Myrna Loy

“I admire some of the people on the screen today, but most of them look like everybody else.  In our days we had individuality.  Pictures were more sophisticated.  All this nudity is too excessive and it is getting very boring.  It will be a shame if it upsets people so much that it brings on the need for censorship.  I hate censorship.  In the cinema there’s no mystery.  No privacy.  And no sex either.  Most of the sex I’ve seen on the screen looks like an expression of hostility towards sex.”

“I have nothing but the best to say about Doris Day.  She was wonderful to me, really lovely.  She sent flowers when I started and remained friendly and attentive.  As I’ve said, it’s difficult when you start stepping down.  You fight so hard to get to the top and then you realize it’s time to gracefully give in a little.  Doris, who was riding high then, never played the prima donna.  I appreciated her attitude enormously.”

“I love Liza [Minnelli].  She is so original.  People speak of her in terms of her mother, but she is herself, very definitely.  A good, strong, unique person.”

“I never enjoyed my work more than when I worked with William Powell.  He was a brilliant actor, a delightful companion, a great friend and above all, a true gentleman.”

“I think Barbra Streisand is a genius, the creativity she has!  And I am very impressed with her as a person.  Some years ago I was on the Academy Awards broadcast, she came up to me.  I was standing in the wings and Barbra walked across the stage to greet me.  Very polite, very nice.  You don’t find many young women who extend that kind of gracious courtesy to an older woman.  Audrey Hepburn does.  And Barbra.  I’ve not forgotten how charming she was.”

“Monty [Clift] was a great talent, whose acting I always admired.  He had extraordinary instincts.  His observations about the script were always astute and correct.  He would have made a great director, which eventually he wanted to be.  ‘Would you ever direct yourself?,’ I once asked him.  ‘Are you kidding?’ he replied.  ‘As a director, I simply wouldn’t put up with all that crap from me.’ Monty was having problems then.  He was full of all kinds of problems, many of them imaginary.”

“Rex Harrison was in a strange kind of mood in ‘Midnight Lace’, no doubt because his wife Kay Kendall had died.  He had very little time for me or anybody else, as far as I could tell; he did his job and that was it.”

“The later ones [the Thin Man films] were very bad indeed, but it was always a joy to work with Bill Powell.  He was and is a dear friend, and in the early Thin Man films with Woody Van Dyke, we managed to achieve what for those days was an almost pioneering sense of spontaneity.”

“[On Burt Reynolds:] It’s the man’s tremendous wit that just keeps coming across.  Listen, there is 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.”

“[On Clark Gable:] He happened to be an actor, a damned good one, and nobody knew it - least of all Clark.  Oh, he wanted to be an actor, but he always deprecated his ability, pretended it didn’t matter.  He was a really shy man with a terrible inferiority in there somewhere.  Something was missing that kept him from doing the things he could have done.”

“[On Tyrone Power:] A lovely gentleman with a great quality of imagination.”

“I think that carrying on a life that is meant to be private in public is a breach of taste, common sense, and mental hygiene.”

“Life, is not a having and a getting, but a being and a becoming.”

“I was a homely kid with freckles that came out every spring and stuck on me till Christmas.”

“I was glamorous because of magicians like George Folsey, James Wong Howe, Oliver Marsh, Ray June, and all those other great cinematographers.  I trusted those men and the other experts who made us beautiful.  The rest of it I didn’t give a damn about.  I didn’t fuss about my clothes, my lighting, or anything else, but, believe me, some of them did.”

“Most of the sex I’ve seen on the screen looks like an expression of hostility towards sex.”

“Some perfect wife I am.  I’ve been married four times, divorced four times, have no children, and can’t boil an egg.”

“Why does every black person in the movies have to play a servant?  How about a black person walking up the steps of a court house carrying a briefcase?”