You've got to love the villain if you have to play him. You've got to find something that you can live with in yourself if you are going to play the villain in a play on stage.- Jim Dale
You cannot learn anything from success, you only learn from failure.
When I was nine, we'd take a bus to the seaside. Coming back, we'd take turns entertaining, singing songs and the like. I tried some stand-up comedy. I had a captive audience in that bus. Then I realized I wanted to do more than that.
We talk about theatre museums filled with old costumes and things. What we also need is a theatre museum of the old routines on videotape. We are only the custodians of those techniques, and they should be preserved.
There is no spray can called 'Instant Stardom,' only talent can keep you at the top.
The joy about the recording is that you are your own boss. You do not have a director telling you how to do it.
It's a little like casting out hundreds of fishing lines into the audience. You start getting little bites, then more, then you hook a few, then more. Then you can start reeling them in and that is a loveliest feeling - the whole audience laughing with you.
I am still a kid inside, and adventure is adventure wherever you find it.
I'd rather get a good clean laugh with good material, than an easy laugh by swearing or shocking. That's not clever or comedic, anybody can get a laugh that way, it's too easy.
I'd get more applause than some because I was just seventeen. If they didn't clap at the end of my act I would limp off stage and boy would they feel guilty. They would all burst into tremendous applause as they saw this poor cripple kid walking off.
I remember certain people in the audience laughing and I wanted to ask: 'What are you laughing at? This is not funny.' Now I realize that laughter can come from insecurity. They do not know how they should be feeling.
I only travel to good material, a good director and a good company. I would not work in another country for a year any longer, because I have a lovely wife and I adore her and I can't bear to be away from her.
I feel if some kid has sat down and felt I am important enough to write two pages of words to and take up a lot of his valuable time, then he deserves a few words back, or even a phone call as I have done on a few occasions.
Good acting is consistency of performance.
A career in the theatre demands so much commitment.
