I like to work with really good professional people - anyone with real talent.
— Lauren Bacall
I hope I'm thought of as not just a showbiz personality, but as someone who has lived a life and who has hopefully made a contribution to something along the way - someone who is a human being as well as an actress.
I don't look in the mirror; don't like what I see; never have. I am not my idea of a beauty. Never was. This is not false modesty. I've just never been enamoured of my face, which of course is magnified umpteen times on screen.
You learn to rise above a lot of bad things that happen in your life. And you have to keep going.
My mother was the greatest example to me of anyone I've ever known. She didn't have an easy life. I adored her. She worked hard all her life, and she was the one who set my values. She was quite an amazing woman, although she wasn't tough at all.
The biggest misconception people have about me is that I'm in control of every situation. I'm rarely in control of any situation.
I used to dream of being other places, other people. It was an escape for me.
I don't consider myself a great actress. I'm just trying to stay alive, actually. I think I'm good, and I've learned a lot, certainly, mostly in the theater. I've been sloughed off movies for years. But what can you do? That's life.
My feeling about the movies is that most of them are terrible. If you don't have a decent script and a decent director, forget it.
When I was a kid, it was Bette Davis. She was my idol. I used to cut school and sit in the back of the theater; of course, I would have snuck in because I couldn't afford a ticket.
In actual fact, I've never been one, even from childhood, to kind of analyze myself very much.
God - if the press ever quoted anyone correctly, it would be brilliant.
That was my original dream, anyway, to be on stage. I think the stage is an actor's place because actors, it belongs to you.
Young people, even in Hollywood, ask me, 'Were you really married to Humphrey Bogart?' 'Well, yes, I think I was,' I reply.
There were times, sure, I wanted my career to go better. But once it starts to go downhill, you can never get back, or only to some degree.
You can't always be a leading lady.
When everything happens to you when you're so young, you're very lucky, but by the same token, you're never going to have that same feeling again. The first time anything happens to you - your first love, your first success - the second one is never the same.
I happen to watch public television more than anything else. I'm also a news junkie, so I watch a lot of CNN.
I don't have an entourage. In fact, I have no live-in help.
Stupidity is not my favourite thing; I cannot deal with it.
I loved reading Grimm's fairy tales and Hans Christian Andersen, and I loved to dream about other worlds and other lives. Maybe that has something to do with having an incomplete family, being an only child. All I know is I loved to pretend, and all that was in tandem with my wanting to be an actress.
I'm not tough, and I never have been. I suppose over the years I've built up kind of a veneer to protect myself because I have functioned on my own for a long, long time, and I have never had a lot of flunkies preceding me to clear the way.
You can't acquire a voice. Either you have it, or you don't.
You are welcoming to everyone when you're a liberal. You do not have a small mind.
I'm a big fan of Daniel Day-Lewis. He's a marvelous actor. He stands alone, I think.
Film is not a woman's medium. If you weren't the hottest kid in town, men stayed away from you.
All the Warner actors were real actors. They started in theater and led very straightforward lives - you never saw entourages around. The MGM girls were the glamour girls, and they always had the makeup and hair people with them and all that.
I was this kid, and I was scared to death of all these pros around me... My head would shake, and my hands would shake, and I discovered if I kept my head down and looked up, my head would not shake, so I started to do that when I could, when it was appropriate in a scene.
I studied dancing for 13 years. And loved to dance. Always wanted to dance with Fred Astaire.
A famous love story is hard to maintain when you both live in the spotlight.
If I could have lived as an actress in any period, it would have been the 1920s - I would have loved to have been part of that speakeasy era.
I love being Jewish; I have no problem with it at all. But it did become like a scar, with all these people saying you don't look it.
What is the point of working all your life and then stopping?
I finally felt that I came into my own when I went on the stage.
My definition of a star is someone who really lasts for a very long time.
I was never my favourite subject.
I suppose there are times when I can't believe that I've lived the way that I have and done the things that I've done. Life's a joke anyway. It's all ridiculous. It's all so short.
I wasn't brought up as a society girl to go to balls and be a debutante and marry the social set and money and go to parties. No one in my family lived like that. And I never wanted to live like that. I was brought up to believe in work. I always wanted a career. Always.
The big rule is that you must never get mixed up with a married man - never even look sideways at another woman's fella. Boy, I really was terrific at obeying that rule, wasn't I?
Acting is a life of rejection.
For my peculiar face, I look best when I look as though I'm not wearing make-up.
I always wanted to work with Spencer Tracy, which never happened, although I knew him well. And I never worked with Cary Grant.
I adored 'Breaking The Waves,' so when Lars von Trier wanted me in 'Dogville,' I was beside myself with joy. He works in a way that nobody I've ever worked with works.
I've always felt that work - learning from people who know more than I know - is what keeps you going.
It's just a fact of life that I don't think I've ever been taken particularly seriously in movies by movie makers. I don't know why.
Movies are great fun and wonderful when they're good. But you never get to see them till six months after they're finished. So you never get a sense of whether they're really well liked or how good they are. And you don't really know what the finished product is going to be like, because it's a director's medium.
It was Howard Hawks who changed my life.
When a person who is very ill decides to treat it like a slight virus, you play that game. If you make a big scene, I think it is yourself you are doing it for, not the person who's ill.
I never believed marriage was a lasting institution. I thought that to be married for five years was to be married forever.
Men need to feel important. They feel better when they're with younger girls or unknown girls.
