101 Quotes by Angela Lansbury

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.