What is an Actor? 50 Great Views by Celebrities!

Main Tera Hero: Bollywood heartthrob Varun Dhawan along with his bombshell co-stars - Ileana D'Cruz and Nargis Fakhri

Hi aspiring actor!

Your main goal as an actor, is to be the face (and body) of the human condition. Think of yourself as a diplomat for all mankind. The beauty of acting is the ability to "play" in the role of another human being, representing him/her to the best and most natural of our ability. The acting is communication. You, as an actor, have the honored task of creating (or recreating) life on the stage or in front of a camera. You must be able to reflect all sorts of characters, some of whom may even seem odd or distasteful to you. That's the challenge and the reward of acting!

One of the first actors is believed to be an ancient Greek called Thespis of Icaria (year 12 BC).

The skills required to be an actor

Acting requires a wide range of skills, including vocal projection, clarity of speech, physical expressivity, emotional facility, a well-developed imagination, and the ability to interpret drama or comedy. Acting also often demands an ability to employ dialects, accents and body language, improvisation, observation and emulation, mime, and training on stage/ film combat. Many actors train at length in special programs or coaches and schools to develop these skills, and today the vast majority of professional actors has undergone extensive combat practice. Even though one actor may have years of training, they always strive for more lessons; the cinematic and theatrical world is always changing and because of this, the actor must stay as up to date as possible. Actors and actresses will often have many coaches and teachers for a full range of training involving, but not limited to, singing, scene-work, monologue techniques, audition techniques, and working with  co-actors work.
Based on

Here is what celebrities say about acting

1. The acting is behaving truthfully under imaginary circumstances.

~ Sanford Meisner

2. An actor is a fool for God.

~ Gerardine Clark

4. The best acting is instinctive. It's not intellectual, it's not mechanical, it's instinctive.

~ Craig MacDonald

5. That's what makes acting so attractive. You get to break all your own rules.

~Gerardine Clark

6. Acting should be bigger than life. Scripts should be bigger than life. It should all be bigger than life.

~ Bette Davis

7. Acting is standing up naked and turning around very slowly.

~ Rosalind Russell

Acting Quotes

8. Acting is not about being someone different. It's finding the similarity in what is apparently different, then finding myself in there.

~ Meryl Streep

9. 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

10. Stop explaining yourself. Shut up and act!

~ Craig MacDonald

Practical Acting Quotes

Acting quotes to remember when you're working.

11. Find in yourself those human things which are universal.

~ Sanford Meisner

12. The more personal, the more universal.

~ Gary Ballinger

13. An actor has to burn inside with an outer ease.

~ Michael Chekhov

14. Use what you know. Don't worry about what you don't know.

~ Michael Shurtleff

15. 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

16. An ounce of behavior is worth a pound of words.

~ Sanford Meisner

17. Conflict is what creates drama. The more conflict actors find, the more interesting the performance.

~ Michael Shurtleff

18. If you really do want to be an actor who can satisfy himself and his audience, you need to be vulnerable.

~ Jack Lemmon

19. Creating relationship is the heart of acting. It is basic. It is essential.

~ Michael Shurtleff

20. Listening is not merely hearing. Listening is reacting. Listening is being affected by what you hear. Listening is active.

~ Michael Shurtleff

21. Whatever you decide is your motivation in the scene, the opposite of that is also true and should be in it.

~ Michael Shurtleff

22. 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

23. 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

24. The first step to a better audition is to give up character and use yourself.

~ Michael Shurtleff

25. 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

26. 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

27. 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

28. 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

29. My job is usually to express emotion as freely as possible.

~ Meryl Streep

30. 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

31. 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

32. 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

33. All an actor has is their blind faith that they are who they say they are today, in any scene.

~ Meryl Streep

34. The most difficult character in comedy is that of the fool, and he must be no simpleton that plays that part.

~ Miguel de Cervantes

35. Actors think more with their hearts than with their heads.

~ William Esper

Funny Acting Quotes

Acting quotes to make you laugh.

36. 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

37. Acting is all about honesty. If you can fake that, you've got it made.

~ George Burns

38. The theater has never been any good since the actors became gentlemen.

~ W.H. Auden

39. Actors die so loud.

~ Henry Miller

40. I love acting. It is so much more real than life.

~ Oscar Wilde

41. If I wasn't an actor, I'd be a secret agent.

~ Thornton Wilder

Even More Acting Quotes

42. 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

43. I'm a skilled professional actor. Whether or not I've any talent is beside the point.

~ Michael Caine

44. 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

45. 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

46. 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

47. Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.

~ Stella Adler

48. I think your self emerges more clearly over time.

~ Meryl Streep

49. I need to go where people are serious about acting.

~ Meryl Streep

50. The work will stand, no matter what.

~ Meryl Streep