine
All I would tell people is to hold on to what was individual about themselves, not to allow their ambition for success to cause them to try to imitate the success of others. You’ve got to find it on your own terms.
Harrison Ford
Acting in theatre or television or screen is only for the irrecoverably diseased, those so smitten with the need that there is no choice.
Michael Shurtleff
The only way I can move past the absurdity of what I do, is to commit to the point of absurdity.
Jake Gyllenhaal
Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.
George Bernard Shaw
One day, the people that didn’t believe in you will tell everyone how they met you.
Johnny Depp
There’s nothing more boring than unintelligent actors, because all they have to talk about is themselves and acting. There have to be other things.
Tim Robbins
Vomit first. Then try to make something pretty with it.
Tatiana Maslany
Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.
Stella Adler
If any of the work, that any of us do, contributes to the stretching of culture, the stretching of boundaries of empathy that’s expected of an audience… that’s the holy grail.
Riz Ahmed
I think your self emerges more clearly over time.
Meryl Streep
Actors should not feel scared, about the fact that they’re scared. I think it’s a good sign
Naomie Harris
I need to go where people are serious about acting.
Meryl Streep
I feel like telling stories is a spiritual exercise and I think that it’s something that we need as a culture and as humans. You put your nightmares up there, you put your dreams up there and people can see them better because they can stand outside of it and recognise themselves inside it.
Holly Hunter
The work will stand, no matter what.
Meryl Streep
Find out who you are & embrace it. It’s so much easier to face criticism when you are comfortable in your own skin.
Amy Adams
These true Hollywood stories and famous actor quotes will hopefully inspire you to fuel your own fire, to never give up, and just keep going until you have attained whatever it is you want.
That’s the only way you can overcome all the difficulties and eventually become a winner in life. All it takes is focus, belief, and perseverance. Thankfully, these can be all learned and can be sourced from many different places-including famous actor quotes.