Hollywood Golden Age Quotes

I grew up in an Irish Catholic family, and I think they force you to watch every James Cagney movie.

There are lots of actresses I consider to be my icons, from Katharine Hepburn and Grace Kelly to Diane Keaton and Meryl Streep.

Unless you're of a certain age, you may not know my name, but you can Google it - I was a pretty big movie star in the 1950s. Oh, and another thing: I was - am - gay.

I always felt that Bette Davis was one of the great screen actresses who never really got her due - she won two Oscars, but the last was in 1938, and that was really before all the great work that she did.

I watched a lot of Douglas Fairbanks movies. He always played the same role with a mustache. Zorro had a mustache. The Musketeer had a mustache. Tarzan had a mustache.

My mum raised me on 'On the Waterfront,' 'Gone with the Wind' and 'Rear Window.'

My favorite decade of cinema would be kind of the '40s, yeah. I like things in the '30s, but you know, the sound recording in the '30s wasn't very good. But for some reason the movies in the '40s have the best personalities: Jimmy Stewart, Gary Cooper, Betty Grable, Gene Tierney, and all those people. For some reason, I seem to gravitate more toward the '40s, and I don't necessarily know why. I just love the people.

I wanted to be Gene Kelly. Well really, I just wanted to dance with Cyd Charisse.

I did my very first film with Kirk in Detective Story when he was the greatest, greatest star in the world. I fell in love with him, had a crush on him then.

I've worked with people from Fred Zinnemann, John Huston, through to Richard Fleischer, all of those boys from Hollywood and so on, and Sam Peckinpah and then the Mike Radfords.

Lana Turner taught me how to kiss on the set of the movie 'Diane' in the early Fifties.

As cliche as it is, I was a huge Audrey Hepburn girl growing up.

Think of Frank Capra and Preston Sturges. They used the same actors over and over again.

My father died when I was 11. He was a vaudeville comedian. He worked in one movie, 'Ladies of the Chorus,' as Marilyn Monroe's father.

When I got to Hollywood, there wasn't even a Boulevard. I'm that old. It was just a little dirt trail. I'm kidding.

Lana Turner and Ava Gardner were my special friends at MGM.

The first time I saw 'Sunset Boulevard' I was probably eight or nine years old, and it really struck me how it's so simply put and elegant, yet there's so much going on.

I've always been interested in the gangster genre, so to play Mickey Cohen was a real thrill. It's always fun to do your take on someone so iconic.

I myself am a great James Dean fan. He had this aura and enigma about him.

In America, at the beginning of talkies, they pulled Fred Astaire from the theaters and put him on the screen and had all of these great composers write songs for him. They call it the Great American Songbook; I call it the Fred Astaire Songbook because they were written for him.

The best time I ever had with Joan Crawford was when I pushed her down the stairs in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

My favorite actress of all times is Bette Davis in Dark Victory. I have seen it six or seven times, and I still cry.

There's a scene in 'Singin' in the Rain' where this guy dances with a giant doll while singing 'Make 'Em Laugh.' I remember loving the pure physicality of it.

I wish I had come along when the studios were making those big musical pictures. It would be great to do re-makes of some of the old ones like 'Porgy and Bess' or 'Showboat.' I'd love to do 'em.

I was one of the horses of the Louis B. Mayer stable, and I thought the films I was given after my Academy Awards were not worthy.