Education Quote by Jacqueline Bisset

Bisset’s self-deprecation lands because it’s pointedly specific. Not “I wasn’t good at school plays,” but “I always got a role like the March Hare” - a character built on jittery energy, comic interruption, and being slightly out of step with the room. The line turns a childhood memory into a tiny social x-ray: she’s not claiming to have been overlooked by accident, she’s implying she was typecast early as the odd, talky one, useful for color but not entrusted with the center.

That’s the subtext actors recognize instantly: school theater is a crude sorting machine. It rewards the kids who can project a clean, legible version of themselves - ingénue, leading man, authority figure. Being handed “the March Hare” suggests Bisset read as interesting but not “safe,” expressive but not “serious,” a personality that teachers can deploy for laughs without having to bet the production on her. The joke also protects her. By choosing a whimsical, Alice-in-Wonderland reference, she keeps the sting of rejection at arm’s length, converting disappointment into a story about absurdity and misfit charm.

In Bisset’s era, the cultural script for young women was especially narrow: pretty girls were meant to be graceful, not unruly; poised, not strange. Her anecdote quietly pushes back on the myth of the inevitable star. Instead, it sketches a more believable origin story: talent that didn’t present as “leading” at first, learning to survive by being vivid on the margins - until the margins became the point.