All About Eve (1950)

Thelma Ritter: Birdie

Photos 

Quotes 

• Margo : Birdie, you don't like Eve, do you?

  Birdie : You looking for an answer or an argument?

  Margo : An answer.

  Birdie : No.

  Margo : Why not?

  Birdie : Now you want an argument.

• Birdie : What a story! Everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end.

• Margo : You bought the new girdles a size smaller, I can feel it.

  Birdie : Something maybe grew a size larger.

  Margo : When we get home you're going to get into one of those girdles and act for two and a half hours.

  Birdie : I couldn't get into the girdle in two and a half hours.

• Birdie : The bed looks like a dead animal act.

• Birdie : There's a message from the bartender. Does Miss Channing know she ordered domestic gin by mistake?

  Margo : The only thing I ordered by mistake is the guests. They're domestic, too, and they don't care what they drink as long as it burns!

• [Bill is saying goodbye to Birdie as he departs for Hollywood] 

  Bill Sampson : Any messages? What do you want me to tell Tyrone Power?

  Birdie : Just give him my phone number; I'll tell him myself.

• Birdie : Have you ever heard of the word "union"?

  Margo : Behind in your dues? How much?

  Birdie : I haven't got a union. I'm slave labor.

  Margo : Well?

  Birdie : But the wardrobe women have got one, and next to a tenor, a wardrobe woman is the touchiest thing in show business.

• Birdie : We now got everything a dressing room needs except a basketball hoop.

• Margo : [as she's getting ready for the party]  The extra help get here?

  Birdie : There's some loose characters dressed as maids and butlers. Who'd you call, the William Morris Agency?

  Margo : You're not being funny: I could *get* actors for less.

• Margo : She thinks only of me, doesn't she?

  Birdie : Well, let's say she thinks only about you, anyway.

  Margo : How do you mean that?

  Birdie : I'll tell you how: like... like she's studying you, like you was a play or a book or a set of blueprints - how you walk, talk, eat, think, sleep...

  Margo : I'm sure that's very flattering, Birdie. I'm sure there's nothing wrong with it.

• Margo : This is my dear friend and companion, Miss Birdie Coonan.

  Birdie : Oh, brother!

  Eve : Miss Coonan.

  Lloyd Richards : Oh, brother, what?

  Birdie : When she gets like this, all of the sudden she's playin' Hamlet's mother.

  Margo : I'm sure you must have things to do in the bathroom, Birdie, dear.

• Margo : "I don't think you can rightly say we lost the war. We was more starved out, you might say. That's why I don't understand all these plays about love-starved Southern women. Love was one thing we were never starved for in the South."

  Lloyd Richards : Margo's interview with a lady reporter from the South.

  Birdie : And the minute it gets printed, they're gonna fire on Gettysburg all over again.

  Margo : It was Fort Sumter they fired on.

  Birdie : I never played Fort Sumter.