Steven Berkoff
Actor
1937-08-03
Quotes by Steven Berkoff
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My mother was almost entirely responsible for my cultural education. She took me to the library once a week, and by the age of seven, I was reading 100 books a year.
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My earliest memory is of my first day at primary school and the distress of seeing my mother part from me.And being in a room full of strangers - of aliens. I felt that I would never see her again.
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When I started studying acting, I was enamoured of actors who used movement to enhance the language.
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You are treated like a cog in a machine. The director might be obsessing so much with the stunts that he doesn't notice your performance, and the producer may just be an insane money man, but I have no snobbery about the movies.
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Most American films have now become mindless. The human element has been removed, so you are just left with the surrogate human, which is the robot, so coincidentally or, rather, ironically, they are making films about robots, without realising they are talking about themselves.
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We often find far more power in a symbol than in something that is an an actuality.
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After watching my poor mother being sometimes neglected by my father, it was almost tattooed on my brain that I would never cause hardship or despair to a partner.
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I have a daughter from a relationship I had in my late teens or early 20s. Because I felt it wasn't the kind of pukka behaviour my family or relatives would admit to, I denied it for many years.
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The great actors we had came from the actor-manager theaters. Not only did they create a team, they were the generals working with the soldiers.
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The mainstream is generally garbage. Look at the heavily subsidized theaters.
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The theatre is your pulpit - it is your church - and you want to be a priest in your church, and that's what I believe in.
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Transgender casting is a kind of literalism. It is the same with racial casting. This means that you can now only play Othello if you are black. There is something quite tainted about it. It is a form of racism in itself.
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If you want to be an actor, you must have total, ruthless commitment to your art. Don't be ambitious for fame or TV or movies. Art is a jealous mistress and will brook no competitors. Study all the time. Never stop reading. Never stop learning speeches. It will fill you up - define and refine you.
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Facebook and Twitter are like a horrible digital plague.
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I find it very satisfying to write because you can purge many things and vent what you feel under the mask of fiction.
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The most vital part of your humanity is the love you have for others. To deny it is to deny your life.
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I'd like to be remembered with affection, with regard, and with just a smallest amount of admiration - that here's a man who walked against the tide.
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In London, nobody comments on what you wear - they think that's not important to you or your state of well-being.
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When I write about working-class people, I do so in ways that reveal them at their absolute, magnificent worst.
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During the Second World War, we lived in a flat on Whitechapel Road in the East End of London. At one point during the blitz, the air-raid sirens went off every night for 30 nights, and each time, my parents would grab my sister and me and take us to the shelter beneath Whitechapel underground station.
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