Paul Scofield (1922 – 2008)
Award-winning English actor of stage and screen.
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As you get older, the more you know, so the more nervous you become. The risks are much bigger.
The only great actor I have worked with who was not in any sense a star — there was no great publicity about him, no scandal about him, none of the attitude to stardom.
It isn't difficult to leave King Lear or Macbeth, but once you have gone back to yourself, you want it to be the same self you have always been.
I decided a long time ago I didn’t want to be a star personality and live my life out in public. I don’t think it’s a good idea to wave personality about like a flag and become labeled.
I found at this point that effective acting wasn't what I wanted to do, that I didn't want to make effects, that I wanted, as it were, to leave an impression of a particular kind of human being.
He brought you face to face with the unfathomable. No actor summoned with such authority the mysterious depths of human experience.
Privacy is not negotiable.
Beneath the gentle modesty of his behavior lay the absolute assurance of a born artist.
I feel incredibly lucky to have discovered early in my life, practically when I was a child, that I could do something that in the end I finally wanted to do all my life. It has something to do with being completely removed from oneself, which doesn't necessarily mean one is uncomfortable inside oneself. It just means it's a great relief to be inhabiting somebody else. It can be a tremendously liberating sensation.
If you want a title, what's wrong with Mr? If you have always been that, then why lose your title?
I have a title, which is the same one that I have always had.
But it's not political. I have a CBE, which I accepted very gratefully.
King Lear is undoubtedly the greatest play ever written by Shakespeare — or anybody else for that matter. Hamlet is certainly great, but it doesn't contain as many elements of humanity as we see in Lear.
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