Sam Wanamaker Quotes

Sam Wanamaker

Profession : Actor

Birth : June 14, 1919

What I want is an international monument to the world's greatest playwright. It would be an attraction that would be both educational and an automatic sight for tourists, like St Paul's and the Tower of London. It would be built with honesty and integrity not another Disneyland, but as nearly as possible a replica of the original Globe Theatre.

Sam Wanamaker

The British are much more cynical and regard the idea of a Globe reconstruction as an Elizabethan Disneyland. But the Americans have a real hunger for what they see as their history, their culture and their Shakespeare.

Sam Wanamaker

The Globe is a missing monument. There's no existing example of a theater from Shakespeare's time. You have Roman theaters, Greek theaters, all kinds of theaters, but none in which the plays of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and Marlowe were performed. Scholars feel that it would be of immense value to have one.

Sam Wanamaker

I am kind of a curiosity in England.

Sam Wanamaker

I mean, the Globe is the most famous theater in the western world. The British have absolutely neglected it. It's an embarrassment to them that they haven't done anything about it.

Sam Wanamaker

Through the years, I had became involved with social and political issues, such as racial discrimination.

Sam Wanamaker

Two planeloads of California actors and directors flew to Washington in support of the Hollywood Ten, and some of us, like John Garfield, came down from New York. There's a very famous Life magazine cover with Bogart and Bacall sitting in the hearing room. I was in between them.

Sam Wanamaker

What could be more fitting - or more exciting - than to restage Shakespeare's plays on the very spot where they were first performed, in the shape and style of theater for which they were written?

Sam Wanamaker

It's true that I have sacrificed certain jobs, and it's been a matter of fitting my career into the Globe rather than the other way around.

Sam Wanamaker

I think the Schwontkowski banner will help publicize the construction of the new Globe and probably will also help fundraising.

Sam Wanamaker

It's very difficult to know exactly what a major audience is going to respond to. 'We know they respond to certain personalities. That has been proven by the success of certain people in television who have gone from show to show and carried an audience with them. Apart from that, it's very hard to say what formula works.

Sam Wanamaker

Shakespeare is, after all, Britain's greatest poet and dramatist.

Sam Wanamaker

Of course, the Globe will be an international educational center as well as a theater.

Sam Wanamaker

This is more than just the rebuilding of the Globe, creating some kind of monument to Shakespeare which he doesn't need. His books are his monuments. But this will be a major center for the study of Shakespeare in performance. We are making the only faithful effort to restore the theater in every respect as close to the original as possible.

Sam Wanamaker

Now I do perhaps three films or 17 TV movies a year.

Sam Wanamaker

What would the world say if the Globe, now that it has at last been found, is not excavated?

Sam Wanamaker

The Ides of March? That doesn't worry me.

Sam Wanamaker

In my teens, I saw a terrible production of 'Die Walkuere.' To a person of 15, it was just awful, and it put me off for many years. Eventually I became an opera-goer, if not an opera buff.

Sam Wanamaker

The only thing that I can contribute as director is to work with the performers in a way that brings out the drama.

Sam Wanamaker

I became a producer because of projects I wanted to pursue and develop as a director or actor.

Sam Wanamaker