quarta-feira, 14 de abril de 2010






Se a minha vida fosse um filme esses seriam os personagens principais! Amo vocês!

segunda-feira, 5 de abril de 2010


Em tempo irei atualizar o blog...paciência!

terça-feira, 2 de março de 2010

Greer Garson- Nickname


The Duchess of Garson

Greer Garson- Trivia



She once broke a dental cap in Trader Vic's restaurant and had to reassemble the bits with gift-shop adhesive.
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She loved a breakfast of orange juice with a raw egg in it.
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"Scandal at Scourie" (1953) was the only Greer Garson/Walter Pidgeon film that did not open at Radio City Music Hall. It was also the last time the famous couple would ever act together.
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Directors George Cukor and Mervyn LeRoy both worked on Greer's 1947 movie "Desire Me." Both tried to make something out of it, but failed. Both of them insisted that their names not appear on the screen, and so the picture came out without any director listed at all, the only major film ever issued without a director's credit.
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"The Valley of Decision" (1945) brought in $8,096,000, the biggest gross of any Greer Garson film, and Greer's sixth nomination for Best Actress.
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Her husband, Buddy Fogelson, taught Greer about the oil industry and named an oil field for her in Palo Pinto County, Texas.
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Greer's disillusionment with "Adventure" (1946), the film she hoped would open new opportunities for her at MGM turned to anger when she heard the publicity slogan that Howard Dietz was preparing: "Gable's Back and Garson's Got Him!" Dietz tried to appease her objections with an alternate: "Gable Puts the Arson in Garson." "They're ungallant," she indignantly replied. "Why don't you say, 'Garson Puts the Able in Gable?'" Gable's sour reaction to the fiasco was unprintable.
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Louis B. Mayer once compared Greer to his favorite racehorse, Busher, calling her "a classy filly who runs the track according to orders, and comes home with blue ribbons!"
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After she shampooed her famous red hair, she rinsed it with a cup of California champagne, brushed it out one hundred strokes, and then tied it up in a net for the night.
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At the height of her career, there were more than two hundred official Greer Garson fan clubs around the world.
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She always carried her own thick red pencil in her bag. Her signature in guest books was as much of a standout as she was.
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She wore a different perfume for every new picture.
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Two of her nicknames during her pre-Hollywood stage career were "U.P.," the Universal Provider, always ready to help a fellow actor with her ready supply of safety pins, mints, and threads, and "Ca-reer Garson."
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"Blossoms in the Dust" (1941) was MGM's fifth movie in full color.
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On July 23, 1942, Greer put her footprints and autograph in the cement forecourt of Grauman's Chinese Theater. Underneath the cement square, a time capsule was placed containing a print of the motion picture, "Mrs. Miniver" (1942), a copy of the manuscript and of the book.
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Her two pet poodles were called Gogo and Cliquot. Gogo got to stroll down a country lane with Greer in "The Valley of Decision" (1945).
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She considered "Random Harvest" (1942) her best picture, not Mrs. Miniver (1942).
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Greer liked to work with cameraman Joe Ruttenberg. He had noted that she always photographed better when she held her chin up and devised a set of signals that would tip her off when it began to dip.
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She kept her weight in check by lunching on hot sauerkraut juice.
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Pre-movie career: Head of market research and information department of Lever Brothers in London.
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Of Marlon Brando she said, "Actors like him are good but on the whole I do not enjoy actors who seek to commune with their armpits, so to speak."
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As a child, Greer suffered from chronic bronchitis, which required that she be confined to bed for six weeks each spring, autumn and winter.
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Winston Churchill said that Mrs. Miniver (1942) did more for the war effort than a fleet of destroyers.
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In Ziegfeld Follies (1946), Judy Garland appeared briefly as Madame Crematon singing "The Great Lady Has an Interview," a satiric spoof of Greer Garson.
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In 1947 Greer received a new seven-year contract guaranteeing her $30,000 a year for life-- whether she stayed at MGM or not.
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Clark Gable hated Adventure (1945), his first movie after the war, and wasn't fond of Greer Garson. He put her in the same category as Vivien Leigh-- English girls taking away good parts from American actresses. "A good time to Miss Garson," Clark said, "is tea time." Adventure was a bad movie, but the studio publicity was worse: Gable's back and Garson's got him! Critics added, "... and they deserve each other." Clark was angry, embarrassed, and crushed. He would never get over the slogan. His homecoming film should have been a blockbuster, but he refused to pass a movie theater with Adventure on the marquee. His fans didn't let him down, however. It was a box-office success.
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Greer was presented a plaque as the Queen of New York's Radio City Music Hall because more of her films played there (14) than those of any other actress; they also played for the most number of weeks (83) of any actress.
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Greer was an Academy Award nominee five years in a row as Best Actress (1941-45), a record no one has topped and only Bette Davis (1938-1942) has matched.
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Garson didn't want to do Mrs. Miniver (1942) at all. She didn't dislike the part, only the idea that she'd have to play the mother of a grown son, something which in the 1940s could dash chances of ever again playing an attractive leading lady. Norma Shearer had earlier turned down the film for the same reason; Norma, however, had the clout to get her own way. Greer, at that point, did not.
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Greer often laughingly referred to herself as "MGM's Glorified Mama" - not an unreasonable label, actually, since her home studio of MGM so often cast her as a wise and compassionate wife and/or mother. She was the movies' beloved Mrs. Chips, Mrs. Gladney, Mrs. Miniver, Mrs. Parkington, Madame Curie and Mrs. Forsyte, to name a few, including the wives of Julius Caesar and F.D.R..
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Garson formed an attractive romantic partnership with the stalwart and gentlemanly Walter Pidgeon, with whom she co-starred eight times.
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Mrs. Miniver (1942) racked up 12 Academy Award nominations and won six Oscars including Best Picture, Director (William Wyler), Actress (Garson) and Supporting Actress (Teresa Wright), plus an Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award to the film's producer, Sidney Franklin. Garson entered Oscar lore with her acceptance speech, which began "I am practically unprepared." She rambled on for several minutes, leaving one wit to observe that her speech was "longer than her performance." As the legend grew, some witnesses with faulty memories claimed that she spoke for over an hour.
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In 1952, she accepted the Oscar for best actress in a leading role on behalf of Vivien Leigh. In 1962, she accepted the Oscar for best actress in a leading role on behalf of Sophia Loren.
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Greer Garson- Personal Cotes


"I think that women can be a tremendous force in the world. If it were up to women there would always be peace... women don't want war. Squabbles maybe, but not war!"

"I've been offered nymphomaniacs, kleptomaniacs, pyromaniacs, homicidal maniacs and just plain maniacs."

"I dislike bullfights, political arguments, bouillabaisse, hamburgers-- they give me indigestion-- and horse-racing."

"I think the mirror should be tilted slightly upward when it's reflecting life-- toward the cheerful, the tender, the compassionate, the brave, the funny, the encouraging-- and not tilted down to the troubled vistas of conflict."

"It's my husband who does the doing, I just do the talking."

"In a way it's too bad I had to be a 'movie star,' because it didn't allow me to be the actress I wanted to be."

"Gracious is a word that has haunted me all my life. I abhor it. The only things I'm allergic to are the words 'gracious' and caraway. I would much rather be thought of as zesty, mischievous or serene, although I'm not at all serene, I'm afraid."

"You know an actress never quite finally gives up working but always hopes that the irresistible script will appear someday."

"Give a redhead an inch, and she'll take a mile and a half."

"Life is so exciting that one life seems hardly enough to live."

"The screen's main function, I believe, is to give the world beauty and romance, to make us forget our own troubles for a time and send us out of the theater with a lift of the heart."

"To this day, I still think Louis Mayer played Mrs. Miniver better than I did."

"When you can't wait for your ship to come in, you've got to row out to it."

"I was a star in London. I did not come to Hollywood to play supporting roles."

"People are always asking me what it was like during the golden years of Hollywood. That was in the 1920s and '30s-- which wasn't my period. My period, the '40s and '50s, is what I call the romantic years of Hollywood."

"Experiment-- don't be content to stay faithful to one safe color scheme. I do all my experimenting with scarves and try out all sorts of daring color combinations that way, before I venture out with a complete outfit."

"Only the very young who are trying to make their way, who are riding the crest of the first burst of ambition are allowed to be self-centered."

"It's rather mortifying that although I boast of being descended from Viking robbers and bold cattle rustlers, I'm a rotten sailor and terrified of cows!"

"I am very impatient by nature, quick-tempered, and high strung with a tendency to want things done at once, or not at all."

"I only have a few clothes, all of them quite simple."

"I find I like commotion better than emotion."

"One's life is a crossroads pointing in every direction."

"Time is too short. Not enough. I wanted to live a lot of lives at the same time. Only by being an actress could I do that."

"Playing a love scene requires a feeling of intimacy between man and woman and intense concentration. I don't like to look over the shoulder of a man and see the long gloomy sound stage behind the camera, cluttered with equipment and pieces of sets from past pictures."

"Say I'm dreary, say I'm sad. Say my acting doesn't please. Say my films are awfully bad. But don't knock my knees."

"All I know about getting something that you want is that there are three essential things: wanting, trying and getting the opportunity, the breaks. None works alone without the others. Wanting is basic. Trying is up to you. And the breaks - I do know this, they always happen."

"I decided once I was fortunate enough to get away from Hollywood, it would take wild horses to drag me back."

"Starting out to make money is the greatest mistake in life. Do what you feel you have a flair for doing, and if you are good enough at it, the money will come."

"I do wish I could tell you my age but it's impossible. It keeps changing all the time."

Greer Garson- Introduction


Birth name: Eileen Evelyn Greer Garson

Date of birth (location): 29 September 1904,London, England, UK

Date of death (details): 6 April 1996,Dallas, Texas, USA (heart failure)

Greer Garson

"Keep your horizons wide and your waistline narrow."

segunda-feira, 22 de fevereiro de 2010

Kathryn Grayson


Kathryn Grayson (February 9, 1922 – February 17, 2010[1]) was an American actress and operatic soprano singer.
From the age of twelve, Grayson trained as an opera singer. She was under contract to MGM by the early 1940s, soon establishing a career principally through her work in musicals. After several supporting roles, she was a lead performer in such films as Anchors Aweigh (1945) with Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly, Show Boat (1951) and Kiss Me Kate (1953) with Howard Keel.
When film musical production declined, she worked in theatre, appearing in Camelot (1962-1964). Later in the decade, she performed in several operas, including La bohème, Madama Butterfly, Orpheus in the Underworld and La traviata.


Background
She was born Zelma Kathryn Elisabeth Hedrick in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The Hedrick family later moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where she was discovered singing on the empty stage of the St. Louis Municipal Opera House by a janitor, who introduced her to Frances Marshall of the Chicago Civic Opera, who gave the twelve-year-old girl voice lessons.
[edit] Career

with Mario Lanza in The Toast of New Orleans (1950)
Discovered by an MGM talent scout in 1940,[6] her first film appearance was in Andy Hardy's Private Secretary (1941) as the character's secretary Kathryn Land.[8][9] Though she began, in films such as Seven Sweethearts (1942) and Anchors Aweigh (1945), as MGM's response to Deanna Durbin's box-office appeal, she became a star via the films Thousands Cheer, Anchors Aweigh and Two Sisters from Boston. Howard Keel was her partner in three feature films, the remake of Show Boat (1951), Lovely to Look At (1952), which was a new version of Roberta, and the title role in Kiss Me Kate (1953), for which she is probably best remembered. Later, Grayson appeared with Keel in a highly successful cabaret act during the 1960s. She also appeared in two films with tenor Mario Lanza, That Midnight Kiss (1949) and The Toast of New Orleans (1950).
Grayson appeared on television occasionally from the 1950s, receiving an Emmy nomination in 1956 for her performance in the General Electric Theater episode Shadow on the Heart with John Ericson. In the 1980s, she guest starred in several episodes of Murder, She Wrote with Angela Lansbury.
[edit] Stage career
Grayson's film career ended with the classic MGM musical. She appeared on stage in numerous productions including Show Boat, Rosalinda, Kiss Me, Kate, Naughty Marietta, and The Merry Widow, for which she was nominated for Chicago's Sarah Siddons Award. This led to her being cast as Queen Guenever in 1962 in Camelot, a well regarded replacement for Julie Andrews in the Broadway production, before continuing in the role for over sixteen months in the national tour of the United States, leaving the show for health reasons. Grayson had a lifelong dream of being an opera star, and she appeared in a number of operas in the 1960s, such as La bohème, Madama Butterfly, Orpheus in the Underworld and La traviata. Her dramatic and comedy stage roles included Night Watch, Noises Off, Love Letters and Something's Afoot as Dottie Otterling.
Grayson supervised the Voice and Choral Studies Program at the Idaho State University.[10][11]
[edit] Personal life
In Hollywood she married twice, first to the actor John Shelton and then to the actor/singer Johnnie Johnston. Both marriages ended in divorce. Her second marriage produced her only child, her daughter Patricia Kathryn Johnston (b. October 7, 1948).
Grayson died in her sleep at her home in Los Angeles, California on February 17, 2010, at the age of 88.[1]

domingo, 21 de fevereiro de 2010

Many Passions, none regrets


In the end, Ava Gardner said that she was tired of living. Struggling against lung disease and the partial paralysis that was the legacy of her 1986 stroke, the woman whose mesmerizing looks and public life once defined the term screen goddess spent her last weeks inside the sumptuous flat off Hyde Park, London, where she lived with her longtime housekeeper, Carmen Vargas, and her beloved Welsh corgi, Morgan. Exasperated with her failing body, she took little interest in food, and for the first time in her life, she stopped fighting. Plagued by a limp and a weakened left arm, she suffered a bad fall a week before she died, and she lay on the floor, alone and unable to move, until Vargas returned. When old friend Sydney Guilaroff called from Los Angeles on Jan. 20, the once fiery Gardner sounded weak and dispirited. "I feel as if I have pneumonia again," she said. "I can hear the water in my lungs." Then she told him, "I don't want to live anymore." Less than a week later, Ava Gardner, 67, died quietly in her canopied Chippendale bed. After bringing in Ava's breakfast tray on Jan. 25, Vargas came back in mid-morning to find that she had stopped breathing. Sobbing, Vargas called Gardner's physician and close friends Paul and Spoli Mills, who rushed over from their flat across Hyde Park. "It was very simple: She'd gone to sleep after breakfast, and then she died," said Paul. To her friends, it seemed ironic that death took Ava so easily; a lusty, vital creature who had seized life by the cojones, she might have been expected to go out fighting. When the news reached actress Kathryn Grayson, a friend since their days at MGM, "I was furious," says Grayson. "Furious at her for not fighting more. But I got over that. Everyone who knew her well loved her, warts and all." A siren who was wildly insecure about her looks, a star who swore she couldn't act, Gardner had always been a study in contradictions. To the moviegoers entranced by Ava during World War II, she was sensuality itself. But while part of her was the flamboyant temptress whose beauty cowed even Elizabeth Taylor, another part was a country girl who went barefoot, took seconds on fried chicken and disliked anything that hinted of pretension. A loner who felt miscast as a movie queen, she learned to drink her liquor straight—not because she liked the taste, but because alcohol took the edge off her shyness. Addicted to stormy relationships, she was a quick-tempered scene maker who fought and made love with equal fervor. In her later years, she began saying that she would have traded her film career for "one good man I could love and marry and cook for," but friends doubted that she could have made it as a hausfrau. Says Kitty Kelley (who wrote about Ava's entanglement with Frank Sinatra in her controversial 1986 Sinatra bio, His Way): "Ava Gardner probably represented more tempestuous passion and sex appeal than one marriage could ever contain." On Jan. 29, Ava Lavinia Gardner Rooney Shaw Sinatra was buried in Smithfield, N.C., the rural town she had left behind half a century ago. It was a scene that to some seemed eerily reminiscent of the rain-soaked funeral in The Barefoot Contessa—the 1954 film in which she played a hardscrabble beauty who transformed herself into a star and was shot by her embittered husband. Under rainy morning skies, about 50 relatives and a few friends gathered beneath a canopy at Sunset Memorial Park—a drab field bordered by a cluster of trailer homes—where Ava's rose-covered cherry coffin was to be buried in the family plot. Outside the roped-off grave site several hundred fans and townsfolk huddled under umbrellas, straining to see whether any of Gardner's Hollywood friends had come to pay their respects. (In fact there were no sightings, but the 3,000-odd visitors who streamed through the Underwood Funeral Home earlier had whispered about the wreath whose card was signed "With my love, Francis.") Spoken by Rev. Francis C. Bradshaw, the brief eulogy focused on Gardner's small-town background. "She was no saint," he said, "but [her relatives] talked about her authenticity, her genuineness, her wanting to be strictly who she was." Long after the service ended, the curious continued to cluster around the graveyard; afterward many drove to the boardinghouse once run by Ava's mother, Mary Elizabeth (Mollie). Now the memorabilia-stuffed Ava Gardner Museum, it is a monument to the star who began her career in A Rose Dream—the operetta presented by the first-grade class at Brogden School in 1929. Like most of Ava's kin, Bill Grimes never appreciated the story—ground out by the MGM publicity mill—that his aunt was a sharecropper's daughter who made good. Nine years her junior, Grimes remained close to Ava even after she left Smith-field, and he claims that she hated being typecast as a hollow-eyed striver from the hookworm belt. Says Grimes (owner of an auto parts shop in Smithfield): "Those stories really depress all of us here, and they depressed Ava sometimes." By community standards, he says, Ava's father, Jonas, was "better than well-to-do" when his last child was born on Christmas Eve, 1922. Not only did he have the deed to the tobacco-and-cotton farm that he worked with his wife, but he also owned a sawmill and a country store with a marble soda fountain. And while the family lost their land when the Depression hit, they were never dirt-poor, says Grimes. As the youngest of seven, Ava had more in common with her nieces and nephews than with her older siblings. "She was a tomboy back then," says nephew Al Creech, who was born to her sister Elsie in 1925. "We'd play marbles, and she could hold her own. In the summer we'd use mattresses as trampolines, until our mothers caught us.". If young Ava harbored notions about becoming an actress, she never spoke about them to her family. In a letter written to a girlfriend when she was 13, however, she confessed that Hollywood made an early imprint on her. "I always wanted...be a movie star," she wrote. "I still do, but I know I can't so I have about given up hope." Hope was in short supply in the years after Ava entered high school. Jonas succumbed to a lung ailment in 1938, and when Mollie took over a boardinghouse in Rock Ridge, N.C., she put her daughter to work in the kitchen. Money was scarce, and while Ava was already a beauty, she was forced to wear hand-me-downs that drew ridicule from classmates. Shy, lonely, she was ruled with a strong hand by Mollie, who was a devout Baptist. According to Jane Ellen Wayne, author of Ava's Men, published in 1989, Mollie was so protective that she chased away every male who dared approach. By Wayne's account, Mollie once followed Ava when she drove with a suitor to a nearby lake. Dragging her daughter from the car, she delivered a blistering lecture and then marched her home. Later, Ava remembered, "Nobody wanted to take me out. No boy looked at me." In the summer of 1940, Ava was allowed to visit her married sister Beatrice in New York City, and the trip altered her life. Struck by his sister-in-law's unspoiled beauty, Beatrice's husband, commercial photographer Larry Tarr, persuaded her to pose for a series of portraits. After he placed one shot in the window of his studio, it was spotted by a messenger from MGM who presented himself as a talent scout. Tarr saw through the ruse, but he eventually sent another group of photos to the talent office at Metro. Eager to see the 18-year-old in the flesh, MGM's scouts invited her to come to the New York City office for a screen test. As Wayne reported it, the head of the talent department noted that Ava's performance was dreadful but that the girl "took our breath away." Said he: "She was clumsy and uneasy, but we all wanted to go to bed with her. What a woman!" There was indeed a breathtaking lushness about Ava: luminous skin, languid eyes, and lips by Botticelli. Her hourglass figure made time seem to stop for most men. On Aug. 23, 1941, she arrived in Hollywood with Beatrice, who had volunteered to serve as her chaperon. Given a seven-year contract by MGM, Ava soon discovered that studio head Louis Mayer was at least as demanding as her mother had been: Like other starlets in his stable, she was placed in the hands of calisthenics instructors, hairdressers and diction coaches and forbidden to leave the city without permission. Compelled to pose for endless pinups, she was given walkthrough parts in pictures like Calling Dr. Gillespie and Kid Glove Killer. Years after, she said, "I had no experience and knew f—- all about anything, but I had no doubt that I'd be a movie queen." And while she wasn't a smash on the screen in the beginning, she was a major success with Mickey Rooney—the 21-year-old who was one of Metro's hottest properties. When they met on the studio lot, he was dressed in a Carmen Miranda costume, complete with platform shoes, and she was wearing a red coat and a blue ribbon in her hair. "She was the loveliest lady I had ever seen," says Rooney. Besotted with the 19-year-old, Rooney pursued her relentlessly. After a six-month courtship, the two were wed in a quiet ceremony near Santa Barbara. Sixteen months later, the marriage was over. According to Ava, she and Mickey were too immature for the roles of man and wife. "I simply didn't fit into his world," she said. "He had already been through it all, and I hadn't even begun my career." Over the next two years, she slogged along in films in which she was mainly ornamental. She found her escape in romance: After a dalliance with millionaire Howard Hughes, she married bandleader Artie Shaw in October 1945. A strong-willed intellectual with four marriages behind him, Shaw, then 35, worshiped Ava's body. "She was a goddess," he says. "I would stare at her, literally stare, in wonder." Her mind, it seemed, was another matter. Mocking her for being a lowbrow, Shaw sent her to a psychoanalyst who "made me crazy," as she put it later. After her 1946 divorce from Shaw, Ava began to concentrate on her career. Teamed with Clark Gable and Deborah Kerr in The Hucksters, she received good reviews but retained her fragile self-image. "Ava wouldn't even go eat in the commissary because she was so scared to walk in and see Lana Turner and Greer Garson," says actress Arlene Dahl. "She said she'd rather crawl under a rug than climb down some stairs into a party." For all of that, Ava learned to hold her own in a love affair. In the late '40s she met Sinatra and immediately recognized him as her Rhett Butler. Says Dahl: "She told me that she never loved another man as much as she loved Frank." Their courtship was an exercise in glorious excess: It took two years for Sinatra to extricate himself from his first marriage, and the press trailed the two from Las Vegas to Mexico to Madrid. The Sinatras retained few secrets after they wed on Nov. 7, 1951: They drank hard, fought with abandon and sustained a sexual tension that was palpable even in photographs. When Sinatra went to shoot a movie in Escorial and Ava stayed 25 miles away in Madrid, he called her one night while a group of friends were having a nightcap in his room. Over the phone, Sinatra crooned to his wife for almost an hour. After he was finished, there was a knock at the door and in swept Ava, wearing only a mink coat with a negligee beneath. As soon as Frank had started singing, she had grabbed a taxi and driven through the night to be with him. With Frank's career in a decline and Ava's on the rise, the battles grew more barbaric. She called him a gangster; he attempted suicide. And while the marriage lasted only two years, the passion never waned. Says Kitty Kelley: "No one ever loved a woman the way Frank loved Ava Gardner. She was his female counterpart—mercurial, volcanic, jealous. They just couldn't live with it." Ava never married again, but she retained her appetite for domineering partners. "She loved macho men," says Dahl. "She loved them because they knew who they were and were so positive and strong. She admired what she didn't have." In Spain, where she lived after the mid-'50s, Ava threw herself into front-page affairs with matadors, including famed bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguin. Intoxicated by Spanish culture, Gardner learned flamenco dancing and tried her hand at fighting bulls. In 1961 she embarked on a yearlong affair with Claude Terrail, a world-class playboy and owner of the Paris restaurant La Tour d'Argent. By the time it was over, he says, "I had to give up—she was too dangerous for me." The peril began at dusk. Says Terrail: "She was Jekyll and Hyde. It was the drinking. She'd be fabulous from 9 A.M. to 7 P.M., until the mai tais were served. Then it was an entirely different personality—Ava from hell, with whole nights of drinking, wild times, car chases." Later, of course, Gardner would give up car chases in favor of evenings at home. After her career reached its artistic apex with The Night of the Iguana in 1964, she began to retreat; always uncomfortable in front of the camera, she accepted roles in 12 movies in the 16 years before she died. Not because she wanted to prove anything as a performer; instead, she told one reporter, "I do it for the loot, honey—always for the loot." Those who were close to Ava in her final years say that, although she was in pain, she harbored few regrets. A woman who always lived for the moment, he refused to clutter her London flat with mementos. "I don't like all that stuff hanging around," she said. "I don't need to be reminded every minute." Even wrinkles, it seemed, were no obstacle for the indomitable Ava Gardner. "Honey, there comes a time when you've got to face the fact that you're an old broad," she once declared. "I've had a hell of a good time, so my face looks, well, lived-in. You won't find me standing in front of a mirror, weeping."


—Michelle Green, Doris Bacon and Eleanor Hoover in L.A., Cathy Nolan in Paris, Jane Walker in Madrid, Linda Kramer in Washington, D.C., David Hutchings and Dick Lemon in New York City

Show Boat


This is a musical about life on a Mississippi River gambling boat. The story is interesting, but the songs are incredibly beautiful. You will sing them to yourself with delight again and again and again: "Ol' Man River," "Make Believe," "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man," and "Bill." One of the performers on the boat is a mulatto woman trying to pass as white. The story revolves around her romance with a white man. Alcohol abuse and gambling addiction are problems for the characters.

quinta-feira, 18 de fevereiro de 2010

Grace Kelly - Nickname


The Ice Maiden

Grace Kelly - Trivia



Grace and Alfred Hitchcock were soulmates who were involved in a very intense love affair of the mind. After she deserted him for marriage, he called her Princess Disgrace.
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After accepting Rainier's proposal, Grace called her friends to tell them she was engaged to be married but hung up before telling them who the man was. The consensus was Oleg Cassini. No one suyspected Prince Rainier.
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Princess Grace first met French president de Gaulle on a state visit to Paris in 1959. To prepare for the trip, she had sent to the library for a copy of the general's memoirs. However, when she saw how huge the volume was she asked a secretary to provide her with a résumé.

When Grace first arrived back in New York after her marriage to Prince Rainier, she was carrying a large, almost square handbag that she had purchased on the journey from Hermès in Paris. The bag was derived from a piece of luggage once used to carry bridles and riding tack, and it became known henceforward as the Kelly bag.
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When Grace picked up the 1954 Academy Award for her performance in The Country Girl, Judy Garland-- who was nominated for A Star Is Born-- didn't bother to hide her opinion that she had been gypped, sniffing at the thought of Grace Kelly "taking off her fucking makeup and grabbing MY Oscar."
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Legend has it that Marilyn Monroe's engagement congratulations to Grace ran, "So glad you've found a way out of this business."
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When people speak of Grace Kelly as one of the classic faces of her era, it's usually a Howell Conant photograph they are thinking of. His images of Grace vacationing in Jamaica in 1955 caused a sensation and were the making of Conant's career. It was also the beginning of an extraordinary collaboration between subject and photographer that lasted until her death in 1982.
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Grace put her foot down when MGM wanted to hire a voice double to sing True Love in the 1956 movie High Society. She insisted on singing her own track and made a fool out of her critics, because the record-- a ballad performed with co-star Bing Crosby-- didn't just go Gold, it went Platinum.
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She wasn't a good driver and hated to drive a car.
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The location for the 1953 movie Mogambo was full of tall Watusis, beautiful warriors who had been hired as extras, wearing their breechclouts. Grace and co-star Ava Gardner were walking along, and Ava said to Grace, "I wonder if their cocks are as big as people say? Have you ever seen a black cock?" With that, she reached over and pulled up the breechclout of one of the Watusis, who gave a big grin as this huge cock flopped out. By then Grace had turned absolutely blue. Ava let go of the breechclout, turned to Grace, and said, "Frank's bigger than that."
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Gary Cooper said of her that, "She looked like she was a cold dish with a man until you got her pants down, then she'd explode."
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Plunged 120 feet to her death in 1982 after her brakes failed. Ironically, the accident happened in the place where she had shot a scene from To Catch A Thief (1955) 27 years before.
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In Dial M For Murder (1954), before Grace stabs Anthony Downson, you can actually see the pair of scissors she uses embedded in his back.
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Briefly worked as a model for insecticide.
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Had a long-running practical joke going with Alec Guinness whereby each would smuggle an Indian tomahawk into the other's bed no matter where they were. Part of the gag was that neither would ever allude to the fact afterwards."
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She was designer Edith Head's favorite star.
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Nicknames include Gracie and Graciebird.
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The inscription at her burial site in the Cathedral of St. Nicholas, Monte Carlo, Monaco, does not refer to her as a princess. It uses the title Uxor Principis (prince's wife), which is traditional in the House of Grimaldi.
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Cheryl Ladd portrayed her in the 1983 TV movie, The Grace Kelly Story. Grace assisted in the pre-production status.
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In High Society (1956) she recreated Katharine Hepburn's The Philadelphia Story role as Tracy Lord.
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In The Swan (1956) she played a young woman betrothed to a prince! It was her penultimate role. Shortly after making the film she became engaged to a prince in real life.
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In 1993, the USA and Monaco simultaneously released a commemorative postage stamp honoring her. However, USA federal law forbids postage stamps depicting foreign heads of state, so the USA stamp listed her as Grace Kelly, while the Monaco stamp listed her as Princess Grace.
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When actress Jennifer Jones became unexpectedly pregnant, Paramount begged MGM to allow Kelly to take her place in 1954's The Country Girl. The studio initially refused, but she successfully battled for the role. The result was a Best Actress Oscar. Greta Garbo had refused the role earlier.
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When she married Prince Rainier III of Monaco, MGM released a Technicolor film of their wedding ceremony.
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Her wedding gown was the most expensive garment MGM designer Helen Rose had ever made. It used twenty-five yards of silk taffeta and one hundred yards of silk net. Its 125-year-old rose point lace was purchased from a museum and thousands of tiny pearls were sewn on the veil.
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After marriage, she occasionally lent her presence to documentaries like The Children of Theatre Street, a 1977 film about the Kirov Ballet School.
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It was announced in 1962 that she was to return to Hollywood to star in Hitchcock's Marnie, but she later withdrew from the project and never acted again.
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Her uncle, George Kelly, was the Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist behind the plays The Show-Off and Craig's Wife.
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It was while filming Hitchcock's To Catch A Thief on the French Riviera in 1955 that she met Prince Rainier III of Monaco, and the two began a romance.

Grace Kelly - Personal Quotes


"How can I bring up my daughters not to have an affair with a married man, when I was having affairs with married men all the time?"

"I've had happy moments in my life, but I don't think that happiness-- being happy-- is a perpetual state that anyone can be in. Life isn't that way."

"A person has to keep something to herself or your life is just a layout in a magazine."

"I'll be goddamned if I'm going to stay in a business where I have to get up earlier and earlier and it takes longer and longer for me to get in front of a camera."

"As an unmarried woman, I was thought to be a danger. Other women looked on me as a rival. And it pained me a great deal."

"I don’t want to dress up a picture with just my face. If anybody starts using me as scenery, I’ll return to New York."

"Women's natural role is to be a pillar of the family."

"Emancipation of women has made them lose their mystery."

"I don't want to be married to someone who feels inferior to my success or because I make more money than he does."

"I don't like yelling and fighting, and I can't quarrel. Getting angry doesn't solve anything."

"For a woman, forty is torture, the end. I think turning forty is miserable."

Grace Kelly - Her Story


From Screen Princess to Princess of Monaco, Grace Kelly’s amazing life was a fairy tale sprung to life for legions of dreamy little girls and starlet wannabes. Her inconspicuous beginnings as a proper young lady from a privileged family, through some years filming for Hollywood, led her eventually to becoming Princess Grace, Countess Grimaldi, the wife of Prince Rainier III of Monaco. It wasn’t destined to be nothing but sunbathing and baccarat, however; Monaco’s survival depended upon her ability to produce an heir, thereby ensuring tiny Monaco’s right to continued independence from France.
She filled her new role well. In 1958, Grace dutifully produced Albert, their second child-- and an heir. Along with his two sisters, Caroline and Stéphanie, tabloids were well-supplied with fodder for many years, thanks to their antics-- especially those of the two girls. After Princess Grace matured into a steady life dedicated to good causes, due to her husband’s insistence that she abandon her film career after seeing her working in High Society, it became difficult to believe that these three children could have been borne by Her Serene Highness.
Grace’s film career culminated in an Academy Award for her work in The Country Girl (1954), but began some years earlier. Though the family was well off, she decided to join New York City’s American Academy of Dramatic Arts. In 1949 she debuted on Broadway in The Father, by Strindberg. In 1951 she landed a part in Fourteen Hours for Twentieth Century-Fox. Her work in 1952 opposite Gary Cooper in High Noon led to a contract with MGM. 1953 saw Grace starring opposite Clark Gable and Ava Gardner in Mogambo.
Her work with Alfred Hitchcock, however, was to provide the definitive stamp on a rapidly-escalating career. His penchant for casting cool blondes in his cinematic tour de forces provided Grace with unforgettable roles in Dial M for Murder, Rear Window (both from 1954), and 1955’s To Catch A Thief. Her cool, aloof demeanor naturally led to talk of romances with many of her leading men, but Grace knew better how to behave.
Life as a Princess, however, ended tragically. At the young age of fifty-two, Grace died of injuries sustained in an automobile accident when the car in which she and daughter Stéphanie had been driving crashed through a barrier on a twisting road and down a hill. She was sent to her final rest from the grand church in which she had been married many years before-- remembered by the world for her beauty, dignity, and most of all by the quality inherent in her baptismal name.

Grace Kelly


Birth name: Grace Patricia Kelly

Date of birth (location): 12 November 1929,Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

Date of death (details): 14 September 1982,Monacoville, Monaco. (cerebral Hemorrhage after a car crash)

Sometimes Credited As: Princess Grace, Princess Grace of Monaco, The Countess Grimaldi

segunda-feira, 15 de fevereiro de 2010

Nickname


One Shot Liz

Trivia



While still a teenager Elizabeth was the first child actress to refuse Louis B. Mayer a kiss on the cheek during his annual birthday celebration on MGM's largest sound stage.
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Her customary parting present to lovers was a gold watch inscribed: "Forget Me Not."
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Elizabeth's face was insured for $1 million during Ash Wednesday should any damage occur as a result of the extensive makeup requirements."
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Her Hebrew name was Elisheba Rachel.
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Her favorite couturier was Marc Bohan of Christian Dior, with whom she remained associated for decades. Over the years, she purchased a hundred separate outfits from Dior, but whenever she bought anything, she expected an accompanying gift... a certain belt, scarf, or chapeau.
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Unbeknownst to Elizabeth, her husband Mike Todd made an entire series of tape recordings of their lovemaking sessions and frequently presented the tapes as mementos to friends and business associates.
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For the kissing scene in Conspirator Elizabeth wore only a black negligee on the set. According to the press agents, Robert Taylor developed a hard-on during the shooting and it proved a total embarrassment. He tried talking to the cameraman to rectify the situation. "You're going to have to shoot me from the waist up," he urged.
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Elizabeth had two early major crushes-- Vic Damone, the singer, and Peter Lawford, the M-G-M actor born in England.
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As a child, Elizabeth suffered from hypertrichosis, a glandular condition which can cause a heavy growth of body hair. Her arms, shoulders, and back were covered with a thick downy pelt. The infant looked like a little monkey. Although doctors assured her mother the condition would correct itself, it continued to plague Elizabeth for years.
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Between 1947 and 1994 Elizabeth had no fewer than seventy-three illnesses, injuries and accidents requiring hospitalization.
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Backed by a $10 million promotional campaign and priced at $200 an ounce, Elizabeth Taylor's Passion was, by 1995, the fourth biggest-selling women's fragrance in America-- and, with her share of the income, it made Elizabeth Taylor one of the richest women in America.
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In 1983 at typical day at home for Elizabeth began with Bloody Marys for breakfast, wine with lunch, Jack Daniel's at cocktail time, and perhaps a half dozen glasses of wine with dinner.
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From 1980 to 1985, Elizabeth was issued more than 1,000 prescriptions for twenty-eight different sleeping pills, tranquilizers and painkillers by three doctors who were later reprimanded by a medical board.
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For her part in the play The Little Foxes (1981) Elizabeth was paid more than any stage actor had ever received: more than $50,000 a week.
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When she gained twenty-five pounds for the part of Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966), Elizabeth insisted that the press be told that the added pounds were for the movie, and that she did not have an eating disorder.
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By 1963 Elizabeth had won unprecedented control over her image in the movies. She had the right to approve her own costumes, hairstyles and makeup designs; no publicity stills were released without her permission; she had the right to accept or reject the final version of the script and the producer's choice of director; and if she objected to certain takes or sequences, her resentment would not be risked by any studio.
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Elizabeth gifted Michael Jackson with a four-ton elephant named Gypsy for his zoo at Neverland.
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Between her marriages to Mike Todd and Eddie Fisher, Elizabeth was formally accepted into the Jewish faith. When she further expressed her solidarity by purchasing Israeli bonds, her movies were forthwith banned in Egypt; by year's end, the Arab League had gone further and issued an injunction against the screening of all her pictures in every Arab country of the Middle East and Africa.
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Throughout her marriage to Eddie Fisher, Elizabeth continued to wear Mike Todd's wedding band-- Eddie's on her left hand, Mike's on her right hand. The twisted, charred band had been recovered from the wreckage after Mike had been killed in a plane crash.
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When Elizabeth left Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for Twentieth Century Fox, MGM changed the name of its commissary's 'Elizabeth Taylor Salad' to the 'Lana Turner Salad.'
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When she was staying at the Dorchester in London for filming of Cleopatra, Elizabeth ordered chili flown over from Chasen's in Los Angeles, stone crabs from the coast of Florida, smoked salmon from Barney Greengrass in New York, sirloin steaks from Chicago, shrimp creole from New Orleans, spare ribs from St. Louis, white asparagus from the French countryside and fresh linguini from Genoa.
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Her father, Francis, was a homosexual. Hollywood insiders were aware that he was having an affair with MGM fashion designer Adrian, married to actress Janet Gaynor.
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Marlene Dietrich once referred to Elizabeth as 'that British tart with big tits.'
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Shortly after she had completed Little Women, Howard Hughes offered her father a million dollars for Elizabeth's hand in marriage. She cringed at the idea and turned up her nose when Hughes handed her a box of priceless gems. Though shocked at the thought of 'selling' his daughter, Francis was tempted by the million-dollar offer and regretted not following up on the idea.
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Mattel has made a doll with costumes styled to look just like her.
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At age fifteen she was dubbed 'the most beautiful woman in America' by Hedda Hopper.
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On December 3rd of 1993 she spoke Maggie's first word -- "Daddy" -- on The Simpsons.
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She never read an entire script, just her own lines.
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According to Richard Burton, "Her breasts were apocalyptic, they would topple empires down before they withered."
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Burton was the man she fought hardest to keep, and the man she would have probably tried to win back again had he lived.
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When Charles Manson was picked up after the murder of Sharon Tate in 1969, he had a list of Hollywood celebs he wanted to kill. Liz was among them.
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Sunbathed so much during the making of 1963's Cleopatra that the film required extensive color-correction to even out her changes in skin tone.
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When Richard Burton's wife visited the set of Cleopatra, the incident upset his mistress Elizabeth so much that she cried all night and couldn't shoot the next day because of her red, swollen eyes.
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As David Niven introduced Elizabeth, the presenter of the Best Picture award at the 1973 Academy Awards, a naked man holding a peace sign ran across the stage. The orchestra broke into a rendition of "Sunny Side Up."
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Looking at photographs of nine-year-old actor Elizabeth, a casting agent opined "The kid has nothing. Her eyes are too old."
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She was the first celebrity to acknowledge a stay in the Betty Ford Clinic.
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She does not like being called 'Liz'. The reason why she came to hate the name Liz, was because during childhood she was called 'Lizzie the Lizard' by her brother, Howard?
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Her dear friend, Montgomery Clift, nicknamed her 'Bessie Mae'. He said "Only I can call you Bessie Mae", apparently, he wanted to call her something different because the whole world knew her as Elizabeth Taylor.
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Soon after Burton purchased the historic 'La Peregrina' pearl for Elizabeth, he scoured the art market for a portrait of the pearl being worn by its most famous owner, Queen Mary I, aka 'Bloody Mary'. One was found. Upon the purchase of the painting, the Burtons found out that the National Portrait Gallery in London did not have an original painting of their former Queen, so they donated the painting to the Gallery.
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In addition to 'La Peregrina', Taylor owns another piece of historic jewelry, an elaborate enameled bracelet once owned by Napoleon's wife, Josephine Bonapart.
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She received her first-ever kiss - 'politely pecked, like a handshake' - from a teenage co-star on the film Cynthia. "It was humiliating," she said, "being kissed on screen before real life.""
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Following Elizabeth's early film success, their mother Sara set up a meeting for her son with a studio executive, but by then Howard had seen that fame hadn't made his sister happy and shaved off all his hair to avoid being auditioned.
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Aged nine, Elizabeth was earning more than her father - a fact that he found very difficult to live with. "He batted me around a bit," Elizabeth revealed in 1999. But despite his resentment, he was ready to spend the money. By the time she was in her mid teens, Elizabeth was keeping her family in palatial style.
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Her performance in National Velvet is one of her two favourites, the other being in Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?
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Her husband Mike Todd's plane was called 'The Lucky Liz'. It proved very unlucky, because it crashed over a mountain range in New Mexico, killing him.
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When her dear friend, actor Montgomery Clift, was involved in a severe car accident, Liz was one of the first to turn up at the accident spot. He was choking. She put her fingers in his mouth and found an obstruction lodged in his throat. She pulled it out. It was two of his front teeth. Her action saved his life. He later had one of the teeth mounted on a silver strand, which he gave Elizabeth as a token of his appreciation. She occasionally wore it as a necklace.
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In 1985, following the death of dear friend Rock Hudson, Elizabeth took a public stand - the first great star to do so - in support of AIDS research, becoming a tireless advocate through the American Federation for AIDS Research (AmFar) and the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation.
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Elizabeth Taylor's perfumes have been Passions (1987), White Diamonds (1991) and Black Pearls (1995).
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Taylor has four children and nine grandchildren.
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Liz has appeared solo on the cover of People Magazine 14 times, second only to Princess Diana.
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Between Taylor's 14th and 15th birthdays, it became clear that the child star was blossoming into a major sex object, boasting a 35in bust, 34in hips and a 22in waist. She caused censors such concern that they insisted on a bizarre test to ensure decency was maintained on screen. An orange would be placed in Elizabeth's cleavage, and if the cameraman could see the orange, he had to move the camera back. Studio executives known as B.I.s (bust inspectors) regularly patrolled the sets, ordering a higher-cut dress when too much bosom was visible. But as soon as they left, Elizabeth bared as much as the law allowed, loving to show off her developing figure.

Personal Quotes


"I guess the world thinks of me as such a scarlet woman, I'm almost purple."

"Nobody tells me who to love or not to love, who to be seen with and not to be seen with."

"Every time I fall in love, I get married. My morality prevents me from having adventures. I was brought up in a very puritanical family."

"If I believed everything I read about myself in the press, I'd have good reason to hate myself."

"Eating too much is like drinking too much... I do allow myself to pig out once a week, but I always behave myself the next day."

"A drunk is somebody who drinks too much. Somebody who takes too many pills is a junkie. There's no polite way of saying it."

"I know I'm vulgar, but would you have me any other way?"

"More than anything else in the world I wanted a man who could control me."

"Everything was handed to me-- looks, fame, wealth, honor, love. I rarely had to fight for anything."

"No matter what happens, I'm loud, noisy, earthy and ready for much more living."

"I could drink everyone under the table and not get drunk. My capacity was terrifying."

"I'm a survivor-- a living example of what people can go through and survive."

"I'm wonderful at playing bitches."

"I'm glad that in my life I have never cut short my emotions. The most awful thing is to be numb."

"I love four-letter words."

"God knows I've led a complicated life. I don't like chaos, although I sometimes create chaos."

"I want my tombstone to say 'She Lived.' "

"The creativity of homosexuals has made so much possible in this town, in all the arts! Take out the homosexuals and there's no Hollywood!"

"I love being surrounded by beautiful things and I love being looked after."

"My toughest role is trying to grow up."

"I never liked acting that much. It's really been more or less a hobby with me."

"How many Hollywood marriages do you know of where the wife is an actress and the marriage still works?"

"Food is one of my major vices. I like anything fattening. But having double pneumonia is a great way to lose weight."

"I had the arrogance to think I could be a social drinker."

"You can see through celluloid, and it is brittle. Neither of those things is true about me."

"Being 70 is no different from being 69. It's a round number, and there's something about roundness that has always appealed to me."

"Success is a great deodorant. It takes away all your past smells."

"It's not the having, it's the getting."

"I don't think President Bush is doing anything at all about Aids. In fact, I'm not sure he even knows how to spell Aids."

"I don't pretend to be an ordinary housewife."

"My mother says I didn't open my eyes for eight days after I was born, but when I did, the first thing I saw was an engagement ring. I was hooked."

"I've only slept with men I've been married to. How many women can make that claim?"

"I have a woman’s body and a child’s emotions."

"If someone's dumb enough to offer me a million dollars to make a picture, I'm certainly not dumb enough to turn it down."

"Some of my best leading men have been dogs and horses."

"Big girls need big diamonds."

"I really don't remember much about Cleopatra. There were a lot of other things going on."

"Everything makes me nervous - except making films."

"People who know me well, call me Elizabeth. I dislike Liz."

"I don't look too bad for someone my age, with my history of illnesses and operations and all those anesthetics. When they knock you out, it gives you time to catch up on your beauty sleep."

"I sweat real sweat and I shake real shakes."

"Marriage is a great institution."

"You can call me Dame Elizabeth. I've been a broad all my life. Now I'm a dame."

"I think I'm finally growing up - and about time."

"You find out who your real friends are when you're involved in a scandal."

"Richard is a very sexy man. He's got that sort of jungle essence that one can sense." (on Richard Burton)

"I'm a survivor - a living example of what people can go through and survive."

"I've been through it all, baby, I'm mother courage."

Her Story


Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor was born in London, England on February 27, 1932. Although she was born an English subject, her parents were American who were art dealers from St. Louis, Missouri. Her father had gone to London to set up a gallery. Her mother had been an actress on the stage, but gave up that vocation when she married. Elizabeth lived in London for the first seven years of her life before the family left when the dark clouds of war began brewing in 1939. The family sailed with out her father who stayed behind to wrap up loose ends of the art business. The family relocated to Los Angeles, California where Mrs. Taylor's own family had moved. Mr. Taylor followed not long afterward. A family friend noticed the beautiful little Elizabeth and suggested that she be taken for a screen test. She passed and was signed to a contract with Universal Studios. Her first foray onto the silver screen was in the film, called a short, There's one born every minute (1942) released when she was ten. Universal let the contract drop after the one film and Elizabeth was picked up by MGM. The first production she made with them was Lassie come home (1943). On the strength of that one film, MGM signed her to a full year. Her next two films were minuscule parts. The white cliffs of Dover (1944) and Jane Eyre (1944). The former was on a loan to Fox Studios. Then came the film that made Elizabeth a star, MGM's National Velvet (1944). She played Velvet Brown opposite Mickey Rooney. The film was a smash hit grossing over $4 million. Now she had a long term contract with MGM and was their top child star. With no films in 1945, she returned in 1946 in Courage of Lassie (1946). Being young as she was, Elizabeth didn't have to work as hard as her adult counterparts. In 1947, when she was 15, Elizabeth starred in Life with father (1947) co-starring with such cinema heavyweights as William Powell, Irene Dunne, and ZaSu Pitts. Her other film that year was Cynthia (1947). Thoughout the balance of the 40's and into the early 50's, Elizabeth appeared in film after film with mostly good results. 1954 proved her busiest year to date with roles in Rhapsody (1954), Beau Brummell (1954), The last time I saw Paris (1954), and Elephant walk (1954). She was 22 and, now, a beautiful young woman. In 1956, Elizabeth appeared in the hit Giant (1956) with James Dean. Sadly, Dean never saw the release of the film as he died in a car accident in 1955. The next year saw Elizabeth star in Raintree County (1957), an overblown film made, partially, in Kentucky. The film was said to be dry as dust. Despite the shortcomings of the film, Elizabeth was nominated for an Academy Award for her portrayal of Southern belle, Susanna Drake. Unfortunately for her, the honor went to Joanne Woodward for The three faces of Eve on Oscar night. In 1958, Elizabeth starred as Maggie Pollitt, in Cat on a hot tin roof (1958). The film received rave reviews from the critics and Elizabeth was nominated again for another Academy Award for best actress losing, this time, to Susan Hayward in I want to live. She was a hot commodity in the film world. In 1959, she again appeared in another mega-hit and again another nomination for Suddenly, last summer (1959). And once again, she lost to Simone Signoret in Room at the top. Her Oscar drought ended in 1960 when Elizabeth landed the coveted honor at last. As Gloria Wandrous in Butterfield 8 (1960), Elizabeth performed flawlessly in the role of a call-girl who is involved with a married man and who later dies in an auto accident. Some of the critics blasted the movie but they couldn't ignore her performance. There were to be no films for Elizabeth for three years. She had left MGM after her contract ran out, but would do projects for them later down the road. In 1963, Elizabeth starred in Cleopatra (1963) which was one of the most expensive productions to date as was her salary, said to be a whopping $1, 000, 000. This was also the film where she would meet her future and fifth husband, Richard Burton. (The previous four were, Conrad Hilton, Michael Wilding, Michael Todd (who died in a plane crash), and Eddie Fisher). Her next handful of films were lackluster at best, especially The VIP's (1963) which was torn apart by most critics. Elizabeth was to return to fine form with her role of Martha in Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966). The role as a loudmouth unkempt woman easily was her finest personal performance to date. For this she would win her second Oscar and one that was more than well-deserved. Her films afterward didn't approach the intensity of that one. Since then she has appeared in several films, both for the silver screen and television. She also has appeared on a number of TV programs. Her last film was The Flinstones (1994). In February 1997, Elizabeth entered the hospital for the removal of a brain tumor. The operation was successful. As for her private life, she divorced Burton in 1974, only to remarry him in 1975 and divorce, permanently, in 1976. She has had two husbands since, Senator John Warner and Larry Fortensky.

About Liz


Birth name: Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor

Date of birth (location): 27 February 1932,Hampstead, London, England, UK

Sometimes Credited As: Liz Taylor

Elisabeth Taylor


"What do you expect me to do? Sleep alone?"

domingo, 14 de fevereiro de 2010

Seria Natalie Portman a nova Audrey Hepburn?


Em 2008, Natalie foi a escolhida pela revista Bazaar para usar o vestido da grife Givenchy que Audrey usou em Bonequinha de Luxo, em 1961. Na época em que as fotos foram feitas, Natalie declarou que temia não conseguir entrar no vestido. Mas a peça coube perfeitamente.
Natalie odeia falar sobre a comparação, mas é comum ouvir por aí que ela é a Audrey contemporânea. Também pudera. As semelhanças físicas são enormes, as duas atrizes possuem maxilares com traços bem marcados, boca e nariz delicados, estatura baixa e corpo magrinho, magrinho. Além de toda a semelhança física, assim como Audrey, Natalie também faz parte do time de artistas engajados em campanhas de auxílio social.
Na moda, as duas também se parecem. Natalie é conhecida por sua elegância simples. Ela é do tipo que fica extremamente bem-vestida usando um "pretinho básico". Ela sempre adota exatamente a mesma estratégia fashion da eterna musa Audrey: menos é mais.

sábado, 13 de fevereiro de 2010

A princesa e o plebeu


A princesa Ann de Hepburn está cansada da pompa e circunstâncias de suas obrigações oficiais. Uma noite ela foge do controle de seus manipuladores e, disfarçada de garota comum conhece o jornalista americano Joe Bradley(Gregory Peck). Ele vê na princesa a possibilidade do furo de sua carreira, porém à medida que a conhece melhor, sente-se muito mal por tirar proveito da sua inocência. Enquanto os dois passeiam pela cidade, percebem que estão e apaixonando, contudo a realidade das suas respectivas situações pode tornar esse relacionamento impossível. Assim eles aproveitam a cidade e seus encantos, sabendo que o curto tempo que estão passando juntos pode não se repetir.Peck e Hepburn estão excelentes como casal improvável e Eddie Albert está perfeito como o entusiasmado cinegrafista de Peck levado a reboque.

Betty Nickname


The Fifth Warner Brother

Bette Davis - Trivia




She intimidated Marilyn Monroe so badly on the set of All About Eve that Monroe went into the bathroom to vomit after her scenes with Davis. After one particular scene Davis whispered to her other co-stars-- within poor Marilyn's hearing-- "That little blonde slut can't act her way out of a paper bag! She thinks if she wiggles her ass and coos away, she can carry her scene-- well, she can't!"
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She hated colorization of her old films, called it "heartbreaking."
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She called Veronica Lake "the most beautiful person who ever came to Hollywood."
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Davis played twins in the murderous melodrama Dead Ringer in 1964. She had played twins eighteen years before in the romance A Stolen Life.
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Joan Collins claims that she got her earliest lessons in how to play the bitchy, demanding, vixenish Alexis in the long-running Dynasty TV series from testing her mettle against Bette Davis in The Virgin Queen.
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After his divorce from Bette, Gary Merrill took up with Rita Hayworth, who was between men. Once when Gary and Rita brought Michael-- Bette and Gary's adopted son-- home after an excursion, Bette stuck her head out of a second-floor window and called Rita a whore.
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Screenwriters Katherine Albert and Dale Eunson had Joan Crawford in mind when they wrote the screenplay for The Star-- a harsh, unflattering portrait of an aging movie star-- not a stage refugee or dedicated artist but a movie star-- whose whole world revolves around the unrealities of Hollywood. However, Bette landed the part and, in a way, got to portray Joan Crawford.
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She has said that her favorite of all her film lines is the one from her 1932 film, Cabin in the Cotton: "I'd love to kiss ya, but I just washed ma hair!" spoken, of course, in the southern accent she adopted for the film.
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In 1973 Bette Davis began appearing in a one-woman show, a sort of retrospective of her life and career. Her first appearance at Town Hall was a smash success, so she took it all around the country and even to Australia and Europe. The program for the evening never varied. The first half was a series of film clips, cleverly chosen by film historians like Don Koll. the second half had Davis fielding any and all sallies and queries, personal as well as professional. These sessions drew a large contingent of gay men, who delighted in her reminiscences and witty, tart remarks about former co-workers and, of course, her complex relationships with Miriam Hopkins and Joan Crawford.
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Humphrey Bogart was in her first film Bad Sister, but Davis disliked him from the start, and nothing changed her opinion in later years, even when they did good work together.
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Edward Albee wanted Bette and James Mason for the stars of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Albee sold the play to Warners thinking they were to be the stars. Jack Warner had other plans.
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Though a lot of people told her The Little Foxes was their favorite of her films, she didn't like it.
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Hepburn was to costar with her in The Night of the Iguana, but due to Spencer Tracy's poor health, Hepburn withdrew from the play. Bette felt if Kate had costarred with her, Tennessee Williams would have written a scene for them which would have balanced the roles of Hannah and Maxine. In the finished play Maxine (Bette) is the third lead and Hannah (Margaret Leighton) is the star part. Bette stated that she had her pick of either part. She chose Maxine because she thought Hannah's speech in the rowboat to Shannon "about underwear" was offensive. Bette planned to take Iguana to London, but was so unhappy in the play, she left it in New York.
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She said the biggest mistake of her career was turning down the role of Blanche in the original stage production of A Streetcar Named Desire. She had just had her baby and didn't want to go to New York. Interestingly Vivien Leigh won the Oscar for this part as well as for another Bette "almost" role Gone With The Wind.
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She thought Toys in the Attic by Lillian Hellman would have been the perfect vehicle for her and Katharine Hepburn.
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Robert Ryan begged her to star with him in O'Neil's Long Day's Journey Into Night. She refused because she really didn't like the stage.
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Considered her debut screen test for MGM to be so dreadful that she ran screaming from the projection room.
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Her feud with Joan Crawford began when Bette was making the movie Dangerous with Franchot Tone. Davis apparently developed a very bad crush on Tone without knowing that he was having an affair with Crawford. Tone would come back from his lunch with lipstick all over his face from the make-out sessions with Crawford and when Davis found out that Tone was having an affair with Crawford the feud began and it never really ended.
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In October 1941 she was elected the first female president of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, only to resign two months later, publicly declaring herself too busy to fulfill her duties as president while angrily protesting in private that the Academy had wanted her to serve as a mere figurehead.
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When Bette learned that her new brother-in-law was a recovering alcoholic, she sent the couple a dozen cases of liquor for a wedding present.
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Her second husband Arthur Farnsworth was killed in an accidental fall in which he took a blow to the head.
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Her real true love was director William Wyler but he was married and refused to leave his wife.
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Bette wanted to play Martha with Henry Fonda as George in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? but all involved wanted Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton instead.
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Her real Christian name was Ruth. The Bette came from Balzac's novel Cousin Bette.
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Had a legendary feud with Joan Crawford which reached its nadir when she said, "The best time I ever had with Joan in a film was when I pushed her down the stairs in What ever happened to Baby Jane?"
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Bette had three children, one of whom was severely retarded.
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She suffered a stroke and a mastectomy in 1983.
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On her tombstone is written "She did it the hard way".

Bette Davis - Personal Quotes


"Beautiful never. Striking, sometimes, if I'm lucky!"

"I act larger than life; that's what my audience paid me for all these years. If they wanted ordinary reality they'd go out and talk with their grocer!"

"Tension breeds creativity! Relaxation and conviviality breeds mediocrity!"

"We all carry some variety of infirmity or sorrow with us-- let's treat each other kindly. None of us is getting out of our human condition alive!"

"Most women have a special sexual fantasy. Mine was to make love on a bed covered with gardenias."

"If I am representative of those who share my astrological sign, Aries women are the most romantic fools that ever walked the earth."

"There's no doubt about it, a girl's first exposure to sex is a powerful drug."

"I realize I was always in love with "being in love," seldom really in love."

"I see - she's the original good time that was had by all." (on Joan Crawford)

"Why am I so good at playing bitches? I think it's because I'm not a bitch. Maybe that's why Miss Crawford always plays ladies."

"I went back to work because someone had to pay for the groceries."

"I’m the nicest goddamn dame that ever lived."

"An affair now and then is good for a marriage. It adds spice, stops it from getting boring… I ought to know."

"I never did pal around with actresses. Their talk usually bored me to tears."

"I wanted to be the first to win three Oscars, but Miss Hepburn has done it. Actually it hasn’t been done. Miss Hepburn only won half an Oscar. If they’d given me half an Oscar I would have thrown it back in their faces. You see, I’m an Aries. I never lose."

"Gay Liberation? I ain’t against it, it’s just that there’s nothing in it for me."

"Old age is no place for sissies."

"I have been uncompromising, peppery, intractable, monomaniacal, tactless, volatile, and oft-times disagreeable ... I suppose I'm larger than life."

"Attempt the impossible in order to improve your work."

"With the newspaper strike on, I wouldn't consider dying."

"I'd marry again if I found a man who had fifteen million dollars, would sign over half to me, and guarantee that he'd be dead within a year."

"From the moment I was six I felt sexy. And let me tell you it was hell, sheer hell, waiting to do something about it."

"I don't take the movies seriously, and anyone who does is in for a headache."

"She has slept with every male star at MGM except Lassie." (on Joan Crawford)

"Gary was a macho man, but none of my husbands was ever man enough to become Mr Bette Davis." (on Gary Merrill, her fourth husband)

"Sex. God's biggest joke on human beings."

"At 50, I thought proudly: Here we are, half century! Being 60 was fairly frightening. You want to know how I spent my 70th birthday? I put on a completely black face, a fuzzy black Afro wig, wore black clothes and hung a black wreath on my door."

"Acting should be bigger than life. Scripts should be bigger than life. It should all be bigger than life."

"Hollywood's first case of syphilis, I wouldn' t sit on her toilet." (on Joan Crawford)

"The only reason anyone goes to Broadway is because they can't get work in the movies."

"I was the Marlon Brando of my generation."

"I start Bette Davis In Person shows with film clips ending with the 'Fasten your seat-belts' line from All About Eve. Then, I come on stage, light a cigarette, look around and say 'What - a - dump!' Really breaks the ice - people laugh and relax instead of having to revere me."

"I will never be below the title."

"First time was when I was 26 and got married - and it was hell waiting."

"I don't think of myself as a character actress - that's become a phrase which means you've had it."

"Locations are all tough, all miserable. I never left the sound stage for 18 years at Warners. We never went outside the studio, not even for big scenes."

"Men become much more attractive when they start looking older. But it doesn't do much for women, though we do have an advantage: make-up."

"I was never beautiful like Miss Hayworth or Miss Lamarr. I was known as the little brown wren. Who'd want to get me at the end of the picture?"

"I will not retire while I've still got my legs and my make-up box."

"I believe God helps those who help themselves."

"I was never very interested in boys - and there were plenty of them - vying with one another to see how many famous women they would get into the hay."

"I work to stay alive."

"Psychoanalysis. Almost went three times - almost. Then I decided what was peculiar about me was probably what made me successful. I've seen some very talented actors go into analysis and really lose it."

"I've always liked men better than women."

"To fulfill a dream, to be allowed to sweat over lonely labor, to be given the chance to create, is the meat and potatoes of life."

"Strong women only marry weak men."

"Today everyone is a star - they're all billed as 'starring' or 'also starring'. In my day, we earned that recognition."