James Woods Net Worth

James Woods's Quotes

• My parents loved each other. I was raised in a house of total love and respect. My dad worked very hard and my mother was incredibly devoted to him. I can unequivocally, without any peradventure of doubt, tell you that I was raised with the kind of love that we only dream of. My mother and my father loved me and my brother like we love the air we breathe--out of necessity. It was a necessity for them to love us in some deep inner genetic calling in their hearts and minds and souls. I have that as a standard.
• I was really bright as a kid and tested well, and it was clear that I was going to get scholarships to any schools I wanted. My dad always said I could be an engineer; at that time it was the elite of society: steady job, working in science, which was then the answer to every problem we had. It was kind of a mandate. Kind of a dream he had for me.
• "It was a very wrenching and painful decision for me--in my senior year at MIT, on high dean's list and full scholarships--to decide that maybe I wanted to be an artist. I think it is actually something that my father would understand. Whether I'm making 30 grand a day or union scale, I have found something that I truly love, and that is something he would have admired." - On leaving school to go to NYC and become an actor.
• I always have a rule that acting is acting and truth is truth and you just go out there and you do it. But what happens in each medium is that you have other responsibilities. The acting remains the same, but each medium dictates assuming other halves to make the acting work. When I'm working on a film, I just play the absolute purity of the moments. I don't worry about the pacing, because the pacing is going to be dictated by the director and the editor. On the stage I have to give pacing to the play. As an actor, you, in fact, become the editor of the piece, in terms of the timing. You are required to engineer the pace yourself. In television, everything is in so close, that you realize that most of what you do has to register in your thought process.
• A cardinal rule of being a movie star, according to the agents and all the people who have wisdom, is that you should be aloof, do very little press and you shouldn't ever get on television. I don't think there is a piece of political film making in the United States that is a good as, let alone better than, Citizen Cohn (1992). Let's assume that I am not even in the picture. I mean, just the writer of the piece, David Franzoni. I look at Promise (1986), written by Richard Friedenberg and directed by Glenn Jordan, a wonderful director. Forgetting that I am in it, just looking at the material itself, My Name Is Bill W. (1989) would not have had the same impact if it were a feature film; it would have come and gone. But on television, 25 million people get to watch it all at the same time. So television has a power all its own and it has an allure all its own, and I think that television often deals with more meaningful subjects than many feature films do.

Interesting Facts about James Woods

1. Received his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 7021 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California on October 15, 1998.
2. A reserve officer in the Los Angeles Police Department.
3. Fired his agent for not telling him of Quentin Tarantino's offer to star as Mr. Orange/Freddie in Reservoir Dogs (1992).
4. Majored in Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
5. Older brother of actor Michael Jeffrey Woods.
6. Member of the Theta Delta Chi fraternity.
7. 1997: Was engaged to actress Missy Crider; they met when she played his daughter in the television movie Jane's House (1994).
8. 2001: While on a commercial flight from Boston to Los Angeles in August, he noticed a group of men acting suspiciously on the plane and informed a flight attendant that he felt they were planning to hijack the plane. He has thus been in several interviews with FBI agents since the September 11 attacks.
9. Provided the voice of Carl, the straight-laced rabbit in the pet store across the street from a rental station, in a series of Blockbuster commercials.
10. Is ambidextrous (as seen in The Virgin Suicides (1999), writes on chalkboard with both hands).
11. Is the son of a United States Army intelligence officer.
12. The high school in the animated series Family Guy (1999) was named after him (James Woods High School).
13. Visits his family in Rhode Island frequently.
14. Loves cooking and is an excellent chef.
15. Enjoys playing golf.
16. Quit smoking cigarettes in 1993. Played as a man trying to break the habit using drastic, preventive measures in Stephen King's Cat's Eye (1985).
17. Loves photography.
18. He was accepted into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a full scholarship, majoring not in the physical sciences but in political science. He also pursued acting, appearing in 36 plays at MIT, Harvard, and the Theater Company of Boston and also performed in summer stock at the Provincetown Playhouse. He dropped out of MIT during his last year to move to New York and pursue acting full-time.
19. Got his third television role, as Caz in Kojak: Death Is Not a Passing Grade (1974), after Richard Dreyfuss and Martin Sheen had turned it down.
20. Referred to composer Howard Shore as the Bernard Herrmann of the synthesizer.