“Anyone with a modicum of intelligence and the right kind of physique ought to make a film actor, if they are lucky enough to be told exactly what to do, and I cannot see that the actor for the screen deserves any more credit than a schoolboy who is good at dictation should have for […]
“One thing has always annoyed me. That is for people to say that I was ‘made overnight,’ that I sprang from nowhere into the fame that ‘Stella Dallas’ brought me. Why, I was a star with Essanay when Gloria Swanson hadn’t yet been heard of. I starred in four stage plays on Broadway. For years […]
“I’ve seen a lot of people come and go in this business. Good people, too. When I first noticed that fans tired of personalities but never of pictures, I began to wonder why. Maybe this isn’t it, but movies were made to move. That was their first and inherent appeal. Then sound came along and […]
“I can’t tell you anything about love! I’ve been so busy making love in pictures, I haven’t had time to find out what it’s all about in real life!” — Patsy Ruth Miller The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923). With Lon Chaney, Norman Kerry, Kate Lester, Tully Marshall, Brandon Hurst, Winifred Bryson, Raymond Hatton, […]
“It cost me half a million dollars to learn the value of a nickel, but I wouldn’t trade the experience for the whole half million back again.” – Agnes Ayres Bought and Paid For (1922). With Jack Holt.
“You see, life goes on without the slightest regard for individual preoccupations. You may take what attitude you like toward it or, like most people, take no attitude at all. It doesn’t matter a darn to life. The ostrich, on much the same principle, buries its head in sand. But just as forces outside the […]
“Everyone should see Hollywood once, I think, through the eyes of a teenage girl who has just passed a screen test.” – Gene Tierney “I learned quickly at Columbia that the only eye that mattered was the one on the camera.” — Gene Tierney “I was turned over to the studio’s top publicity […]
“I’m the worst subject in the world to interview on what I know about women because I don’t pretend to know a thing about them, and I don’t believe that I ever will.” — John Gilbert Source: Alice L. Tildesley (1928) John Gilbert, Elinor Glyn, and Aileen Pringle pose for a candid […]
“We were pioneers in a brand-new medium. Everything’s fun when you’re young.” — Mary Pickford “In the Valentine Stock Company when she was five years old, the man who owned the company asked to have her for a part he had in mind. He said, ‘I think you could do it, Mary,’ and Mary said, […]
Leslie Brooks (real name Lorraine Gettmann), was a Nebraskan, who got her start as a pin-up model, eventually being signed by MGM and then Warner Bros. Both studios primarily employed her as a model, occasionally giving her extra roles, while promoting her as having the best legs in Hollywood. Once she signed with Columbia, however, […]