- [on Katharine Hepburn] When I was growing up, she was not that popular. It was Bette Davis.
- [on Bette Davis] The biggest thing about Bette Davis was that she was nothing like the character Margo Channing in All About Eve (1950). She was a homemaker, a very New England lady, a great friend, a cook, she liked other women. So she wasn't competitive with women. She could very easily sit in a living-room with a lot of people and she didn't have to be the center of attention. She liked going to parties, all that stuff.
- Somebody, I think it was Pauline Kael, called Around the World in 80 Days (1956) the worst Best Picture, and you know, I'd like to slap her silly for that. It's very hard to judge, because it may look like a mistake to you today, judging from 2010 while watching it on TCM or whatever, but at the time it meant something totally different. In the case of Around the World in Eighty Days, that's a movie that truly has to be seen on a big screen, preferably in Todd-AO and all of that. Because when I saw that in those conditions, it was a fabulous movie.
- [on the best performances of 2011] I thought The Iron Lady (2011), that she [Meryl Streep] was fabulous, but I didn't think the film was as good as I wanted it to be. But I thought she deserved to win.
- [on Hedy Lamarr] No 1930s Meryl Streep, maybe, and I'm sure she never gave Bette Davis or Ingrid Bergman a sleepless night in the 1940s, although one critic in reviewing Hedy's performance in the film The Strange Woman (1946) did note that "Bette Davis couldn't have done it better." The problem for Hedy was always "that face," which consistently overshadowed the acting prowess and versatility she did possess.
- [on Katharine Hepburn] "The problem with Kate," her father once said, "is that she never wants to go anywhere unless she is going to be The Bride or The Corpse." He knew his daughter well.
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