“It can take me forever to choose the right coffee cup in the morning. And it does make a difference!”
― Joel Grey
“I love ‘Cabaret’ and ‘George M!’ They’re both incredible as far as I’m concerned.”
― Joel Grey
“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.”
― Joel Grey
“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.”
― Joel Grey
“I was small growing up, and to make matters worse, I wore glasses, and my mother dressed me in attention-getting outfits. I was a target of bullies.”
― Joel Grey
“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.”
― Joel Grey
“There’s a civility that has always been a part of me.”
― Joel Grey
“I am concerned about the musical theater, selfishly, because I love it.”
― Joel Grey
“I don’t like to bad-mouth other shows, but I was very disturbed after seeing ‘Starlight Express.’ It had very little to do with musical comedy as I know it. It had to do with sound and spectacle and records and technology and amplification.”
― Joel Grey
“I’m always interested in the challenge of doing something new.”
― Joel Grey
“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.”
― Joel Grey
“I was totally delighted, interested in, and amused by my stint on ‘Voyager.’”
― Joel Grey
“Theater is the most important thing in life for me.”
― Joel Grey
“I really didn’t feel that my motion picture career was going the way I wanted it to go.”
― Joel Grey
“Satisfying as that ‘Cabaret’ role was, it is not the only thing I do. But Hollywood is somewhat limited in its perspective about what it is you do or don’t do.”
― Joel Grey
“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.”
― Joel Grey
“My father was a musician and wanted me to study piano. I had no interest.”
― Joel Grey
“Larry Hagman and I are very old friends.”
― Joel Grey
“There’s a lot going on in the world that’s very disturbing: rewriting the Holocaust; pseudo-historians rewriting history itself. And we’re dealing with a terrorist mentality that involves whole nations.”
― Joel Grey
“I really did start a whole way of thinking about musical theater.”
― Joel Grey
“I always sort of saw myself as different from a musician.”
― Joel Grey
“My grandparents from the old country, Latvia, were all musical on my father’s side.”
― Joel Grey
“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.”
― Joel Grey
“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.”
― Joel Grey
“’Cabaret’ was the most commercial success that I’ve been involved in.”
― Joel Grey
“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.”
― Joel Grey
“I’ve always wanted to do, oddly enough, a live variety show, but only with a live audience.”
― Joel Grey
“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.”
― Joel Grey
“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 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.”
― Joel Grey
“I don’t like labels, but if you have to put a label on it, I’m a gay man.”
― Joel Grey
“I came to realize, along with being attracted to girls, I had similar feelings for boys.”
― Joel Grey
“I always wanted children, to be a dad. That was as important to me as being an actor.”
― Joel Grey
“I was traumatized by a lot of childhood stuff. I felt that I was bad somewhere, starting with my birth.”
― Joel Grey
“Being at the Play House, the only way I could see my life was that I would be an actor in a company, doing a lead role one week, a small part the next. That’s what I thought I was going to be.”
― Joel Grey
“I think everything that happens to you becomes a part of what you end up doing and being and standing for.”
― Joel Grey
“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.’”
― Joel Grey
“Eight times a week, I got to be a gay man, a remarkable gay man, and every night, that felt as full, as true, as passionate, and as authentic as I ever felt in my life.”
― Joel Grey
“I never learned to speak Yiddish, ever.”
― Joel Grey
“I had begun my professional career when I was 9 years old at the Cleveland Play House, and it was a very specific, real theater sort of like, you know, in England and the Berliner Ensemble – very devoted people. And I thought the theater was the greatest place I had ever been, and that’s what I wanted to do.”
― Joel Grey
“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.’”
― Joel Grey
“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.”
― Joel Grey
“The theater is the place where people create ideas and send messages out, and you learn, and I think it’s a fair venue for disagreement and enlightenment.”
― Joel Grey
“If you don’t tell the whole truth about yourself, life is a ridiculous exercise.”
― Joel Grey
“The fundamental job of the actor is to tell about the human condition, to be a voice for the truest ideas and deepest emotions.”
― Joel Grey
“I wasn’t sure what it would take to make it in the theater, but despite the struggle, that was all I ever really wanted.”
― Joel Grey
“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.”
― Joel Grey
“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.”
― Joel Grey
“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.”
― Joel Grey
“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.”
― Joel Grey
“Often, entertainment goes deeper, in terms of ideas, than the newspapers.”
― Joel Grey
“I used to eat Danny Kaye’s food. I had his Chinese and Italian meals, and that was as good as it gets.”
― Joel Grey
“When you cast cross-racially, another dimension is added.”
― Joel Grey
“I’m enormously sympathetic to talented people who have few roles to choose from.”
― Joel Grey
“I’d like to direct something at the Public.”
― Joel Grey
“The Yiddish language is so rich and unusual that I’ve always been hooked on its sounds, although I don’t speak it.”
― 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.’”
― Joel Grey
“There is nothing I enjoy more than doing my show.”
― Joel Grey
“I really do enjoy everything I do. I just do so much.”
― Joel Grey
“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.”
― Joel Grey
“You are either visual or you’re not.”
― Joel Grey
“I’m about possibilities and about surprises and the life force.”
― Joel Grey
“There was always this idea that I would work on Shakespeare and some of the other classics, but it never came to be.”
― Joel Grey
“I don’t look like Brad Pitt.”
― Joel Grey
“I thought ‘The Humans’ was a beautiful play.”
― Joel Grey
“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.”
― Joel Grey
“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.”
― Joel Grey
“I was accepted to UCLA, but at the same time, I had a job offer at Chicago’s Chez Paree nightclub. My father, being a practical man, felt I should take the job.”
― Joel Grey
“I’m essentially an actor. And the fact that I got away with singing and dancing for a long time is still a miracle to me.”
― Joel Grey
“When I read a script, the important thing is that I can connect in some way with that character and have some idea from what his story is that I can tell that story too, because that’s all acting is, is storytelling.”
― Joel Grey
“Acting always affects every part of your life because it’s such a solitary, lonely, and thrilling circumstance that you’re taking on someone else’s character and that responsibility. It’s exhausting.”
― Joel Grey
“I saw Lee J. Cobb in ‘Death of a Salesman’ when I was about 15, and I couldn’t get up from my seat in the theater; I was so… I was weeping, and I was upset. And I find that people are still like that in a similar circumstance in a theater today, where they just can’t get up. It’s too heartbreaking.”
― Joel Grey
“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.”
― Joel Grey
“I did a benefit one night at Carnegie Hall with Bono and Lady Gaga and Rufus Wainwright.”
― Joel Grey
“Whenever I get to work with great actors, I’m happy.”
― Joel Grey
“Collaboration is about listening to someone else and adding your own feelings about that thought.”
― Joel Grey
“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.”
― Joel Grey
“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.”
― Joel Grey
“I spent 15 years of not being able to get a job creating a role on Broadway.”
― Joel Grey
“For a few years, there were three shows running on Broadway that I had all opened: ‘Chicago,’ ‘Wicked’ and ‘Anything Goes.’”
― Joel Grey
“I’m very slow. I’m a slow learner.”
― Joel Grey
“I worked with a lot of leading ladies: Bebe Neuwirth, Anne Rankin, Bernadette Peters, Liza Minnelli. They’re all phenomenal talents.”
― Joel Grey
“I fell so hard for the theater. I knew it was a place where you can sort out your life.”
― Joel Grey
“I think there is a lot of loss in being a professional child actor. All of a sudden, you start to want to be an adult at the age of 8 or 9. I never did kid stuff, so to speak, so I was in many ways ostracized by the other kids. But I did get this other life, so it was a trade-off.”
― Joel Grey
“I’m crazy about surprises. I love chance.”
― Joel Grey
“A lot of people have problems thinking of you doing more than one thing. If you do one thing, then you couldn’t possibly do another thing well. Of course, we know that’s not so.”
― Joel Grey
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