Seraphic Secret

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

George Hurrell

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“It was after she said that she wanted to be in The Brothers Karamazov,” Wilder went on, “that she started going to the Actors’ Studio School of Dramatic Arts in New York. She didn’t do it for publicity. She’s sincerely trying to improve herself, and I think she should be admired for that. She could have sat here in Hollywood on her pretty little fanny and collected all of the money any ordinary actress would ever want, but she keeps trying.”
— Pete Martin’s interview with Billy Wilder for The Saturday Evening Post in 1956.
Billy Wilder and Marilyn Monroe on the set of Some Like it Hot, 1958

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“Whenever you hear the beat of my feet, it is really the beat of my heart saying, Thank you and God bless you.”
—Eleanor Powell

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“Unlike writers or painters, we don’t sit down in front of a blank canvas and say, ‘How do I start? Where do I start?’ We’re given the springboard of the text, a plane ticket, told to report to Alabama, and there’s a group of people all ready to make a film and it’s a marvelous life.“
—Albert Finney R.I.P. 1936-2019

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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Greta Garbo, 1931, photo by Clarence Sinclair Bull
“I don’t like to talk to people because I can’t express myself satisfactorily. I don’t say the things I mean.”
—Greta Garbo

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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At the beginning of her career Myrna Loy´s turned-up nose was rather troublesome. She had a little bone on the side of her nose, which cast a shadow in certain lights. This drove the cameramen crazy “because they never knew when it would appear. They’d see the rushes, groan, ‘There’s that thing again,’ and have to retake the scene. It looked like a tiny smudge on my nose. I mean you could hardly see it, but that’s how far the mania for perfection went.” So she was often called in for retakes and since those are rather expensive she was once called in by the makeup department who announced that they maybe would fix her nose. “I was horrified. I used to be known as ‘The Nose’ for goodness’ sake—thousands of women went to plastic surgeons to have it duplicated. I said, ‘Never! Nobody’s touching this nose!’ and got out of there fast.” And she was right. She had the most famous and sought-after nose of the 1930s and women would regularly go to plastic surgeons to get a nose like Myrna Loy.

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