star quotes | Hollywood Yesterday

(In 2004, referring to King Kong) “He (Merian C. Cooper) called me into his office and showed me sketches of jungle scenes and told me, ‘You’re going to have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood.’ Naturally, I thought Clark Gable. But then he showed me this sketch of a giant ape up the side of the Empire State Building, and he said, ‘There’s your leading man.'”

“Right after The Wedding March (1928), everything happened at once. Sound was coming in, and color was being used for the first time. It was very exciting to be a part of it.”

(About The Wedding March) “That movie meant a lot to me; my heart was right up in my throat.”

(About King Kong) “When my youngest daughter first saw the film, she said, ‘Kong wasn’t trying to hurt you, he was just trying to protect you,’ which was right.”

(About The Wedding March) “I still love that film, Erich von Stroheim was a wonderful human being, and he took a chance on me. I was only 19 when I did the screen test, but he saw something in me. After 75 years, it’s still one of the happiest experiences of my life. And it was a nice part, wasn’t it?”

“I was known as the queen of the Bs. If only I’d been a little more selective.”

“King Kong is my friend. He’s been my public relations man for years. It was an extraordinarily good role, but the richness of the role that I had in The Wedding March appealed to me more and that’s very understandable, I think, since there weren’t many nuances in the King Kong role. That was a fantasy, and there was a broadness to it that seemed unreal.”

Barbara Stanwyck – Lady of Burlesque

“I’m a tough old broad from Brooklyn. I intend to go on acting until I’m ninety and they won’t need to paste my face with make-up.”

(Referring to director Frank Capra) “Eyes are the greatest tool in film. Mr. Capra taught me that. Sure, it’s nice to say very good dialogue, if you can get it. But great movie acting – watch the eyes!”

“Put me in the last fifteen minutes of a picture and I don’t care what happened before. I don’t even care if I was IN the rest of the damned thing – I’ll take it in those fifteen minutes.”

“My only problem is finding a way to play my fortieth fallen female in a different way from my thirty-ninth.”

(About the fact that her fiancé, Robert Taylor, at 28, was four years younger than she was)”The boy’s got a lot to learn and I’ve got a lot to teach.”

“I couldn’t remember my name for weeks. I’d be at the theater and hear them calling, ‘Miss Stanwyck, Miss Stanwyck,’ and I’d think, ‘Where is that dame? Why doesn’t she answer? By crickie, it’s me!'”

“Egotism – usually just a case of mistaken nonentity.”

“The more you kick something that’s dead, the worse it smells.”

(about acting) “Just be truthful – and if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” (apparently advice she gave to Fred MacMurray)

“Attention embarrasses me. I don’t like to be on display.”

“Career is too pompous a word. It was a job and I have always felt privileged to be paid for doing what I love doing.”

(about a boring party) “It was a fete worse than death.”

(on filming Titanic, 1953) “The night we were making the scene of the dying ship in the outdoor tank at Twentieth, it was bitter cold. I was 47 feet up in the air in a lifeboat swinging on the davits. The water below was agitated into a heavy rolling mass and it was thick with other lifeboats full of woman and children. I looked down and thought: If one of these ropes snaps now, it’s good-by for you. Then I looked up at the faces lined along the rail -those left behind to die with the ship. I thought of the men and women who had been through this thing in our time. We were re-creating an actual tragedy and I burst into tears. I shook with great racking sobs and couldn’t stop.”