I played a lot of leaders, autocratic sorts; perhaps it was my Canadian accent.
As for honours, I've had a few along the way, and to be honest, I never expected any of them. I made a good living for decades, and that was enough; that, and maybe a good residual cheque from time to time.
It's been dawning on me slowly that for the past 35 years I have been cast against type, and I'm finally getting to do what I really wanted to do.
In those days, I auditioned for everything MGM made while I was under contract. Not for the roles Elizabeth Taylor eventually got, of course.
I have always loved science fiction. One of my favorite shows is 'Star Trek.' I like the trips, where it drops my mind off, because they give you a premise and all of a sudden, you say, 'Oh!' and I'm fascinated by it.
The reason there's a question mark on my front door is just in case I forget my address.
You know it's very difficult to be an actor, and to have people depending on you to say the right line, at the right time, and to not be able to hear your cues! I can't tell you how many times I would've had to have said What? if I didn't have my hearing aids. So my hearing aids are a life saver, and they allow me to practice my craft.
It's not really that I've been an advocate for hearing aids for a long time, it's just that I've been losing my hearing for a long time! So it's actually very important for me because I'm actually hearing impaired and I simply want to hear better!
Yes, it's true, I've been called the Laurence Olivier of spoofs. I guess that would make Laurence Olivier the Leslie Nielsen of Shakespeare.
I wore that same shirt yesterday playing golf. There goes the Nike account.
To be honest, I never, ever thought I'd ever do comedy. I was so frequently cast early on as a high-born young man with... 'problems' and, later, as a heavy, from black-hatted western villains to the corporate raider to bad cops.
Shirley! Don't call me Shirley!
I've produced, but as for directing, that's a dream that'll have to go unfulfilled.
The violence or the vaudeville style of comedy is a technique all by itself. You get up there, and you are a comedian, and you're doing one thing. That is, you're going to make the audience laugh.
I had to weave and play around with a honey bear, you know, and I could wrestle with him a little bit, but there's no way you can even wrestle a honey bear, let alone a grizzly bear that's standing ten feet to eleven feet tall! Can you imagine? But it was fascinating to work that close to that kind of animal.
