Most of us have compromised with life. Those who fight for what they want will always thrill us.
I’m not a film star; I am an actress. Being a film star is such a false life, lived for fake values and for publicity.
People who are very beautiful make their own laws.
My birth sign is Scorpio and they eat themselves up and burn themselves out. I swing between happiness and misery. I am part prude and part nonconformist. I say what I think and I don’t pretend and I am prepared to accept the consequences of my actions.
Sometimes I dread the truth of the lines I say. But the dread must never show.
I cannot let well enough alone. I get restless. I have to be doing different things. I am a very impatient person and headstrong. If I’ve made up my mind to do something, I can’t be persuaded out of it.
Life is too short to work so hard.
Scarlett: You should die of shame to leave me here alone and helpless. Rhett: You helpless? (laughs) Heaven help the Yankees if they capture you.
It’s much easier to make people cry than to laugh.
I’m not young. What’s wrong with that?
I realize that the memories I cherish most are not the first night successes, but of simple, everyday things: walking through our garden in the country after rain; sitting outside a cafe in Provence, drinking the vin de pays; staying at a little hotel in an English market town with Larry, in the early days after our marriage, when he was serving in the Fleet Air Arm, and I was touring Scotland, so that we had to make long treks to spend weekends together.
When I come into the theatre I get a sense of security. I love an audience. I love people, and I act because I like trying to give pleasure to people.
But I remember the morning after The Mask of Virtue-which is the first play I did at the West End-that some critics saw fit to be as foolish as to say that I was a great actress. And I thought, that was a foolish, wicked thing to say, because it put such an onus and such a responsibility onto me, which I simply wasn’t able to carry. And it took me years to learn enough to live up to what they said-for those first notices. I find it so stupid. I remember the critic very well, and have never forgiven him.
Things are simple when you’re going to die.
I will not be ignored.
In Britain, an attractive woman is somehow suspect. If there is talent as well, it is overshadowed. Beauty and brains just can’t be entertained; someone has been too extravagant. This does not happen in America or on the Continent, for the looks of a woman are considered a positive advertisement for her gifts and don’t detract from them.
Comedy is much more difficult than tragedy-and a much better training, I think. It’s much easier to make people cry than to make them laugh.
I’ve always been mad about cats.
I don’t know what that Method is. Acting is life, to me, and should be.
I think Edith Evans is the most marvelous actress in the world and she can look beautiful. People who aren’t beautiful can look beautiful. She can look as beautiful as Diana Cooper, who was the most beautiful woman in the world.
Dear Lord, I’m so grateful I’m still loved.
Having lost Rhett, she can always return to the land – to Tara, to soak up its strength. . . . Tara! . . . Home. I’ll go home, and I’ll think of some way to get him back! After all, tomorrow is another day!
You know the passage where Scarlett voices her happiness that her mother is dead, so that she can’t see what a bad girl Scarlett has become? Well, that’s me.
Who could quarrel with Clark Gable? We got on well. Whenever anyone on the set was tired or depressed, it was Gable who cheered that person up. Then the newspapers began printing the story that Gable and I were not getting on. This was so ridiculous it served only as a joke. From the time on the standard greeting between Clark and myself became, ‘How are you not getting on today?’
My husband, who’s the greatest actor in the world, can do anything. Look at what he did in The Critic and Oedipus. In every role he gets-he did this in Richard the Third-there’s nothing he can’t do, nothing. Just nothing.
