“In the studio the director controls the actor’s every move, every inflection, every expression.”

The love-bite, it is the beginning. You will be irresistible.

That is different, to have someone think that I am evil when I really am not.

I don’t have a dime left. I am dependent on my friends for food and a small old-age pension.

Because of my language and the pantomime with which most Europeans accompany their speech, I was catalogued as a heavy.

Women have a predestination to suffering.

Circumstances made me the theatrical personality I am, which many people believe is also a part of my personal life.

Death, the final, triumphant lover.

I have lived too completely. I think I have known every human emotion.

When a film company is in the red they come to me. Always it is the same.

It is women who bear the race in bloody agony. Suffering is a kind of horror. Blood is a kind of horror. Women are born with horror in their very bloodstream. It is a biological thing.

It took me years to live down Dracula and convince the film producers that I would play almost any other type of role.

Actors were exploited no less by the capitalist managers than they were by the state.

I’d like to quit the supernatural roles and play just an interesting, down-to-earth person.

In Hungary, acting is a career for which one fits himself as earnestly as one studies for a degree in medicine, law, or philosophy.

I enjoy my work. I haven’t been an actor for 30 years without getting pleasure out of the profession.

A screen actor is compensated in the knowledge that millions will see his performance at one time, where only hundreds will see it on the stage.

The audience has always been my best director.

Ive never actually watched another director work.

Most directors have little lists in their heads of people they really want to work with.

A lot of directors prefer the solitude of the editing process, but I revel in the craziness of what a film set is.

Directors have a tendency to use their hands like orchestra conductors.

Actors aren’t stupid, mostly, and if there’s a sensibility and an aesthetic that a director’s going for, if you’re aware of that too, you can do things to help that.

I think the writer’s quite low down in the hierarchy really. But the fact that they took the piss out of Nicholas [Hynter] who, besides being the director, is also director of the National Theatre is, I’d have thought, slightly more risky.

Exodus is a very large organization. My board of directors is supportive of me as the president of Exodus and are very much involved in my decision-making and those types of things.