Eileen Atkins Quotes

I have never been able to bear people who are obsessed with beauty.

It’s no use ignoring looks or charm if you’re going into the theatre.

I’d hardly seen any movies when I was 19 and left drama school.

I hate tight, tight stuff showing every line. I want to be sick when people are in Lycra.

When I think of all the Hamlets I’ve seen, there’s been a load of different styles, some marvellous. You like the Hamlet you saw when you were the right age to think you could be Hamlet.

My grammar school caught on to the fact that the reason I was falling asleep in class was that I was doing working men’s clubs till 10 or 11 at nights. My mother was told I shouldn’t do it anymore. Of course, I was bringing in money to the family, so nobody liked hearing that.

A little allegory of the soul – wherever it hides, God will find it.

It’s a damn shame we have this immediate ticking off in the mind about how people sound. On the other hand, how many people really want to be operated upon by a surgeon who talks broad cockney?

Bad things happen. Cope!

There seem to be two sorts of actors. Some people play themselves marvellously, and others, like me, rather like to become someone else.

Wheels come off? Get on with it. Cope. Survive.

The idea of an actor is that you should be able to play anything.

My parents felt so uncomfortable coming to the kind of theater I was in; they had nothing to say about it.

Losing friends is the worst thing about getting older.

I’m rarely wrong.

I think most British people who say they can do an American accent are so bad at it. I find it excruciating. I find it excruciating the other way around, too.

The effort must be total for the results to be meaningful.

My looks were good enough for what I needed in every possible way but not so much to be a burden.

Film was something I didn’t really think about when I was young, because if you looked like me, you weren’t a film star.

On the street where I lived, they almost didn’t know the word ‘university,’ and my mother was simply appalled when it was suggested to her that I was to go to a drama college.

I’m told I am over-choosy, and I shocked everybody by doing Jeffrey Archer. I did that to annoy everybody; sometimes, between Medea and Virginia Woolf, you can get punch-drunk.

I love dresses that just skim the body, that suggest what’s underneath rather than display it.