Women are usually only interesting to studio executives when they are fecund, between the ages of 15 and 30. I decided to get through the really tough patch, around 50, by just cutting my price...

My job always is to play a person, not to judge her.

The first time I was nominated for an award for professional acting, I was in my mid-twenties. I was married and the mother of my first two daughters. I had been working for near to...

Sweat makes good friendship cement.

My time on television began, and I started playing victims. I did about 10 or 12 years of them, which gets boring, right?

There was this wonderful trick of going to the theater with my parents and sitting in the audience under the watchful eye of an usher, and then these other people would come on the stage:...

I am pretty sure that all young human beings have, at one time or another in their growing-up, been actors. They have used their imaginations to carry them away from painful or confusing situations… have...

The art of acting is to pitch good. You do the pitching and hope that the other person catches the ball and does some good pitching back to you.

A critic is someone who never actually goes to the battle, yet who afterwards comes out shooting the wounded.

What I like is the acting itself. But I’m a lousy celebrity. I’m not interested in selling my private life. I take my private feelings to the work, but I want there to be a...

I don’t have a waist: I’m a breadbox on top of legs.

When I got married, my marriage was illegal in 17 states because my husband had a different skin color than I did. And we saw those laws go down one at a time.

I think the 20s are a vastly overrated decade. We promise kids that once they get out of school, life will begin and their dreams will come true. But then comes the struggle.

I do games of solitaire when I get home to quiet my spirits.

Before ‘Cagney and Lacey,’ we didn’t follow officers home to find out what they did when they took their badges off and emptied their guns. So the idea that these women also had lives outside...

You know, my hair is very upsetting to people, but it’s upsetting on purpose. It is important to look old so that the young will not be afraid of dying. People don’t like old women....

I’m interested in playing old ladies because I am becoming one. And I want to become a very good one!

I believe imagination to be a uniquely human gift. The reason I like my job, and have liked it for more than half a century, is that I get to use my imagination.

I went into the family business. To me, it was the norm and not the exception.

I’m not glamorous, I don’t have a look, I don’t know anything about opera, I have no Italian, and I’m too old.

I don’t want people instructing me what to do with my body; I don’t want the government to tell me what I can do in my bedroom, with my body, or with whoever I choose...

Love is as strict as acting. If you want to love somebody, stand there and do it. If you don’t, don’t. There are no other choices.

Many more people saw me on TV than will ever get to see me on stage, but I do love being in the same room as the people I’m telling the story to.

I think mothers get a raw deal in American culture, so I’ve been defending them. I have three daughters, and I know that as they become mothers, they got a lot more gentle towards me!

Both my parents were actors. I was schooled to think that acting was an important social service, that it was something that human beings need.

I don’t take part in texting and those other things myself, so I don’t really know if people put as much thought into messaging as they used to into writing letters.

I wish it was possible to do the work and not have to talk about it, but it is traditional in the theater to go into the village square and bang the drum and say,...

I am a greedy actor in the sense that I like the big bites. Put a big fat steak in front of me, and I will eat it.

I never played the ‘decoration,’ I always played the one who suffered. And then I got very lucky in my middle career, when I started playing the hero, which at that point was quite rare...

In sixth and seventh grade, my two best friends and I pretended to be horses. Every day after school, we would gallop around, whinnying and stamping our hooves and tossing our manes – for hours.

I was raised to be in service to something larger than myself. A lot of actors concentrate on what they will get out of the profession, rather than what they can offer it. The way...

I’m sorry I didn’t wear paint this morning. I tend not to wear it unless I’m getting highly paid.

The director’s job is full of all sorts of annoyances and details – like how many cars are on the street. Ugh. I don’t want it. I like my gig. And I feel that for...