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I suddenly think the job of acting is a difficult one. It's not as flip, irrelevant and shallow a calling as I thought it was in the Eighties.

Rowan Atkinson

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Rowan Atkinson
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: January 6
Actor
Comedian
Electrical Engineer
Film Actor
Film Producer
Manufacturer
Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Television Actor
Voice Actor
Mr Bean
Rowan Sebastian Atkinson
Difficult
Eighties
Jobs
Flip
Thought
Eighty
Think
Shallow
Thinking
Irrelevant
Suddenly
Calling
Acting

More quotes by Rowan Atkinson

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I like to relish words and sentences, and phraseology, and there's not much facility for that [playing Maigret].
Rowan Atkinson
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When you play a serious role, as far as I'm concerned, I feel I'm using exactly the same skills, whatever they are, to play the role as you do with something more obviously comic. It's slightly different muscles, but the same skill set.
Rowan Atkinson
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Certainly in the second film [Maigret's Dead Man], which is quite a more unpleasant and darker story, it's quite different in tone and feel.
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The right to ridicule is far more important to society than any right not to be ridiculed because one in my view represents openness - and the other represents oppression.
Rowan Atkinson
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People think because I can make them laugh on the stage, I'll be able to make them laugh in person. That isn't the case at all. I am essentially a rather quiet, dull person who just happens to be a performer.
Rowan Atkinson
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The first couple of weeks of filming were quite tricky for me to find my feet with the character [Maigret], which wasn't helped by the story that we were telling.
Rowan Atkinson
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But I always feel that whatever I do, I could do better. I suppose it is perfectionism.
Rowan Atkinson
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I'm not a naturally funny man. I find that I can only be funny, if I become someone else.
Rowan Atkinson
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To criticise a person for their race is a manifestly irrational and ridiculous. But to criticise their religion - that is a right. That is a freedom.
Rowan Atkinson
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Your services might be as useful as a barbershop on the steps of a guillotine.
Rowan Atkinson
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The clear problem of the outlawing of insult is that too many things can be interpreted as such. Criticism, ridicule, sarcasm, merely stating an alternative point of view to the orthodoxy, can be interpreted as insult.
Rowan Atkinson
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Lord, thy one-liners are as good as thy tricks. Thou art indeed an all-round family entertainer.
Rowan Atkinson
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I'm not looking for anything other than an interesting role to play.
Rowan Atkinson
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The problem with Maigret is he hasn't got a limp, and he hasn't got a lisp, and he hasn't got a French accent, or a particular love of opera... or all those other things that people tend to attach to many fictional detectives. He's just an ordinary guy doing an extraordinary job, in a very interesting time.
Rowan Atkinson
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At the moment, I'm certainly not thinking 'never again', but neither am I thinking 'I can't wait to play that part again'. I'm somewhere in between.
Rowan Atkinson
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But, actually, so many of the clerics that I've met, particularly the Church of England clerics, are people of such extraordinary smugness and arrogance and conceitedness who are extraordinarily presumptuous about the significance of their position in society.
Rowan Atkinson
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I have always regarded Mr. Bean as a timeless, ageless character, and I would rather he be remembered as a character mostly in his 30s and 40s.
Rowan Atkinson
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Of course, some would say if you have a performing inclination, then you should become a lawyer. That's a platform we use, or a priest. You know, anywhere you lecture and pontificate to people.
Rowan Atkinson
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I think in many ways Johnny English is a more believable character.
Rowan Atkinson
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[Maigret] is more internal. I think if we made more of these I might let him out a bit.
Rowan Atkinson