Quotes

For my second and third pictures I won Academy Awards. Nothing worse could have happened to me. When I got two Oscars, they thought 'Oh, they can throw me into anything'. I was a machine, practically a tool in a big, big factory, and I could not do anything. And so I left. I just went away. I fled. Yes, I fled.

[to MGM chief Louis B. Mayer when she walked out on her contract] You are now 60 and I am 20. When I am 40, the age of a successful actress, you will be dead and I will live.

[2003] It was not the thing that I strived for because, you see, today's Academy Award is - Oh God! The thing everyone longs for.

[2003, referring to her Academy Award win in 1937] No one in Europe had never heard of it. I didn't know what it was, it didn't mean anything to me.

The Oscar is not a curse. The real curse is that once you have an Oscar they think you can do anything.

I always considered myself the world's worst actress.

[on MGM chief Louis B. Mayer] He said, 'That girl is a Frankenstein, she's going to ruin our whole firm. We made you and we are going to destroy you.' Well, he tried his best.

[on her first husband Clifford Odets] All the acting I've done on the stage or screen has been nothing compared to the acting I did in New York, when I tried to make everyone think I was happy - and my heart was breaking.

[on quitting Hollywood] I was very young. There were a lot of things I was unprepared for. I was too honest, I talked serious instead of with my eyelashes and Hollywood thought I was cuckoo. I worked in seven big pictures in three years. I have to be inspired to give a good performance. I complained to a studio executive that the source was dried up. The executive told me, 'Why worry about the source. Let the director worry about that.' I didn't run away from anybody in Hollywood. I ran away from myself.

[on her comeback] All the professor and the other students cared about was whether I could answer the questions, not whether I could come to class looking glamorous. But after that brief return to the stage, I began to realize that all the doors which had been opened to me in Europe, and all the work I had been able to accomplish for refugee children, was due to the fact that people knew me from my screen work. I began to feel a sense of responsibility to a job which I had started and never finished. When I also felt, after that experience at Dennis, that perhaps I did have talent after all, and that my too-sudden stardom was not just a matter of happy accident, I decided to go back.

[on her comeback role] It's certainly not an Academy Award part, and thank goodness, my bosses don't expect me to win an award with it. No, this is something unspectacular but I hope, a step back in the right direction.

I don't believe in acting. I think that people in life act, but when you are on the stage, or in my case also on screen, you have to be true.

I was nobody to make a pass to. I was very thin like a boy and I was very un-sexy.

I was never proud of anything. I just did it like everything else. To do a film - let me explain to you - it's like having a baby. You labor, you labor, you labor, and then you have it. And then it grows up and it grows away from you. But to be proud of giving birth to a baby? Proud? No, every cow can do that.

The secret of a long life is to never trust a doctor.

I'll tell you a wonderful story. Coming with all of these ideas that I had, and still have, and still feel because I never change and still believe in the same things. Soon after I was there in Hollywood, for some reason I was at a lun­cheon with Robert Taylor sitting next to me, and I asked him, 'Now, what are your ideas or what do you want to do,' and his answer was that he wanted to have 10 good suits to wear, elegant suits of all kinds, that was his idea. I practically fell under the table.

My acting was from the inside out. I don't believe in anything artificial. I don't believe in makeup. It has to come from you like a child you give birth to. That is how you act.

In my day, making films was like working in a factory. You were a piece of machinery with no rights.

[on Ascension Island in 1944] On Christmas night, I danced with all kinds of fellows with pimples and all kinds of sores. I suddenly felt, 'What is this being shy? I have to give myself, I just felt I didn't want to be shy, I didn't want to draw away, but give myself, I mean, not physically, but be there. It was a great lesson also for me, this tour through Africa and Italy during the war.

[on the bombing of Kosovo] How can you close your eyes and say this has nothing to do with me? I'm not speaking about politics. Politics is a terrible thing. Everyone wants power.

My greatest regret is that I have not given out much, much more, because inside me there is much, much more that I would have liked to give. It sounds arrogant, but it is the truth: I do not feel I have given out even part of what I can give out.

[on her second husband Robert Knittel] God sent me a man that was beautiful inside and out. He was idiotically in love with me. I had a wonderful life with him. He was dear and he was loving and, above all, he saw me as the center of the universe. And that was good.

[on The Good Earth (1937)] I had a wonderful director, Sidney Franklin. I worked from inside out. It's not for me, putting on a face, or putting on makeup, or making masquerade. It has to come from inside out. I knew what I wanted to do and he let me do it. Hollywood was a very strange place. To me, it was like a huge hotel with a huge door, one of those rotunda doors. On one side people went in, heads high, and very soon they came out on the other side, heads hanging.