Melissa Leo Quotes

• You know, when I got started on television in the ’80s, you would go to the costume department, and if you were a female they put you into a skirt. And you had a pocketbook, usually a shoulder bag.

  Melissa Leo

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• Well, I don’t think of myself as a feminist at all. As soon as we start labeling and categorizing ourselves and others, that’s going to shut down the world.

  Melissa Leo

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• To play someone when the character masks their own emotions, doesn’t understand their own emotions, has no release for their own emotions, and yet is full of emotion – that is a much harder character to play than someone who has somewhere to put it.

  Melissa Leo

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• To get the hippie out of certain characters is probably the most difficult thing for me. I was not a hippie by choice but by birth.

  Melissa Leo

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• Through all of this lovely interviewing, and nice things people say, and the rest of it, I have learned that I am an actor. That is my profession. That is my job. That is how I make a living. So I am just out there making a living.

  Melissa Leo

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• There were not enough women like Kay on TV and now there are none.

  Melissa Leo

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• The key to acting has much more to do with listening than with talking.

  Melissa Leo

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• The climate informs the character.

  Melissa Leo

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• That’s probably the biggest secret of acting: If the actor believes it themselves, they can make you believe it.

  Melissa Leo

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• Supporting actors are the support. You can’t make a building without support. You can’t buy dinner without support.

  Melissa Leo

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• People often expect me to be something other than what I am.

  Melissa Leo

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• My mom was a ’70s mom. She paved a road that no one had yet walked.

  Melissa Leo

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• My body has done for me all these years things I couldn’t ever even dreamt to do for characters. It’s a tool, molecularly speaking, and I need to take care of it.

  Melissa Leo

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• I’m very old-school. I like a director to direct me. I like to be the actor.

  Melissa Leo

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• I’m not particularly fond of the hybrid writer-director or actor-director.

  Melissa Leo

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• I’m a very lucky girl who gets to act for a living! So why sit around griping and grousing about what’s not there.

  Melissa Leo

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• I think this notion of acting and glamour is getting in everybody’s way.

  Melissa Leo

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• I think there has only been one time in my entire career that I’ve ever gone back to shoot a scene. And it was a scene that, when we were shooting it, we knew that it wasn’t working. We knew there was a disagreement between the actor and director. So, we went back.

  Melissa Leo

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• I think the funny thing about acting for me – and I hold it in a very holy, spiritual way – not to be overly fundamentalist about it, but it’s that important to me – is that it is an ancient healing art.

  Melissa Leo

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• I mean, the unfair treatment of women and black people and Indians and other groups, that’s real. Mistreatment of other people because ‘I’m better than you are’ is such a sad part of the world.

  Melissa Leo

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Melissa Leo (28)

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Today's Anniversary - 18th December

Births

• 1927 - Ramsey Clark
• 1888 - Robert Moses
• 1956 - Ron Dee White
• 1970 - Victoria Pratt
• 1954 - Ray Liotta

Deaths

• 1892 - Richard Owen
• 1912 - Will Carleton
• 1975 - Theodosius Dobzhansky
• 2006 - Joseph Barbera
• 2011 - Vaclav Havel