Seraphic Secret

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

Lucille Ball

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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Not long before she died in 1981 at age 57, Gloria Grahame, who had acted in films signed by Frank Capra, Nicholas Ray, Josef von Sternberg, Vincente Minnelli, Elia Kazan, Fritz Lang, and Fred Zinnemann, demolished them all in one sweeping statement. “Those men never directed me,” she told an English stage director with whom she was currently working. “I’d go home and work on it with my mother, then come in and shoot it, and that would be that.”
—Donald Chase, “Gloria Grahame In Praise of the Naughty Mind,” Film Comment, 1997

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“Out here in California, I knew as much as the rest of the girls in movies, which was nothing. The difference was I would take any part. I never sought to be a star. I didn’t mind being typed. I wanted to be typed. One of the greatest thrills of my life was hearing a director say he wanted a Lucille Ball-type for a picture. Of course, later it was different when they said they wanted a young Lucille Ball-type.”
—Lucille Ball

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“I don’t know that I’ve any style at all. I just patterned myself on a combination of Jack Buchanan [musical comedy star of the 1920s], Noël Coward, and Rex Harrison. I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be and I finally became that person. Or he became me. Or we met at some point. It’s a relationship.” —Cary Grant
“I don’t know that I’ve any style at all. I just patterned myself on a combination of Jack Buchanan [musical comedy star of the 1920s], Noël Coward, and Rex Harrison. I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be and I finally became that person. Or he became me. Or we met at some point. It’s a relationship.”
—Cary Grant
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