Blythe Danner Quotes

• "Acting is really only part of my life. I'm addicted to it."
• "Actors are very generous."
• "Barbra, I had the good fortune of being directed by several years ago in Prince Of Tides. She is incredibly generous. There is something about having an ear like hers to the musicality, it just leaves her naturally to wonderful directing as in acting."
• "Both my brother and I were very active. I was captain of the high school swimming team."
• "Bruce and I had an apartment in New York that we kept no matter where our work took us, but we've let it go now. Bruce is the one who found this house."
• "Coming out of the Depression the way I did, you want to do something that matters."
• "Doing a TV series is quite a commitment. You don't know if you'll be on for 13 weeks or five years. If the show doesn't go, however, we'll have learned a lot, and people will have seen my face."
• "He was so busy that he didn't seek help for months-and by then his cancer was very advanced. I wish we had known more. My hope is this will bring oral cancer awareness to more Americans."
• "I did Butterflies Are Free eight times a week for a year. During that time, I did something to my voice. I have no range any more."
• "I don't know what I'd do without Bruce. He's always such a help. We went to a party last night and I just couldn't get up this morning, so he's been taking care of the baby."
• "I feel a little guilty only being an actor."
• "I feel good when I pat and hold somebody."
• "I feel that its our children who do give us hope because they are the ones who are going to save the world."
• "I forget when I'm working with her that she's my daughter. I remember once I actually went, Who is this girl? Oh, my, this is my daughter. It's a joy to work with her."
• "I get a little bit nutty sometimes."
• "I had a grandfather who was Pennsylvania Dutch, and I went to Quaker school, and that makes one very aware of the earth."
• "I like Billy Wilder a lot."
• "I love playing one of Pinter's ladies. I've never felt more womanly in my life. This is the first time I've done a play where I can't wait to get to the theatre to escape into the skin of a woman who I am not."
• "I love to cook, but sometimes we eat at 10:00 P.M.!"
• "I love to garden. I haven't had time to do much of it yet. We brought some furniture out from the New York apartment, but we have to buy a lot too. I'd like the house to look like New England."
• "I loved doing Shakespeare. My two favorite roles, in fact, have been Viola in Twelfth Night and Helena in A Midsummer Night's Dream."
• "I started studying violin and studied it tor three years. I also played piano."
• "I think after the election we've been so depressed and so upset, we have very little to look forward to in a way."
• "I think I have a lot of crazy layers."
• "I think one of my very favorite films of all time was with Peter Sellers when he played Chauncey, the gardener. Being There."
• "I try to avoid a specific image. I seek to play as many different women as I can to avoid having a label put on me."
• "I was attracted to Gwyneth from a school friend who was British. I was 6 years old and she was very eccentric and had a beautiful English accent and when the time came, I just named Gwyneth after that. I got a lot of guff for naming her Gwyneth."
• "I was raised in a time where children were still seen and not heard basically, so I think a lot of us in my generation went the other way and just tried to be as much more liberal and open and we're still paying for it."
• "I went door to door, knocking, and I got lots of right-wing people-very hostile-who said,'Why should I bother to do that? It's time consuming. I can't waste my time."
• "I went to college for four years and got my degree in drama. I had known I wanted to act, but my parents wanted me to go to college first."
• "I would pull up behind a car that was polluting, and I felt so holier-than-thou. I felt that I was in the real car and they were all in horse and buggies."
• "I'm not very up on rock'n'roll. I am a big jazz buff, so it has been an education but certainly this last album was just beautiful. Now he's working on a new one."
• "I'm very grateful for this job because I don't get an opportunity to do a lot of features, but in TV I've been playing a lot of different women."
• "I've always been too laid back about my career, but now that the kids are grown and both of them are doing very well, I don't have to worry anymore."
• "I've always felt more confident when I could throw myself into a part."
• "I've always just adored music. It's my first love, really. I admire and respect people in the music business. You really have to work hard and diligently. Sometimes actors can be lazy and get away with it, but you can't do that if you're a musician."
• "I've been very lucky. I wanted to be an actress, but I didn't really have the drive to sell myself. Fortunately I had a terrific agent in New York who kept me going from job to job."
• "I've just had a fortunate year of playing many different women, which I love. At my age in Hollywood it's very difficult in television especially."
• "I've kept my sanity in this business by trying out for a role and then going home and trying to forget about it."
• "If I can't live in New England, I'll try to bring New England to California!"
• "In the play where I spoke German I was the only girl in the cast. There was only one dressing room so they put me off in a corner and I wore an enormous man's robe and kind of dressed myself under it!"
• "In the summer, I act at the Williamstown Theatre. I do roles that I wouldn't ordinarily be cast in and that make people regard me as a woman of more depth."
• "It was in high school that I first became interested in acting. We put on lots of plays."
• "Jake has written a screenplay for me, so I'm sure eventually we'll all work together. All four of us are in the business. It's inevitable, isn't it?"
• "Just look at my face. Its an extraordinary experience. All of my friends who are grandparents have been saying, just wait, a bit cynically, but its just extraordinary. You feel like a child again yourself. Just walking on air."
• "Maybe subconsciously I've kept activism separate from acting because it's important to me in a more profound way."
• "Mostly, I spend my time being a mother to my two children, working in my organic garden, raising masses of sweet peas, being passionately involved in conservation, recycling and solar energy."
• "Mother had a great personality. She was the belle of the ball! She always had a great desire to perform. Under other circumstances, she probably would have been a singer. Instead, she was a pretty, talented woman who ran our home with lots of pizzazz!"
• "My father has a lovely singing voice which my brother Harry inherited. During the Depression he went to New York and auditioned for a job at Radio City Music Hall. And he was offered the job!"
• "My father is a banker."
• "Neither Bruce nor I knew much about oral cancer, so we didn't know to get him to a doctor when his voice became increasingly hoarse."
• "Now, Santa Monica's program is a model for the country."
• "One day I'd be extremely extroverted and outgoing, and the next day I'd be quiet and introverted. In those days, I was involved mostly in singing-in choirs, choruses, and some solo work."
• "Onstage or in films, you do affect peoples' lives, and sometimes that's very gratifying. But still, there's this little voice that says you should be doing something that matters."
• "Rhode Island had a program for high school students that was subsidized by the state. We put on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Chekhov's Three Sisters to 5,000 kids at once and do two performances in a row. I never had any trouble filling that hall with my voice!"
• "She has my husband's wonderful family cheekbones, those wonderful movie star cheekbones. She's actually the one who started me doing the macrobiotic diet which is very helpful. I find I could fly more easily without all that milk in my sinuses."
• "There more fruit names in Britain."
• "They were looking for a skinny girl who could speak German. I got the part! So I went to Boston and lived in a boardinghouse, where I was very much alone for the first time in my life. We worked in an awful hotel with bugs."
• "Uncle Bill is a violin maker. So is my brother Bill, who is actually my half-brother. Uncle Bill was the twelfth or thirteenth generation of old German violin makers in his family. Each generation had to go back to Europe to study with the old masters."
• "We had a really terrific childhood. It was a very happy time. We had lots of animals-dogs, guinea pigs, and so on, but no cats. Mother didn't like cats."
• "What can we do to make US Air recycle?"
• "When I dress, I want something a bit dramatic that's in contrast to what I am. But I think my husband has a better sense of what looks well on me than I do. He likes to see me looking womanly."
• "Whether you're on TV or on the stage, you have to work hard to stay fresh, real, and full of energy. You can't settle back. You always have to stay on your toes."
• "Why didn't Gore focus more of his campaign global warming? I mean, people say it isn't a sexy issue. But that isn't true. I just can't understand it. Just look at all the storms and weather tragedies. This is a crisis, and it's not being dealt with."
• "You learn more discipline in the theatre than you do in movies or TV. You're on stage every night and you have to sustain your energy level tor several hours."