Jeremy Irons Quotes

I always wanted to do more plays but I never quite understood how you got asked to do a play. I had done house plays, but they were sort of skits.

(1986 comment on Robert De Niro) He is a method actor. I think it would be fair to say he`s much slower than I am. As a man, Bob dislikes making a decision. And acting is a whole line of decisions. You make a decision every time you play a line -- do I say it like this or like that? But what I saw was a man trying many areas and now and again something would really work.

Actors often behave like children and so we`re taken for children. I want to be grown up.

The movie industry is run by accountants in Hollywood and it`s as simple as this; everyone has a number on their computer. They can look up Jeremy Irons and see what my last five movies have made. Say you want to make a $20m picture, which is relatively cheap. If Jeremy makes $9m, the director makes $5m, then you need a leading lady, and they just go through those figures - that`s how casting happens. And none of my movies has made a lot of money.

And trust, yes, which is important, but that is what I aim towards. Now that is difficult for some people, and with that desire to get things as good as possible, I would say that I`m probably regarded as quite prickly to work with.

I sing like an actor and dance like a duck.

I liked the theater. I liked the people. I liked the time that we worked.

At the age of 12 I was going on to another boarding school in another part of the country. We change schools at 13 in this country.

Basically, I want to keep working, so I don`t worry about the size of the character - if it`s interesting, I`ll do it. It`s quite nice doing smaller roles, in some ways. It means I get home more, and I can get on with my life.

I think I would not be described as a character actor in that I don`t take on characteristics which are very alien to me.

Now in my theater training I showed no aptitude at all.

My father was a CPA. He worked hard in the aircraft industry, and would come home more and more infrequently. He was about to leave my mother, which he did when I was 15.

I`m sure that Steve Martin would love to be where I am, and I would like to be more where he is as far as the comedy stakes are concerned.

Now the decision to play a role is halfway towards understanding the character, because you empathize with it and that`s why you want to play it.

A trip to the mainland was a big event and happened maybe once a year, although now you can get across in a speed boat in seven minutes but then it was a long way away.

(When asked by an interviewer about why he accepted his role in `Dungeons & Dragons`) "Are you kidding? I`d just bought a castle, I had to pay for it somehow!"

I succeeded on sort of chutzpah and charm. No technique at all, didn`t know what I was doing, but it worked and the character suited me.

Godspell was a good leap for me, it was a good shop window.

It`s always great to play a man who sets himself up to be punctured.

What a camera likes are eyes which have life and tell a story.

As you get older, you look back and try to make sense of the sort of person you have become. And I think the most important thing that happened in my childhood was the first night I went to boarding school at the age of seven. I remember that night, and the loneliness. Also, my parents` marriage broke up when I was 15. But I think it was that first night at seven years old when I felt something had broken, and I`ve spent my life trying to get back to that feeling of home. It`s the same sense of family that you find in the theater and movies. In fact, I`m hoping to make a film about that very subject - the need for home. You don`t really have a home until you have children. And that home is created by the children.

However, I wasn`t very good at the sciences, or didn`t have a lot of help in the sciences or something but certainly didn`t set science for my A level. And when I came to take my A levels I didn`t get a good enough result to go to University.

I had done a fair bit of traveling during the holidays in my school days with my guitar and discovered that I could live on it. Admittedly, I traveled with a sleeping bag but I could always find somewhere to lay my head.

Paris Hilton, that`s very interesting what she did. I`ve never done that. I haven`t really sort of ever got into that. As time passes, maybe I should record it and put it in a vault so that when I get a little old don`t have the energy I can remember how life used to be.

We all have our time machines. Some take us back, they`re called memories. Some take us forward, they`re called dreams.

What I try to do as an actor is constantly find that, find ways to risk, find opportunities to fall on my face if it`s going to be worth it, and then maybe I`ll surprise myself.

I was the youngest. The yule lamb. The one who always got away without doing the washing up. My sister was four years older, and my brother six years.

No, I don`t believe in hard work. If something is hard, leave it. Let it come to you. Let it happen.

An acting assistant stage manager in a theater in Canterbury, a rep theater. A small wage but just enough to get by on, and I made props and I walked on, and I changed scenery, and I realized that I just loved it.

Actors often behave like children, and so we`re taken for children. I want to be grown up.

At age 10 or 12 he`s going to boarding school in the Isle of Wight. The Isle of Wight is, of course, down at the bottom of England just off South Hampton.

So I continued through my next school, which takes me up to the age of 17, moving from the bottom stream of one year into the bottom stream of the next year, all the way through. I showed other talents which gave me self-respect, which is fine.

I envy children who know that they`re going to become doctors, know they`re going to go into the forces or whatever. I think choice is one of the hardest things, but that`s what I try to give my children, to say you can do anything.

Because I`m now successful, what I`m being offered as an actor is more and more of the same.

So the better my partner or my opposition, however you like to think about it, the better my game.

I was not naturally intellectual, but somebody whose interest had to be whetted, still the case sadly.

My next step must be to go to drama school. Well, I get into drama school, so I did that.

In an interview, he once explained the origin and pronunciation of his name thus: "My name is certainly not pronounced `Eye-rons,` but just like the metal. In England we say, `Eye-ons` -- we`re lazy about our Rs. Here (USA) I guess you would say `Ire-ons.`" The name is fairly common in England, it`s probably short for Ironsmith."

Americans enjoy uniformity in a way that the British don`t; they wanted everybody of a sort of nice chorus line height and here I was, this person who was a good three inches taller than anyone else on the end of the line.

I`ve never been passionate about acting, and I find more and more that I work to live the life I want to live. An actor like Al Pacino lives to act. I`m not sure though, there`s something about the detachment I have, the feeling of the lack of importance about what I do, that is healthy.

On his Ducati motorbike: "Ferrari on two wheels."

Anyway, I`m never satisfied. I think were I ever satisfied with my work, I`d be in trouble.

So nevertheless, what I`m saying is that what one is - one`s parameters are constantly narrowed by one`s success, and my desire is to widen my field even if I risk failure.

The sad thing about any business I suppose, but in mine you see it particularly, is that you`re always asked to do what you`ve already done.

I constantly experience failure in that my work is never as good as I want it to be. So I live with failure.

If we have to pay taxes (for Emmy gift bags), so be it. But don`t spend it on bombs, for Christ`s sake.

And whenever I`m in a situation where I`m wearing the same as 600 other people and doing the same thing as 600 other people, looking back, I always found ways to make myself different, whether it be having a red lining inside of my jacket, having red shoes, it hasn`t changed.