Seraphic Secret

Robert J. Avrech: Emmy Award winning screenwriter. Movie fanatic. Helplessly and hopelessly in love with my wife since age nine.

Lillian Gish

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“Hollywood is like life, you face it with the sum total of your equipment.”
—Joan Crawford

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Lillian Gish Purged by Bowling Green State University

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Lillian Gish, among cinema’s early pioneers and one of our greatest actresses.

Lillian Gish was one of the most important actors in movie history.

She was there at the beginning of moving pictures working with D.W. Griffith, inventing the grammar of film, perfecting the new style of acting for the motion picture camera. She was Hollywood’s first great actress. Her film career lasted for 75 years from 1912 to her last film The Whales of August on 1987. She passed away in 1993 at the age of 99.

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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Anna Lee in How Green was My Valley, 1939. Lee was among the most prominent female members of the John Ford stock company. Ford's pate name for her was Boniface, her middle name (joanna Boniface Winnifrith). Ford's feelings for Lee were cemented when she had a miscarriage while shooting How Green Was My Valley, brought on, it was believed, by collapsing during the scene where she learns her husband has died. She hadn't told Ford that she was pregnant, but he nevertheless, blamed himself. The result was that on every picture Lee worked on with him, Ford would assemble the cast and crew, then ask her if she was pregnant. ”No sir,” she would reply. “I just wanted to make sure.” —Source: Print the Legend, by Scott Eyman
Anna Lee in How Green was My Valley, 1941.
Lee was among the most prominent female members of the John Ford stock company. Ford’s pet name for her was Boniface, her middle name (Joanna Boniface Winnifrith). Ford’s feelings for Lee were cemented when she had a miscarriage while shooting How Green Was My Valley, brought on by collapsing during the scene where she learns her husband has died. She hadn’t told Ford that she was pregnant, but he nevertheless, blamed himself. The result was that on every picture Lee worked on with him, Ford would assemble the cast and crew, then ask her if she was pregnant.
”No sir,” she would reply.
“I just wanted to make sure.”
—Source: Print the Legend, by Scott Eyman

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions, Self-Portraits, Early Selfies

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“Never get caught acting.” —Lillian Gish
“Never get caught acting.”
—Lillian Gish

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Friday Photos: Till the Cows Come Home

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Buster Keaton with a cow. Not sure which film this is from, possibly Go West, but for some odd reason we have been coming across scores of pictures of Hollywood stars and cow.
Buster Keaton with a cow in “Go West” For some odd reason we have been coming across scores of pictures of Hollywood stars and cows.

I’ve just finished a long and depressing conversation with a close friend who attends Daf Yomi with yours truly. We were wondering (among other things) what has possessed Barack Hussein Obama to release five more ruthless Gitmo detainees?

All evidence, and common sense, suggests that these IslamoNazis will return to jihad and commit further rampages of murder, torture, rape, and plunder.

I suggested that Obama is a classic narcissist who will do what he wants regardless of the consequences. My friend asked, not unreasonably, if Obama does not heed his national security briefings? We went around and around the matter. But ultimately the question of Obama’s motivations are irrelevant. His actions are the only things that count. And this POTUS is guilty of dereliction of duty.

Okay. Got that out of the way.

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