Hollywood History Quotes

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.

Noir was a brainchild of the United States. And most of the creators of classic noir - novelists and screenwriters, directors and cameramen - were men. Women were their mysterious, sometimes villainous, always seductive objects of desire.

There was a period of time when they estimated the two biggest stars in Hollywood were Charlie Chaplin and Mickey Mouse.

I think it will be, as always, interesting to compare different portrayals of Hitchcock. I'm very honored that I'm playing the same part as Anthony Hopkins.

I remember when I first moved to L.A. from Michigan when I was 11 years old and I walked down the Walk of Fame and looked at the hand and foot prints of the stars and it was the coolest thing. And I never thought that mine would actually be there one day, so when it happened it was so surreal and such an honor

Hollywood must have been terrific once.

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.

I still can't believe I danced with Gene Kelly. How lucky am I that I've been in movies where I've danced with two of the greatest dancers of all time - with Gene Kelly and John Travolta.

I wanted to live where I could pop to the bar that Humphrey Bogart took Lauren Bacall to, or the little restaurant where Charlie Chaplin had a booth.

The bravery and pioneering of early Hollywood was absolutely incredible.

Dennis Hopper is one of the great American lives.

'You Must Remember This', the podcast about 'the secret and or forgotten history of Hollywood's first century', has a thread dedicated to Dead Blondes, which is a clue to where it's coming from.

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

There's no question that the '70s themselves were really wide open. There was just so much being done at that time. Every year, the major studios were commissioning things that they would never touch today or even thought of touching in the 1950s.

When I started acting in the film industry when I was 16 years old, in 1980, I was going to all the revival theaters in Los Angeles. They were playing mostly films from the '60s and '70s, some from the early '20s and '30s, before that Hays commission. Those films did question things a lot, and there definitely was a switch in 1934. You can see very distinctly in 1934, it's harder to understand what the real culture was. Films made before 1934, you can really kind of see the racism, sexism, drug use, etc. that was going on at that time. And then it was all stopped.

Hollywood has unfortunately become a memory. It's nothing but a sign on the side of a hill.

I'm a big fan of old Hollywood.

Bette Davis in All About Eve was huge for me. Her acting was staggering.

Hollywood was invented by hoodlums from central Europe. And today a Hollywood lawyer is not a hoodlum. He's a bureaucrat.

Things have really changed here in Hollywood. Used to be people in this town couldn't wait to get an envelope full of white powder.

My father used to say it was just there, the opportunity. It was all teed up for him. The talkies were starting, and here was Hollywood waiting for people to come from New York who had the training, who could do music with a sense of dramatic context.

I still think of Columbia as one Rita Hayworth movie a year, or maybe one a year directed by Frank Capra in the '30s. To see how many really outstanding movies Columbia made, and all together, is kind of eye-opening.

I came in on the tail end of the old school of Hollywood.

True crime has long been a passion for me, but I'm also a sucker for biographies, particularly of politicians, writers, or Hollywood icons.

It's weird, because American films in the 1930s and '40s, particularly melodramas, were made for woman, from Bette Davis to Joan Crawford to Barbara Stanwyck to Katherine Hepburn, and for some reason we've taken a step backward in this sense.