Love Quote by Cyril Cusack

There is a sly modesty in Cusack’s line: it’s disarmingly plain, almost too plain for a man who spent his life inside other people’s sentences. That simplicity is the point. Actors are trained to sell emotion without sounding like they’re selling it; “I love the theatre and theatre people” lands like an offhand confession you’d hear in the wings, not a polished credo for a program note.

The phrasing does a quiet two-step. Cusack doesn’t say he loves “acting,” which would center the ego and invite the usual vanity jokes. He loves “the theatre” first: the institution, the ritual, the room where strangers agree to believe together. Then he adds “theatre people,” a phrase that can be affectionate and slightly wry at once. Anyone who’s worked around theatre knows the type: obsessive, melodramatic, generous, petty, brilliant, broke, gossipy, loyal. By naming the tribe, Cusack signals that the mess is part of the magic. The love isn’t sanitized; it includes the backstage weather.

Context matters: Cusack came up in a 20th-century stage culture that treated theatre as both craft and calling, especially in Ireland and Britain, where repertory work and touring demanded stamina and camaraderie. Read against film and television’s rise, the line feels like a gentle allegiance statement: a veteran choosing the live, fallible art and the odd, irreplaceable community that keeps it standing.