Peter Hall

Father of actress Rebecca Hall with Maria Ewing; Christopher Hall and Jennifer Caron Hall with Leslie Caron; Lucy Hall and Edward Hall with Jacqueline Taylor; Emma Hall with Nicola Frei.
He was awarded the 1999 Laurence Olivier Theatre Award: Special Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Arts.
He was awarded the 1990 London Critics Circle Theatre Award (Drama Theatre Award) for Best Director of The Wild Duck.
A strong believer in reciting Shakespeare's dialogue as verse rather than prose, and keeping the "verse structure" as much as possible.
He was awarded the CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in the 1963 Queen's Birthday Honours List and created a Knight Bachelor in the 1977 Queen's Birthday Honours List for services to Drama.

[in 2008] Actors now think that if they raise their voice, they are being "unrealistic". I tell them, "What you do is unreal. You're wearing someone else's clothes and speaking someone else's words".
I've worked with practically all the great directors, alphabetically, from Bergman [Ingmar Bergman] to Zeffirelli [Franco Zeffirelli]. It's wonderful to be involved in the mystery of other directors' work, because they're all different. But most will know within the first three or four days whether it's going to work. The interesting thing is when it's wrong they have to go on and they can't tell anybody it's wrong.
I love the politics of committees. I love the fact that with any committee if they set out on a certain path there is always a moment in the discussion if you pick the right moment and you have the right case where you can completely reverse their decision. I mean it's a very undemocratic procedure.
The theatre is always dying, always has been, because it's always changing. Change looks like imminent death sometimes. But it won't ever go away because it's live and there's nothing that you can compare it to because of that.
To play [Alan] Ayckbourn properly, you have to dig deep, be serious and then get laughed at. It wounds the personality