When my father came out on stage wearing a big cowboy hat and a shirt lettered 'Bar Mitzvah Ranch' to sing 'Home on the Range' in Yiddish, it was his way of saying, 'I want to be an American.'
Joel Grey
My father was Mickey Katz, who worked with Spike Jones and then went on to improvise some successful Yiddish parodies, some of which I perform. My favorite was 'Geshray of the Vilde Kotchke,' his version of 'Cry of the Wild Goose.'
After my bar mitzvah, I started to assimilate, to really not pay attention to my roots. The anti-Semitic experiences of my youth had been very painful. You try to put all that in the past and become a person of the world. I think that's the right thing to do. But it's not right to leave out who you really are. That's a tragedy.
If you don't tell the whole truth about yourself, life is a ridiculous exercise.
My dad was a really funny, really talented guy who had a great success in a limited audience. But from him, I learned that he always felt the audience was entitled to 150 per cent. If he was performing at an event, he'd keep playing until the last person had finished dancing.
My dad would take me downtown, and I'd stand backstage and watch him in the vaudeville pit band. I was 6 or 7. He was a musician, a band leader, a wonderful clarinetist and saxophone player.
I love that moment just before the curtain goes up, whether I'm sitting in the audience or standing backstage. It's full of expectation. It's a thrill that's unequaled anywhere.
My mother loved fashion. She was a beauty and had enough sewing skills that she could re-create the looks in magazines. She also was enormously charismatic.
There is nothing I enjoy more than doing my show.
I don't look like Brad Pitt.
I've always wanted to do, oddly enough, a live variety show, but only with a live audience.
I was so successful in Cleveland, and we moved to Los Angeles, and there was nothing for me to do. All of a sudden, from being a success, I was a has-been at 13.
My father was a musician and wanted me to study piano. I had no interest.
Often, entertainment goes deeper, in terms of ideas, than the newspapers.
Larry Hagman and I are very old friends.
My grandparents from the old country, Latvia, were all musical on my father's side.
You are either visual or you're not.
My daughter, Jennifer Grey, was in 'Dirty Dancing,' which was shot in the Catskill Mountains, where the great old Jewish entertainers used to appear. It was the first time she'd been to the Borscht Belt, and I don't think she's been back since.
My mother named me after her favorite actor, Joel McCrea, and dressed and presented me as her avatar. I'm sure she wanted to be a performer, but when that was impossible, I was her next best shot.
All the things you do, even the shows that don't work, are as much work, but you learn more from the things that are difficult.
I love 'Cabaret' and 'George M!' They're both incredible as far as I'm concerned.
I never learned to speak Yiddish, ever.
Collaboration is about listening to someone else and adding your own feelings about that thought.
That's what people forget about, is that when things are very, very powerful in a sad way, they have that possibility of also being over-the-top, hysterically funny.
The fundamental job of the actor is to tell about the human condition, to be a voice for the truest ideas and deepest emotions.
When I was eight, I went to the theatre, and I remember looking at the stage afterward and pointing and saying, 'I want to do that.' I don't think that's ever changed.
I was already in my early twenties, but I looked much younger because I was fresh-faced and, well, short. So I did songs such as 'Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah' and jokes such as describing current events as 'ancient history.' Boy, did the audience roar at that one.
It can take me forever to choose the right coffee cup in the morning. And it does make a difference!
I'm enormously sympathetic to talented people who have few roles to choose from.
You can be taking two steps forward as an actor, but if a movie doesn't make money, you might as well be taking two steps backwards. It's all about economics.
I don't want to do material that I don't like. I've always stuck to that policy. If that means being out of work for awhile, that's fine with me.
I came to realize, along with being attracted to girls, I had similar feelings for boys.
For a few years, there were three shows running on Broadway that I had all opened: 'Chicago,' 'Wicked' and 'Anything Goes.'
Theater is the most important thing in life for me.
I worked with a lot of leading ladies: Bebe Neuwirth, Anne Rankin, Bernadette Peters, Liza Minnelli. They're all phenomenal talents.
I'm crazy about surprises. I love chance.
When you cast cross-racially, another dimension is added.
The subject matter of the show, 'Cabaret,' was more than risky. And the emcee I would be playing didn't have a single line of dialogue. Still, it was full of possibilities, and it was mine.
I spent 15 years of not being able to get a job creating a role on Broadway.
I never think about my age very much. I've always lived my life the same way, full of excitement and anticipation of wonderful things and the knowledge that some not-so-wonderful things come with it.
I don't like labels, but if you have to put a label on it, I'm a gay man.
I loved being in the theater. It was a place of enormous excitement and happiness and safety and respect and dignity. It was a place where, if you did your job, you weren't a kid - you were a full person worthy of respect from all the adults in the company.
There are problems in doing television that have been plaguing me for years. I really like to have a lot of time, to rehearse and make things as good as they can be, but television often doesn't allow for that.
Looking back now, I can see that my dad was a real fighter. A lot of people thought, 'Why don't you keep the Jewish stuff quiet?' They were anti-Semitic Jews. People who were afraid. People who came here and made it and anglicized themselves and didn't want to associate with their past.
My father was the one who used to stand up in the middle of a number to flutter his lips and make sputtering sounds into lyrics.
I fell so hard for the theater. I knew it was a place where you can sort out your life.
I really did start a whole way of thinking about musical theater.
For me to take a role, I read a script, and I think, 'Wow, I don't know how I'm going to do this, but I want to try.'
When I met Jo Wilder, I fell crazy in love and never thought about homosexuality. And I thought, 'Well, this is what I'm supposed to be doing. This is life.'
I never thought I would sing or dance - ever, ever, ever. My idea was to be Laurence Olivier or Peter Lorre or some great classical actor. I thought I'd be a character actor.
