Seraphic Secret

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

Roman Vishniac

Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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Yul Brynner, 1949
“I am just a nice, clean-cut Mongolian boy.”
In fact, Yul Brenner (b. Yuliy Borisovich Briner, 1920 – 1985) was born in the city of Vladivostok in the Far Eastern Republic, a puppet state controlled by Soviet Russia before being merged into the wider USSR two years later. He enjoyed telling tall tales and exaggerating his background and early life for the press, claiming that he was born “Taidje Khan” of part-Mongol parentage, on the Russian island of Sakhalin. In reality of Swiss-German, Russian, and partial Buryat ancestry. Wikipedia

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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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“Flops are a part of life’s menu and I’ve never been a girl to miss out on any of the courses.”
—Rosalind Russell

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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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Letter from Jennifer Jones to husband David Selznick, March 1959
Dearest:
Hope you are well and the deal goes but most of all that you miss me a little. Betty Bogart [Lauren Bacall] came through from Klosters on her way to London with her two children in hand and she told me I was pushing my luck. That you are a very attractive guy and in her words there are plenty of dames in wait for an attractive guy. I said I was less concerned since she had left California but I realized the danger, only I had to continue this work [psychoanalysis] with Dr. Meier. Her reply was, if you can take it, exactly as follows. “F— the Doctor, go home and get yourself l— and you won’t need doctors or diets. Greatest thing in the world for the complexion.”
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Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

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“I have gone through such a time, and more, and survived. I traveled in a world that once was—Hollywood of the war and immediate postwar years. And I existed in a world that never is—the prison of the mind. If what I have learned from these experiences can be summed up in one sentence, it would be this: life is not a movie. But I do not make that point in a sad or regretful way. I can only wonder, if my life had been a movie, would a director have cast Gene Tierney to play the part? The bitter with the sweet makes for a better part.” —Gene Tierney
“I have gone through such a time, and more, and survived. I traveled in a world that once was—Hollywood of the war and immediate postwar years. And I existed in a world that never is—the prison of the mind. If what I have learned from these experiences can be summed up in one sentence, it would be this: life is not a movie. But I do not make that point in a sad or regretful way. I can only wonder, if my life had been a movie, would a director have cast Gene Tierney to play the part? The bitter with the sweet makes for a better part.”
—Gene Tierney

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