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| "When I worked on The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976), Vanessa Redgrave tried to convert me to a form of communism, Trotskyism, whatever the hell it is. Talented broad, but everyone ducked behind a camera when she came around. I asked her, 'Vanessa can you shoot a pistol?' 'Why?' 'Well, when the revolution comes...' 'No, no,' she interrupted. 'Someone else will do that.' Some Trotskyite. She travels by Rolls Royce." - ROBERT DUVALL on VANESSA REDGRAVE |
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| "Then, I thought to myself, 'Darn it, maybe I can't do what Vanessa Redgrave can, but can Vanessa Redgrave do what I can do? Who's kidding who here? - RAQUEL WELCH on VANESSA REDGRAVE |
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| "What seemed like such a nice, simple, artless performance in Superman (1978) was the finest kind of acting. Reeve's timing-and humor-has to be just about perfect to make the character come off." - director SIDNEY LUMET on CHRISTOPHER REEVE (who he directed in Deathtrap (1982.) |
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| "It was my father who told me I should develop my body seeing as how I wasn't born with much of a brain an' it was the only thing I had to fall back on. Then I saw Steve Reeves an' I thought, 'Jesus, anybody can go to school an' become a lawyer, but I wanna be able to pull down a temple, shift a bridge, take on a whole Roman army. ...That's a man to me.'" - SYLVESTER STALLONE on STEVE REEVES |
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| "It's the man's tremendous wit that just keeps coming across. Listen, there's no acting style. Most people just play themselves. Spencer Tracy used to say to me after a scene, 'Did I ham that one up?' If I said yes, he'd say, 'Okay, let's do it again.' There's that same honesty in Burt Reynolds. He's a throwback to the old school." - MYRNA LOY on BURT REYNOLDS (whose mother she played in The End, 1978.) |
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| "He is the one the ladies like to dance with and their husbands like to drink with. He is the larger-than-life actor of our times. He is gifted, talented, naughty-but nice." - FRANK SINATRA on BURT REYNOLDS (and in whose Cannonball Run II, 1982, he appeared.) |
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| "Burt has a quality that nobody else has. He's funny, sexy, glib, likeable and still very macho. But Burt tries to be all things to all people... He thinks that unless he's doing...intense dramatic work-then he's not an actor. But I don't think he's comfortable with that kind of intense emotional revealing. He doesn't like to reveal himself that way in life, yet he's mad at himself because he can't do that on the screen." SALLY FIELD (one-time romantic partner and costar in Smokey and the Bandit, 1977, The End, 1978, Hooper, 1978, and Smokey and the Bandit II, 1980) on BURT REYNOLDS in 1985.) |
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| "She's one of the reasons I left show business... We'd give her a new scene, and she couldn't remember the lines. She couldn't sing and, surprisingly, she couldn't do the dances. And all through the horror of it all she was smiling and grinning and unreal. There's no denying her appeal to the public. That's what makes her so dangerous. She almost smiled me into bankruptcy." - PAUL GREGORY (producer of the 1959 musical The Pink Jungle, which closed prior to its scheduled 1960 Broadway opening and involved at least seven Actors Equity motions) on GINGER ROGERS |
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| "Don't let her fool you. Tangle with her and she'll shingle your attic." BOB HOPE on JANE RUSSELL (his costar in The Paleface, 1948, and Son of Paleface, 1952.) |
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| "...One of the best actors alive. But my opinion of him as an actor is much higher than my opinion of him as a man." - JOHN HUSTON on GEORGE C. SCOTT (who he directed three times in The List of Adrian Messenger, 1963, The Last Run, 1971, and The Bible: In the Beginning, 1966, the last of which included a booze-fueled relationship with Ava Gardner in which Scott reportedly beat her to the point of hospitalization.) |
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| "But everything [on High, Wide and Handsome, 1937] became a little bit brighter when I got to know Randolph Scott, one of the finest men in Hollywood... Now a retired millionaire, he's still as handsome as he was in 1937, totally charming and loads of fun." DOROTHY LAMOUR on RANDOLPH SCOTT |
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| "Randy Scott is a complete anachronism. He's a gentleman. And so far, he's the only one I've met in this business full of self-promoting sons-of-bitches." - director MICHAEL CURTIZ on RANDOLPH SCOTT (who he directed in Virginia City, 1940.) |
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| "I think his mother had gained such an incredible influence over him that he virtually abdicated his own rights to any individual personality... Finally, he had to invade other bodies to register at all. He had to inhabit, he was like a ghoul, he had to feast off somebody else! But he did it so well, it became an art. He was not a genius, Sellers, he was a freak." - SPIKE MILLIGAN on PETER SELLERS (his frequent stage, television and movie cohort.) |
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| "Talk about unprofessional rat finks." - BILLY WILDER on PETER SELLERS (who Wilder directed, uncredited, in Casino Royale, 1967.) |
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| "Norma, who I have always like and got along with, was at notorious loggerheads with Joan [Crawford.] You see, she was treated as Queen of the Lot because of her marriage to the boss, Irving Thalberg. Joan had made a lot of money for the company, and I imagine that's what annoyed both of them; it was a competition of who was really the Queen of the Lot." ROSALIND RUSSELL on NORMA SHEARER and JOAN CRAWFORD (all three stars of The Women, 1939.) |
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| "And you can tell Miss Shearer that I didn't get where I am on my ass." - JOAN CRAWFORD on NORMA SHEARER (to the press.) |
