AVA GARDNER (1922 – 90)                      

[On her time at MGM]: ‘I thought I was making fifty dollars a week, but it turned out to be $35 because twelve weeks of the year you were on layoff. It was white slavery, and it lasted for seventeen years.’

[On her marriage to Artie Shaw]: ‘We hadn’t been married five minutes when he decided I should go to an analyst. Artie was a pseudo-intellectual. He had a great oral diarrhea. I was constantly being put down. I was madly in love with him, but I wasn’t treated as an equal, as a wife; I was treated as sort of his little pet.’

[On her affair with George C. Scott in her later years]: ‘George was a different category of animal when he got drunk. He’d break into my hotel room, which he did in Italy, London and at the Beverly Hills Hotel, attack me to where I was frightened for my life, and scream, ‘Why won’t you marry me?’ Well, I would never marry a man who couldn’t control his liquor. Me, I’m a happy drunk. I laugh, I dance. I certainly don’t break bottles and threaten to kill!’

[On her husband Frank Sinatra]: ‘The poor guy was literally without a job. He said all he could do was play saloons and crappy night clubs. His ego and self-esteem was at its lowest ever. And mine was practically at its peak. So it was hell for him. He was such a proud man. To have a woman pay all his bills was a bitch.’

[On her years with billionaire Howard Hughes]: ‘I didn’t know anything about him. I didn’t know about his reputation or his great wealth, or his thing about airplanes and jetting around the world. I just knew that as soon as I got divorced from Mickey [Rooney], Howard entered my life and I couldn’t get rid of him for the next fifteen years, no matter who I was with or who I married.’

[On Marlon Brando]: ‘We went back to his hotel and had some drinks. I wasn’t wearing a bra and he reached over and grabbed my breasts and said, ‘Are those real?’ I said, ‘I believe they are.’

[On her first husband Mickey Rooney]: ‘He came to visit me at the hospital and I heard the ‘Jesus Christ’ routine. He’s a reborn Christian. He kept on about being made in the image of God. What a load of crap!’

PAUL SORVINO (1939 – 2022)                  

[When asked what he thought of Goodfellas, when it first came out in 1990, he said]: ‘I thought it was boring, excessively violent, and not a good movie. I thought I was boring; I thought that I had hurt my career; I thought that this movie should not have been made and it’s not a good movie.’[He then said, three hours later, after thinking more about it]: ‘Do you know, I’m kind of coming through a clearing here, and I’m thinking that’s not a boring movie. That’s a good movie. That’s a great movie, maybe, and I’m really good in it!’

JACK HAWKINS (1910 – 73)                    

[Replying to criticisms, especially from the Field Marshall’s widow, of his portrayal of General Sir Edmund Allenby in the film Lawrence of Arabia (1962)]: ‘I agree that the character has been slanted slightly, but Lady Allenby must remember that this is a film about Lawrence – not the Field Marshall.’

LEE GRANT (1925 – )                                         

[Oscar-nominated four times (one win for Shampoo (1975), and due to turn ninety-seven on October 31, 2022, Lee was black-listed by the HUAC in 1951 for refusing to testify against her husband, black-listed playwright/screen writer Arnold Manoff, and, consequently, got very little work for about twelve years]: ‘I’ve been married to one Marxist and one fascist, and neither one would take the garbage out.’

JERRY MATHERS (1948 – )                      

[On the death of Barbara Billingsley who played his mother in the fifties TV sitcom Leave it to Beaver (1957-63), in which he portrayed the title character, ‘Beaver’ Cleaver’]: ‘I am deeply saddened by the loss of my dear friend and lifetime mentor Barbara Billingsley. She will live in the hearts of her fans as a wonderful actress and be remembered by her friends as a gracious lady. She will be deeply missed by all of her family, friends, fans, and especially by me.’

GLYNIS JOHNS (1923 – )                           

[The daughter of actor Mervyn Johns, with whom she appeared in The Halfway House (1944), (and later in 1960’s The Sundowners), was asked, in 1946, for her views on nepotism in the industry]: ‘Relatives cannot help you in the studios. You stand or fall on your own efforts. My father and I have only ever worked on one picture together – that was The Halfway House– and the producer was casting a father and daughter. Perhaps, it was natural that he chose us, but my father did not get me the job, neither did I get him his.’

SIMON WARD (1941 – 2012)                     

The highpoint of Simon’s movie career was his portrayal of Winston Churchill in Young Winston (1972). Sadly, Simon passed away in 2012, a victim of a rare type of blood cancer that produces too many red blood cells that attack the bone marrow. Its opposite number, leukemia, produces too many white ones.] ‘I didn’t look right for American movies. I would have ended up playing depressed gay marquises. I was too young for the butler. I was not craggy enough for the conventional leading man.’

DJIMON HOUNSOU (1964 – )                    

[One of Russell Crowe’s co-stars in Gladiator (2000) Djimon hails from Benin in Africa]: ‘I feel like Africans are too often portrayed as people on the National Geographic channel: the image is of an African man in a loincloth chasing a gazelle. It’s not intentionally racist; I wouldn’t call it racist at all. It’s a lack of understanding another culture.’

BRAD DEXTER (1917 – 2002)                   

[He played Harry Luck in The Magnificent Seven (1960), the one of the ‘seven’ who was forever trying to find out where the treasure, or gold or silver mine was located near the village]: ‘I’m the one from The Magnificent Seven nobody remembers’.