Quote of the Week

"I always knew I was a poet."

Charlie Chaplin to Garson Kanin, when asked if his status as a great figure of the arts surprised him, 1938

Quote of the Week

"If Bess and I had a son, we'd want him to be just like Jimmy Stewart." - President Harry S Truman after viewing 'It's A Wonderful Life', 1947

Quote of the Week

"If by chance some day you're not feeling well and you should remember some silly thing I've said or done and it brings back a smile to your face or a chuckle to your heart, then my purpose as your clown has been fulfilled." - comedian Red Skelton

If redoubtable Red's never made you chuckle, it's probably that you've never seen him in action; check out this clip from 1949's Neptune's Darling, in which he bumblingly plays paramour to overly amorous Betty Garrett with the help of identity theft, a Spanish-language record and a head injury.

Neptune's Darling is available on remastered DVD as part of The Esther Williams Collection Volume 1.

Quote of the Week

"Some of my best leading men have been dogs and horses." - The understandably man-weary Elizabeth Taylor

















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Quote of the Week

"Lassie was a vicious bastard!"

- Peter Lawford, on his co-star in 1945's Son of Lassie

Quote of the Week

"I was to do something different, and, even more important, I got to die at the end! If anything was going to establish me as a serious actress, I thought, dying ought to do it."

- actress Jane Powell on making the film "Enchanted Island", (as quoted in her autobiography The Girl Next Door and How She Grew)

Quote of the Week

'"If I'd had a child," she said, "and the child got sick and was crying just as I had to leave for the theater, where hundreds of people were waiting for me to perform, and I had to make a choice - the play or the child - well, I'd smother the child to death and go on with the show. You just can't have both, a career and children."' - Katharine Hepburn, 1981 (as quoted by Jane Fonda in My Life So Far)

Quote of the Week

"As for my feelings toward 'Over the Rainbow,' it's become part of my life. It is so symbolic of all my dreams and wishes that I'm sure that's why people sometimes get tears in their eyes when they hear it."

- Judy Garland, on the song she made legendary in 1939's Wizard of Oz

Quote of the Week

"Once in his life, every man is entitled to fall madly in love with a gorgeous redhead." - gorgeous redhead Lucille Ball

Quote of the Week

Henry Fonda warns the host of BBC talk show Parkinson about longtime pal James Stewart's sensational storytelling abilities and penchant for embellishment (excerpts from the 1970 interview):

______________________

HF: If he tells you the story about how (John) Swope(s) and he and I and Josh (Logan) decided we were gonna tunnel under Garbo's fence - 'cause she'd built a fence around her house to make it more private - he dramatizes the story that we run out and dug and started, and we finally hit a water main someplace and it sprung a leak. Well, now, that's not it at all...the four of us sat around drinking and got drunk one night and started talking about 'Let's dig a tunnel under that fence!' We talked a lot about it and laughed a lot about it, but we never left the house.

(audience laughter)

Host: What happened here - when I interviewed him he told me that story, and he actually came up in Garbo's bedroom, I think!

HF: It gets better every time he tells it.

______________________

This is part of a wonderful and very personal interview with Fonda which is included with the supplementary material on the recent DVD release of Young Mr. Lincoln, the first of eight Fonda/John Ford pairings. For a similar recollection of his bachelor days with Jimmy, I recommend reading Fonda: My Life, in which Henry indulges in some wickedly funny tales of his starving artist years, like living on rice and grain alcohol when in between jobs or fending off a clan of wild cats that overran the boys' yard (maybe that's why Greta put up her fence?)

Quote of the Week

I ain't gonna sit in a theater for heartache. I can go into my own room and close the door and look at myself and cry. - Jerry Lewis, on his preference for comedy as entertainment

Quote of the Week

"'America's Sweetheart': That's what Pop called himself - that, and modest." - Christopher Lemmon on father Jack Lemmon

Quote of the Week

""Welcome to the Academy Awards -- or as it's known at my house, Passover."" - Bob Hope, shown here holding an Oscar with a bit of flair in 1942

Quote of the Week

"On the screen...I don't kiss the way you should. I keep my mouth closed. People tell me, 'Shit, Fonda, you can't even kiss good!' Not a girl, mind you - maybe a director. No girl ever told me that." - Henry Fonda, as quoted by Howard Teischmann in Fonda: My Life

Your girl is lovely, Hubbell

"(Robert) Redford told me - I don't know if it still goes on, probably does cause he told me this rather recently - women come up to him and brush his hair the way she did. They remember that. He should be very grateful."

- director Sydney Pollack on the famous scenes from The Way We Were (1973)