Jeffrey Tambor Quotes

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Jeffrey Tambor

Profession : Actor

Birth : July 8, 1944

I actually got thrown into my Bar Mitzvah because my teacher, my Cantor, did not tell me that they would all say 'amen' at the end of each, for want of a better word, paragraph. And that threw me completely. I almost went into an Ella Fitzgerald sort of scat.

Jeffrey Tambor

I went bald when I was 18. My father cried. He cried about many things. But it allowed me to play older men in summer stock.

Jeffrey Tambor

I think of everything as comedy, but I don't think of it in terms of sitcom comedy, I think of it in terms of Chekhov comedy. Chekhov called his plays comedies. There's always a mixture of a laugh with sadness. So the plie to the laugh is sadness.

Jeffrey Tambor

The best comedy not only makes you laugh, but on the moment of the laugh, you learned.

Jeffrey Tambor

You can send a lot of instruction through laughter.

Jeffrey Tambor

When I did the pilot, Mort was very real to me. When I got through with the ten weeks, Maura is even more real to me.

Jeffrey Tambor

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is part of our constitutional rights and it belongs to everybody.

Jeffrey Tambor

I worked at The Old Globe Theater under the great baton of Craig Noel. One of the great theater heroes that we have. He was so great and so inspirational. I think I did 'Antony and Cleopatra' and 'The Taming of the Shrew'. I lived in Ocean Beach, and my rent was $140 a month.

Jeffrey Tambor

The real road, to me, was within the actor, within myself, within my own personality. How much Jeffrey can I find, and how much of Jeffrey could I access? What parts of Jeffrey have I never used for Hank or for George or Oscar? - and that was a delight.

Jeffrey Tambor

I've done 'Yo Gabba Gabba!' I've done... oh, it's not called 'Rapunzel' anymore. 'Tangled', that's it. Those are both huge.

Jeffrey Tambor

I had a bilateral lisp, and I was overweight. I was the kid who played with the flowers on the ground in the outfield during baseball. I was that kid.

Jeffrey Tambor

'Attaboys' help people. I am huge on attaboy. Confidence is the great ingredient to living and art, with fidelity to self. It's so important to surround yourself with people who give you confidence.

Jeffrey Tambor

I was a young actor who was bald, but at that time, there was a thing on television that - there was a prototype or a stereotype of a principal who was bald and mean with glasses, or there was... the angry boss who was bald.

Jeffrey Tambor

I love this company. I don't know how it was selected. It's a bunch of machers. They mean business.

Jeffrey Tambor

The Emmy should be an ensemble award, too. I kept howling at everyone else's performances.

Jeffrey Tambor

This whole thing about winning and losing is muddy waters. But I can remember, as a young actor, just walking around this city and not being able to get arrested.

Jeffrey Tambor

As my manager says, 'These are wonderful problems.'

Jeffrey Tambor

My part had three lines. I said, 'You look wonderful, sir,' three times. All my friends said, 'Do not take that role - and do not understudy. You'll regret it the rest of your life.' I did both of those things, and I've never regretted it once.

Jeffrey Tambor

And I'd watch George C. Scott from backstage. He was one of my mentors.

Jeffrey Tambor

I remember going to Bob Preston's dressing room because I was losing a laugh - as you do in a long run. He said, 'Give me the script. That's where you're going off the road.' That's comedy. It's never the line itself; it's in the foundation.

Jeffrey Tambor