Ralph Fiennes Quotes

Education, awareness and prevention are the key, but stigmatisation and exclusion from family is what makes people suffer most

When you meet women, don't pretend to be anything that you're not.

Unicef's education initiative does not seek to impose, but to initiate and integrate. It does, however, aim to address the huge bias towards education for boys at the expense of girls in so many cultures.

He's really sort of the devil. He's completely emotionally detached. He has no empathy. You find that in psychopaths. It's about power with Voldemort. It's an aphrodisiac for him. Power makes him feel alive.

Unicef wants to encourage a sense of stability for a child.

Success is all about being able to extend love to people.

The people I consider successful are so because of how they handle their responsibilities to other people, how they approach the future, people who have a full sense of the value of their life and what they want to do with it.

When she was younger, my mother was quite committed to Roman Catholicism.

But she got disillusioned with it and moved closer to something like Buddhist beliefs near the end of her life.

Being an actor means asking people to look at you.

I guess I accept that. But it's a profession in which the job is to show another world and other people. You may access it through bits of yourself, and your imagination and experience, but actually, in the end, you're not playing yourself.

In Shakespeare, keep it simple. Don't over-inflect. The speech needs to be naturalistic and simple and accessible as much as possible.

I'm sure acting is a deeply neurotic thing to do.

Ridicule is also a weapon against forces of evil. Really clever, intelligent ridicule.

I couldn't get as big as a bodybuilder.

I tried to put on as much weight in the right places as I could. My weightlifting was impressive for me, but not for some of the guys I see down at the gym.

When theater becomes a soothing middle-class thing, when it's packaged as the Night Out, then that's the death of it.

In the studio system, things are expected of a film.

By the first, second, third act, there's a generic language that comes out of the more commercial system.

I was grateful to have two weeks to shoot this one scene in Harry Potter.

It's a big, big scene, but they have to deliver. And they have high expectations.

Going to the movies was a big event in my youth.

My father would be the initiator - he'd have me put on a jacket to see a film.

If I had a gun to my head and I had to choose between theater and film I'd choose theater.

Having gone through editing process, I can see that in actor's faces there's point where they're not managing their performance and that's, I think, the best place to be. You've done the homework, you've learned the lines, at that point you just sort of let it out.

I respond to a part just intuitively when I read a script.

Actors use who they are to be someone else, but I would hate to ever think I'm playing myself. It's imagining being someone else that is the key motivating thing for me. So when people want to know about me, it makes me a bit unnerved.

I veer away from trying to understand why I act. I just know I need to do it.

The actor shouldn't edit themselves or be anxious.

And the actors that I admire are always the ones who are inventive and their imaginative life in free-willing. It's a director's job to go, "No here, don't do that, go there."

I felt it [Shakespeare's Coriolanus] is sort of an examination of our dysfunction as a nationalistic, tribal entities. I think the world is rocking and cracking open in weird and worrying places. And I think Coriolanus, the play, reflected that.

I'm interested in the spirits of people.

In the theatre, there's the acting part of acting - and I'm not saying that can't be great - and there's the essence. To explore that essence, you need a key, a look, a gesture, an insight that unlocks the person's soul.

It's thrilling to have the opportunity to work in different areas, whether it's on a project that has all the resources behind it like Harry Potter or James Bond and then to go somewhere there's very few resources.

I have grown up loving Shakespeare.

Voldemort? That might be real.

When you get into the edit you'll understand what making a film is.

You'll see all the things you missed and all the possibilities you have from what you shot.

I loved doing Harry Potter. I had a great time on that. And I think it's good to have a mix. I think you're learning all the time.

Kenya doesn't have much of an infrastructure for hosting a film of this scale.

Our producer decided that for the film to really work it had to be in Kenya.

So much of movie acting is in the lighting.

And in loving your characters. I try to know them, and with that intimacy comes love. And now, I love Voldemort.

What moves me in art is how we question who we are as people.

I have a lot of stuff I want to talk about and offer up.

It would be odd not to have ideas about something.

Awards are like applause, and every actor likes to hear applause.

It's not great if someone gives you sort of bland praise without giving you clear direction and say, "This is good, let's try it like this." I have worked with someone who seemed quite inarticulate and just would say, "That's good, that's good." That's very frustrating because - it's nice to know something is good but you know it can always change.

I think I feel more like you're an actor for hire and you take the jobs you want to take, obviously, and some pay well and some don't pay well at all but you go on a gut feeling and it's all a big adventure.

We're in a world of truncated sentences, soundbites and Twitter.

.. [Language] is being eroded -- it's changing. Our expressiveness and our ease with some words is being diluted so that the sentence with more than one clause is a problem for us, and the word of more than two syllables is a problem for us.

I'm more relaxed about how the editing process will create a performance and that, in a way, gives me a sense of freedom.

In the best material, you always should be able to somehow make a case for a story to be transposed to any other time.

I feel there's so much still to learn about acting.

But there is some magic in the capturing of performance and in the process of editing a performance. The psychology of human beings and what's coming through the face... that fascinates me.

Like anything to do with trust, in any relationship it emerges and just the chemistry, vibe between two people an actor and a director. You just know whether this is someone I like to be with whose interaction with me I believe in.

I never studied anything about film technique in school.

Eventually, I realized that cinema and theater are not so different: from the gut to the heart to the head of a character is the same journey for both.

I spent the past week here in India getting a sense of the reality of HIV and AIDS in people's lives. Fathers and mothers are dying, leaving children with no support. Stigma and discrimination is ruining the family lives. There is an urgent need for education, information, and increased awareness of HIV and AIDS. The response needs to be now. We cannot afford to become fatigued.

I learned a lot about acting - watching not just myself but other actors and learning how to distinguish between two great takes. It's also about one's own taste in performance.

Success.. is all about being able to extend love to people... not in a big, capital letter sense but in the everyday. Little by little, task by task, gesture by gesture, word by word.

It's great to be on a set where there's time and there's focus and there's also a kind of adrenaline thrill on a set where people are saying: "We have to get this shot, we've have to go, we've got to move on!"

I should say, a piece of advice that was given to me very early on by the principle of RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) which is where I went. When he auditioned me, he said, "Your speech, monologue, is fine. It's good. Yeah, I think you have ability but you're making it happen. Don't make it happen, let it happen." And that's a sort of subtle shift I think, as an actor.

I think Shakespeare is like a dialect.

If I heard a broad Scots accent, I'd probably struggle at first but then I'd start to look for words I recognise and I'd get the gist. I think Shakespeare is like that.

We are now living in a jungle where the strong eats the weak,we are not better than the Arabs to despise them.