Actors From England

"I, I will be king. And you, you will be queen. Though nothing will drive them away. We can beat them, just for one day. We can be heroes, just for one day."

"I, I wish you could swim Like the dolphins Like dolphins can swim Though nothing, nothing will keep us together We can beat them, forever and ever Oh, we can be heroes just for one day."

"You're such a wonderful person But you got problems oh-oh-oh-oh I'll never touch you."

"Don't let me hear you say life's taking you nowhere, angel Come get up my baby. Look at that sky, life's begun Nights are warm and the days are young Come get up my baby."

"Fame, (fame) makes a man take things over Fame, (fame) lets him loose, hard to swallow Fame, (fame) puts you there where things are hollow Fame (fame)Fame, it's not your brain, it's just the flame That burns your change to keep you insane (sane)."

"Do you remember, your President Nixon? Do you remember, the bills you have to pay? Or even yesterday?"

"Rebel Rebel, you've torn your dress. Rebel Rebel, your face is a mess. Rebel Rebel, how could they know? Hot tramp, I love you so!"

"You've got your mother in a whirl She's not sure if you're a boy or a girl. Hey babe, your hair's alright. Hey babe, let's go out tonight. You like me, and I like it all. We like dancing and we look divine. You love bands when they're playing hard. You want more and you want it fast."

"I had to resign myself, many years ago, that I'm not too articulate when it comes to explaining how I feel about things. But my music does it for me, it really does. There, in the chords and melodies, is everything I want to say. The words just jolly it along. It's always been my way of expressing what for me is inexpressible by any other means. What is very enlightening for me right now is that I sense that I'm arriving at a place of peace with my writing that I've never experienced before. I think I'm going to be writing some of the most worthwhile things that I've ever written in the coming years. I'm very confident and trusting in my abilities right now. But I've got to think of myself as the luckiest guy. Robert Johnson only had one album's worth of work as his legacy. That's all that life allowed him."

"Heathenism is a state of mind. You can take it that I'm referring to one who does not see his world. He has no mental light. He destroys almost unwittingly. He cannot feel any Gods' presence in his life. He is the 21st century man. However, there's no theme or concept behind Heathen, just a number of songs but somehow there is a thread that runs through it that is quite as strong as any of my thematic type albums."

"Strangely, some songs you really don't want to write. I didn't like writing "Heathen". There was something so ominous and final about it. It was early in the morning, the sun was rising and through the windows I could see two deer grazing down below in the field. In the distance a car was driving slowly past the reservoir and these words were just streaming out and there were tears running down my face. But I couldn't stop, they just flew out. It's an odd feeling, like something else is guiding you, although forcing your hand is more like it."

"It's odd but even when I was a kid, I would write about "old and other times" as though I had a lot of years behind me. Now I do, so there is a difference in the weight of memory. When you're young, you're still "becoming", now at my age I am more concerned with "being". And not too long from now I'll be driven by "surviving", I'm sure. I kind of miss that "becoming" stage, as most times you really don't know what's around the corner. Now, of course, I've kind of knocked on the door and heard a muffled answer. Nevertheless, I still don't know what the voice is saying, or even what language it's in."

"Ageing is an extraordinary process... If you are pining for youth I think it produces a stereotypical old man because you only live in memory, you live in a place that doesn’t exist … I think ageing is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person that you always should have been."

"Never play to the gallery... Never work for other people in what you do. Always remember that the reason that you initially started working was that there was something inside yourself that you felt that if you could manifest in some way, you would understand more about yourself and how you co-exist with the rest of society... I think it's terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfil other people's expectations."

"[While filming 'Ashes to Ashes'] So we're on the beach shooting this scene with a giant bulldozer. The camera was on a very long lens. [The camera is along way away, but the artist fills the frame] In this video I'm dressed from head to toe in a clown suit. Why not. I hear playback and the music starts. So off I go, I start singing and walking, but as soon as I do this old geezer with an old dog walk right between me and the camera... Well, knowing this is gonna take a while I walked past the old guy and sat next to camera in my full costume waiting for him to pass. As he is walking by camera the director said, excuse me Mr do you know who this is? The old guy looks at me from bottom to top and looks back to the director and said... "Of course I do!!!! its some cunt in a clown suit." That was a huge moment for me, It put me back in my place and made me realize, yes I'm just a cunt in a clown suit. I think about that old guy all the time."

"Music has given me over 40 years of extraordinary experiences. I can't say that life's pains or more tragic episodes have been diminished because of it. But it's allowed me so many moments of companionship when I've been lonely and a sublime means of communication when I wanted to touch people. It's been both my doorway of perception and the house that I live in. I only hope that it embraces you with the same lusty life force that it graciously offered me."

"I think fame itself is not a rewarding thing. The most you can say is that it gets you a seat in restaurants."

"I'm terribly intuitive—I always thought I was intellectual about what I do, but I've come to the realisation that I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing half the time, that the majority of the stuff that I do is totally intuitive, totally about where I am physically and mentally at any moment in time and I have a far harder time than anybody else explaining it and analysing it. That's the territory of the artist anyway: to be quite at sea with what he does, and working towards not being intuive about it and being far more methodical and academic about it."

"I get offered so many bad movies. And they're all raging queens or transvestites or Martians."

"I suppose I’ve been knocking on heaven’s door for about 11 years now, with one sort of high or another. The only kinds of drugs I use, though, are ones that keep me working for longer periods of time. I haven’t gotten involved in anything heavy since ’68. I had a silly flirtation with smack then, but it was only for the mystery and enigma of trying it. I never really enjoyed it at all. I like fast drugs. I’ve said that many times. I hate falling out, where I can’t stand up and stuff. It seems like such a waste of time. I hate downs and slow drugs like grass. I hate sleep. I would much prefer staying up, just working, all the time. It makes me so mad that we can’t do anything about sleep or the common cold."

"I'm an instant star. Just add water and stir."

"I always had a repulsive sort of need to be something more than human. I felt very very puny as a human. I thought, "Fuck that. I want to be a superman.""

"I'm the cream Of the great utopia dream. And you're in the gleam In the depths of your banker's spleen."

"This is Major Tom to Ground Control. I'm stepping through the door, And I'm floating in a most peculiar way. And the stars look very different today.For here Am I sitting in a tin can, Far above the world. Planet Earth is blue, And there's nothing I can do."

"Ground Control to Major Tom. Ground Control to Major Tom. Take your protein pills and put your helmet on."

"If our love song Could fly over mountains, Could laugh at the ocean, Just like the films, There's no reason To feel all the hard times, To lay down the hard lines. It's absolutely true.Nothing much could happen Nothing we can't shake Oh we're absolute beginners With nothing much at stake As long as you're still smiling There's nothing more I need I absolutely love you But we're absolute beginners. But if my love is your love We're certain to succeed."

"All the young dudes Carry the news Boogaloo dudes Carry the news."

"Criticism should be done by critics, and a critic should have some training and some love of the medium he is discussing. But these days, gossip-columnist training seems to be enough qualification. I suppose an ability to stand on your feet through interminable cocktail parties and swig interminable gins in between devouring masses of fried prawns may just possibly help you to understand and appreciate what a director is getting at, but for the life of me I can't see how."

"I'm a classic example of all humorists — only funny when I'm working."

"If I can't really find a way to live with myself, I can't expect anyone else to live with me."

"To see me as a person on screen would be one of the dullest experiences you could ever wish to experience."

"People will swim through shit if you put a few bob in it."

"If you ask me to play myself, I will not know what to do. I do not know who or what I am."

"There is no me. I do not exist … There used to be a me, but I had it surgically removed."

"Peter Sellers, a showbiz baby, was carried onstage two weeks into his life by vaudevillian Dickie Henderson, who encouraged the audience to join him in singing "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow." Little Peter instantly burst into tears and the audience erupted into laughter and applause. From Pete's perspective, this emotional scenario was played out more or less consistently until his death in 1980."

"Peter was always a mixed-up guy, a childish fellow. But if you're fond of children, you're also fond of childish men. He was always very helpful to me. After he was famous, and when I was still in trouble with the US embassy, he wrote a letter in support of me which was magnificent. But it is true that he was very cruel to his children. He was so hurt by the way children treat you when you're their father. I have been hurt by my children. But he was not in possession of a proper brain when it came to these things."

"He had a conspicuous individual talent, but it was interpretive, not directly creative. He could never have emulated Chaplin, Keaton or Jacques Tati and set up a whole project by himself, controlling its every detail even if the task took years. But there is no point carping. He had such a protean capacity that it would have been a miracle if he had been in full command of it."

"[W]hile at first I felt like a new boy in his presence, I soon relaxed: he was so welcoming, cheery and easy to write with. And he was effortlessly, brilliantly funny all the [fucking] time. We’d be sitting there discussing some aspect of the plot and he’d slide into a five-minute monologue that he could easily have bestowed on a West End audience."

"I writhe when I see myself on the screen. I'm such a dreadfully clumsy hulking image. I say to myself, "Why doesn't he get off? Why doesn't he get off?" I mean, I look like such an idiot. Some fat awkward thing dredged up from some third-rate drama company. I must stop thinking about it, otherwise I shan't be able to go on working."

"Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle!"

"Some forms of reality are so horrible we refuse to face them, unless we are trapped into it by comedy. To label any subject unsuitable for comedy is to admit defeat."

"Noel Coward, whose brain is so delicate that it is intoxicated by the slightest waves in the ether, has, in desperation, taken a header in the wrong direction. He ought to be a white-hot pacifist. But somebody waved a Union Jack in front of him, and he tripped up, and he wrote Cavalcade. That play is about the finest essay in betrayal since Judas Iscariot jingled his thirty pieces of silver in the moonlight a number of years ago. And the tragedy of it is heightened by the fact that it is Noel who has been betrayed, and not his public. His public, which is deservedly vast, adored the flags and the streamers, the blood red, ice-white and royal blue which, in varying patterns, he threw across the stage of Drury Lane. And he, I am quite sure, adored the thirty thousand pieces of silver which, as a result of this play, he was able to jingle in his pocket. But the play was a tragedy, none the less. And the tragedy was not on the stage. It was in the Royal Box. It was focused in the thin, nervous face of the young man who had created this glittering tissue of dramatic lies, as he turned to his adoring audience, and said, "It's pretty exciting to be English nowadays.""

"Now I'm off to Sibyl to meet Noel Coward, with whom I am slightly in love."

"Did I tell you about Noel Coward? He is in search of culture, and thinks Bloomsbury a kind of place of pilgrimage. Will you come and meet him? He is a miracle, a prodigy. He can sing, dance, write plays, act, compose, and I daresay paint.—He rescued his whole family who kept boarding houses in Surbiton, and they are now affluent, but on the verge of bankruptcy, because he spends so much on cocktails. If he could only become like Bloomsbury he thinks he might be saved."

"My big break came the next year with Bitter Sweet, starring . I had a dress with a plunging neckline. Noël Coward said he could see the and I felt devastated. If you're blind, you'll miss me in that one."

"I asked Coward about a famous anecdote about him. He was alleged to have been sitting under cover from the heavy rain next to his close friend Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent, prior to going to Westminster Abbey for the Coronation service. Opposite them was another queen who had made her way into the affections of the British public, the vast Salote, Queen of Tonga. "Noël, who is that little man sheltering under Queen Salote's umbrella?" asked his companion. Coward peered through the rain. "Oh, her lunch, my dear." He laughed. "That was said by somebody at White's, and immediately attributed to me. That was very flattering of course, except I had intended to visit Tonga the following winter, and after that of course it was quite impossible.""

"Coward's influence spread even to the outposts of Rickmansworth and Poona. Hearty naval commanders or jolly colonels acquired the "camp" manners of calling everything from Joan of Arc to Merlin "lots of fun," and the adjective "terribly" peppered every sentence. All sorts of men suddenly wanted to look like Noel Coward—sleek and satiny, clipped and well groomed, with a cigarette, a telephone, or a cocktail at hand."

"Coward himself said of Bitter-Sweet: "disdaining archness and false modesty, I knew it was witty. I knew it was well constructed, and I also knew it would be a success." That description can suffice for a great many of Coward plays (and other achievements) and makes the main points. That comedy, and not tragedy, should have been his métier may convince the injudicious that he is brittle and trivial – but neither the chic nor the wise can trouble themselves about people like that."

"The lifestyle presented in Hay Fever, Design for Living, Private Lives and Blithe Spirit is somewhat more acceptable now than it was in Coward's day, but the plays can never be either controversial or dated. Coward emphasized entertainment, not message, and the principal appeal of these scintillating comedies arises from their bantering dialogue (with just a touch of malice and cynicism) and their amusing situations (with just a touch of sexual spice). The artificiality of both is part of their charm. The carefully wrought machine runs on jewels of wit, and charming little figures parade before us at the appropriate times with striking effect. That it also indicates The Times is almost incidental, but useful."

"Coward played a supporting role in a poorly received comedy movie SURPRISE PACKAGE(1960). When someone approached Coward and told him that he had stolen the picture,Coward replied---"Thank you,My Dear, but it was only petty larceny"."