Seraphic Secret

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

Richard Burton

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“Until I came along all the leading men were handsome, but luckily they wrote a lot of stories about the fellow next door.”
—Gary Cooper

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“Anybody can direct a picture once they know the fundamentals. Directing is not a mystery, it’s not an art. The main thing about directing is: photograph the people’s eyes.”
—John Ford

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“Keaton had a great influence on me. A lot of his moves I intuitively copied in doing some numbers. I know I was thinking of him when I did a dance with a squeaky board and a newspaper. I didn’t look like him, but I often wish I did. He was a complete genius, and there was a lot of dance inherent in his movements.”
—Gene Kelly

Once again Friday Photos appears on Wednesday due to the last days of Sukkot which begin tonight and then run into Shabbat. Enjoy!

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions, Passover Edition

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Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor passed many hours arguing furiously about who was more Jewish.
Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor passed many hours arguing furiously about who was more Jewish.

When Mike Todd (b. Avrom Hirsch Goldbogen) was killed in a plane crash, Elizabeth found comfort in Judaism. “I am absolutely Jewish now in my beliefs and feelings,” she said.

At her conversion, Elizabeth Taylor took the Jewish name Elisheva Rachel.

In the compulsively readable Furious Love, Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger report on the frequently drunken arguments in which Richard Burton and Taylor indulged over—get this—their respective Jewishness.

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“You know what you can do with this.” -Myrna Loy to her movie studio when they sent her a letter reprimanding her for speaking out on behalf of German Jews. Her activism resulted in a loss of revenue for the studio when Hitler banned Loy’s movies in Germany.
“You know what you can do with this.”
—Myrna Loy to MGM when they sent her a letter reprimanding her for speaking out on behalf of German Jews. Her call against Jew-hatred resulted in a loss of revenue for the studio when Hitler banned Loy’s movies in Germany.

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