Angela Lansbury Quotations

Here I am, I still go on, you know, like the tides.

Mystery is something that appeals to most everybody.

I made about 56 movies, I think. Not that many.

I've worked with the greatest actors, and they're all gone. This is what's so desperate to me.

I was put under contract. A major studio. I got nominated for an Academy Award. Isn't that ridiculous? I mean, at the age of 18!

I think of myself as a journeyman actress. I will attempt almost anything that I think that I can bring off. It could be almost anything.

Clint Eastwood is an extraordinary director because he knows the value of a buck. He knows where it will show on the screen.

I don't think about going back to the theater.

The Manchurian Candidate was the most important movie I was in, let's face it.

Believe me, it jabs you. When you're on the side of buses and New York loves you, you love to go out there every night. It's like a race. Curtain opens, out you go, and New York is yours.

I have never directed. But I think I could. I have thought about it. I'm a bit long in the tooth to start.

I started in London, as a kid. My mother knew I had sort of an inbred talent. She was an actress, so I inherited it from her. But I think I got a lot of it from my grandfather, who was a great politician.

I found that people were helping me across the street. I had to pull myself up the stairs. I began to feel ancient, and I feel very young at heart.

The collaboration really begins once the rehearsal starts. This is when the actor takes his place, because he becomes the one who is going to bring the words of the author off the page.

I don't care whether it's a chance meeting or playing a role that you thought was totally wrong but you did it anyway. It will often turn out to be the thing that will lead you to the role which is sublime.

The thing I always say is that I wasn't going out reaching for roles, I wasn't fighting for roles - people came to me. They always came to me.

My memory about names and places now is dreadful. But lines, I can remember.

They're great devotees of Noel Coward in England, of course, he's a favorite son, and so to play Coward in London is such fun, and anyway, the role is such a crazy lady. I just love doing that.

I played the Piccadilly Theater with "Gypsy" and also the Old Vic, and I've done other shows in London, but not for 40 years.

I usually arrive at the first rehearsal with a vague memory of most of it. But the real work happens in rehearsal, oddly enough, because what happens is that you match the words to the movement, and once you know where you're moving, then the words that accompany that movement become not locked into your mind and your brain and your whole body.

I'm the bionic woman. I have a very strong constitution, and I take excruciatingly good care of myself.

I very seldom said no, and I was aided and abetted by my husband, who realized that the one thing I could do was to be a very good actress, by his note.

When I opened up in "Gaslight," for instance, playing that narky maid, that all came about from my experience and my training up to that point, and so nothing was wasted.

I really wanted to go back to the theater, the live theater. That was the thing I had never had a chance to do, even though I had trained to be a stage actress.

I can't say that I deserve longlife; I don't. I've just been around long enough. They say, "My God, she's still here."

Actually the years when I was playing totally un - well, they were just roles that just went by the board, you wouldn't want to know. But anyway, I'm glad I had that chance to build my craft.

I honestly feel that "Murder, She Wrote" stands alone, as many of the other great shows of the past 35, 40 years do. It stands alone, and it's still on. It's still all over the world, "Murder, She Wrote," Jessica Fletcher and "Murder, She Wrote."

You learn the values that are inherent in the scene that the writer has written. You learn about who you as a character are in relation to those others who are working with you within that scene.

Well oddly enough, I liken the years at MGM, and I was there for about eight years, to doing stock, what we used to call repertory or stock, playing a whole bunch of different roles.

All I knew how to do was to act. That's the only thing I had in my favor. That was the thing that propelled me forward.

I had no idea that such a thing could happen. It never occurred to me.My son told me. He called me and said, "Darling, I just wanted you to know that you have been chosen to receive an honorary Academy Award." I was in the back of this car, and I said, "Oh," and burst into tears, of course, because it was so unexpected and quite wonderful. I thought it's been worth hanging around all these years.

Unfortunately, because the theater is always a poor relation when it comes to making the nut, it's not easy to get the audience in to see a play, unless you have a name that is recognizable, that the audience wants to see and is prepared to pay the $125 to see.

Everything I did actually helped to build the revenue, shall we say, of experience, which enabled me to play a variety of roles as I got older.

You learn a great deal that you can feed into your craft which gives you the experience that you actually need later on, when you start to get the really great roles. You've played that part to a certain degree in that picture, and you played that one in that, and so on. You add it all up, and you have that experience.

I'd been out of the movies for years, I had had a wonderful stage career, yes, in musicals and so on, but you don't really make any money in the theater.

Roles came to me. I was very, very lucky in that respect. Great directors, great writers, great producers - they saw something in me that they wanted for their picture or their play or whatever it was, whether it was Edward Albee or whether it was - or Peter Hall, directors. They would come to me, thank God. I was lucky. Lucky, lucky, lucky.

Psychologically, you learn the values that are inherent in the dialogue, and you learn to apply it to the way you read the lines. That's acting. You're not yourself saying those lines, you're somebody else.

I'm Angie to everybody, you've got to learn.

It was an extraordinary experience to have backup singers like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. I have never experienced anything quite like it before and I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.

I never regretted what I turned down.

It's better not to try to learn all the lines by rote. It's a very bad idea, in fact. You have to do it by using the process, and as I say, the process is to learn during rehearsals, and that's how you'll do it.

Louis B. Mayer and I got along like a house afire. He never chased me around his desk or tried anything with me. Of course, he never gave me any good parts, either.

I can't say that I pursued a career. I really didn't, it just sort of happened.

My daughter used to sit and watch Murder, She Wrote. I tried to watch with her, but I fell asleep.

A sitcom. I hate that word.

The theater is magical and addictive.

Actors are not made, they are born.

I haven't been back to London for 40 years to do a play, so to play Madame Arcati there, she would be tickled to death knowing that that was what I was doing. I hope she would. She was a wonderfully unique and very special, very darling woman.

I have heard Mr. Romney's speech's many times on television and the radio and I have even read his book No Apology: The Case for American Greatness and I must say that out of all the gentleman running for the presidency Mr. Romney is, in my opinion, the best one to fit the bill.

I just went along for the ride. It was a God-given gift. It is. So you can't say well, you wasted your life because you spent all of it acting, but I think gosh, I've never been to China, I've never been to Japan. I've never been to Yellowstone Park.

We all have levels of performance.

Now the Gielgud Theater is a very famous old theater, because it was originally called the Globe, and the Globe is where my mother made her very first professional appearance in London, was at the Globe Theater.

I'm not going to be dancing with the stars at this stage in my life. But I want to dance and bop around, and I did, and I can.

I honestly consider that the greatest gift to me, is the reaction that I get from my work. That is a given which I never, ever take for granted. But to be given that by audiences, individuals, on the street, in the theater, is an extraordinary feeling.

My mother was one of the most beautiful women, I have to say, of her generation. She was absolutely lovely. She was a very, extremely sensitive, Irish actress. She came from Belfast, Northern Ireland, and she came to London, and she was sort of discovered by several people.

As a kid, I just was a contract player at MGM Studios. They put me into goodness knows how many different roles.Some of them were wonderful and some of them were very just distasteful and awful because I was playing out of my age range and I was thoroughly uncomfortable, let's put it that way. So it took me many years to find my acting feet.

... because lifestyles are changing constantly the rules of etiquette are changing too -- a little slower than lifestyles perhaps, but still changing.

Better to be busy than to be busy worrying.

The older I get, the more I realize how much I have missed because I was so busy entertaining that audience and so busy pursuing a career.

Im in a very enviable position, being able to work like this 45 years later. Its always beginning! I never have a sense of finishing up, just new things beginning. When I die, theyre going to carry me off a stage.

The purpose of etiquette is to provide an easy set of rules which we can follow when we are in a hurry and want to make sure that we do not give offense to anybody.

You just have to be open and ready, and let it all happen.

It's an incredible experience. I am so proud and so honored.

I'm in a very enviable position, being able to work like this 45 years later. It's always beginning! I never have a sense of finishing up, just new things beginning. When I die, they're going to carry me off a stage.

I had surgery, and I put it off for a long time. I want to tell women: don't put it off.