Daily Inspiration Quote by Imelda Staunton

Staunton is slipping a quiet blade into celebrity culture: admiration is fine, she’s saying, but worship is a category error. By singling out Bette Davis and Vivien Leigh - icons who could easily be framed as untouchable goddesses - she yanks the conversation away from aura and back to craft. The praise lands on the unglamorous verb in the sentence: doing. Work, not worship, is the point.

The subtext is a defense of acting as labor at a moment when “actress” is routinely treated as a lifestyle brand. Staunton’s fondness for Davis and Leigh isn’t nostalgia for Old Hollywood sheen; it’s respect for a kind of professionalism that doesn’t need a curated personality to be legible. “They didn’t present themselves as idols” is less a biography than an ethic: a refusal to confuse publicity with performance. It’s also a gentle rebuke to the contemporary expectation that artists must be perpetually accessible, inspirational, and marketable offstage.

Context matters. Davis and Leigh were manufactured by the studio system, but they’re remembered for something sturdier than studio gloss: Davis’s ferocious intelligence, Leigh’s precision under pressure. Staunton, a performer whose own reputation rests on range and rigor rather than celebrity spectacle, is aligning herself with that lineage. The line reads like an argument for boundaries: let the work be public; let the person go back to work.