academy-award-winners

"To the world, he was an Academy Award-winning actor, a director, a storyteller. To me, he was simply everything. His passion for his craft was matched only by his deep love for characters, a great meal, and holding court. For each of his many roles, Bob gave everything to his characters and to the truth of the human spirit they represented. In doing so, he leaves something lasting and unforgettable to us all."

"It was as if somehow Al Capone had become head of the United States."

"Sometimes what comes around the corner is better for you than what you're planning to do anyway."

"I don’t try to be a hard guy to work with … but I decide what I’m going to do with a character. I will take direction, but only if it kind of supplements what I want to do. If I have instincts that I feel are right, I don’t want anybody to tamper with them. I don’t like tamperers, and I don’t like hoverers."

"The Western is our genre in the United States of America. The English have Shakespeare, the French have Molière, the Russians have Chekhov, but we have the Western."

"Any uncomfortability or pain or difficulty I felt is temporary because that’s just how it is. I welcome those feelings because it means it’s something real that I’m able to show. The film will be forever —any sadness or pain I feel is temporary, and it goes away. And I’m lucky. This is my dream job."

"I grew up in Los Angeles, but Hollywood always felt so far away from me. So to be here standing in this room today is really incredible. I also just want to again recognize and honor the sex worker community. I will continue to support and be an ally. I also just want to recognize the thoughtful, intelligent, beautiful, breathtaking work of my fellow nominees. I’m honored to be recognized alongside all of you. This is a dream come true."

"The whole film, my character has been covering up her emotions with a hardness, not letting anybody see her crack, so I found myself also feeling like that during filming. I was never emotional, and me as Mikey, I’m a very emotional person. For the last scene, I was almost shaking going into the car because I didn’t know what that would feel like—because I had been feeling the same way as my character for so long."

"I have a face like the behind of an elephant."

"I knew in a flash Gary had something I should never have. It is something pure and he doesn't know it's there. In truth, that boy hasn't the least idea how well he acts."

"[I have a face that would] stop a sundial and frighten small children into fits."

"All his tough talk is a blind, you know. He's a literate, gracious, kind man, with wonderful manners, and he speaks beautifully — when he wants to."

"It's got so that every time I walk into a restaurant, I get not only soup but an impersonation of Captain Bligh."

"Method actors give you a photograph. Real actors give you an oil painting."

"They can't censor the gleam in my eye."

"Hollywood is a goofy place. But I like it. It's the perfect mummers' home. If one weren't a little mad one wouldn't be there."

"Over the years, I found that talking about Olivia helped immeasurably. Roald... couldn’t say a word. It was locked inside him."

"I was the strong one at that point. I don’t want to brag about myself, but I’ve never seen anything like it. Roald really almost went crazy. I held everything together. I cooked all day and went on. Of course 34 years ago anything like a survivors’ support group was virtually unheard of. You had to pull yourself together. I loved Olivia, loved her, but my God, I had two more children. I had to go on."

"Part of my healing came by having another child. No one could replace Olivia, but a new child would begin to heal the emptiness. In a letter to my doctor in California soon after Olivia’s death, I wrote, “I absolutely believe in a soul. And I long to let her go, to free her and hope she will be born again to me.” Two years later, was born and a year after that, ."

"The phone rang. It was the doctor. He said, “Mrs. Dahl, ’s dead [from measles]. Did you hear me? I said Olivia is dead.” I said, yes, thank you. I couldn’t believe how cold he was. came back from the hospital and he cried. Oh, he cried. He had seen her dead. I unfortunately never did. My sisters-in-law talked me out of it. I wish they hadn’t. I stayed up that first night just looking out the window. Your love is dead, and the sun still comes up. It’s just so sad."

"I keep a few mementos of Olivia around the house. One is a letter that she wrote when she was about 6 to a family friend. It says, “Dear Sheila, Thank you for the bubbly gum. I hope you are well. The bubbly was the most exciting present I ever had and I can blow bubbles... Love, Olivia. XXXXX.” That’s my Olivia. Isn’t she a honey of a girl?"

"Over the years, I did other things to help keep Olivia’s memory alive, donating a silver cup to her school each year to be awarded to the best high jumper, as she was in 1962. And when I played Olivia Walton in the TV film that preceded The Waltons television series, I insisted that my character’s name not be changed to “Mary” as the producers wanted."

"Nothing ever comes to an end. Wherever one has sunk roots that emanate from one’s best or truest self, one will always find a home. To return is not to revisit something that has failed. I can walk along the old paths without bitterness that other feet are now taking pleasure in them."

"The best thing that can come with success is the knowledge that it is nothing to long for."

"Loneliness beside the swimming pool and in their big new house with hardly any furniture."

"To be a woman is to have the same needs and longings as a man. We need love and we wish to give it. If only we all could accept that there is no difference between us where human values are concerned. Whatever sex. Whatever the life we have chosen to live."

"In those hours and days that followed Pearl Harbor the city of Washington was afflicted with jitters. Some people who knew the extent of the damage that the Japs had inflicted, were talking darkly of disaster. They were talking of the imminence of grave danger to our country—even of the possibility of Japanese invasion of our West Coast, or of Nazi raids on our East Coast. I didn’t know how real or how valid these fears might be. But—when I went into the presence of the president himself—I heard no talk of "disaster," no jitters. I knew that I was back in America. The president loved those ships that were hit at Pearl Harbor. When they were hit, it was as if the Japs had hit his own family. But he knew—he knew with all the confidence of a loyal American—he knew that no Japs and no Nazis—nor all the Japs and all the Nazis put together—could ever deliver a knockout blow against this country. He knew—better, perhaps, than any man who ever lived—he knew what Americans are and what Americans can do. And in those hours and days, after Pearl Harbor, the president would sit back and lean back in his chair, in his oval study up there on the second floor of the White House, and he stated very clearly and very simply what he thought our military strategy in this war ought to be. He completely rejected a defensive policy. He rejected the policy of withdrawing our Navy into our home waters, and of deploying our growing, magnificent Army in foxholes and trenches along our coasts. What he said, immediately after Pearl Harbor, was this: "We must go out there, where our enemies are, and fight them on their own home grounds. We must go out and find them, and hit them—and hit them again." And that has been the summary of our whole policy in fighting this war."

"I wanted it to be a piece of film rather than a video promotional clip. I wanted it to be a short piece of film that would hopefully do justice to the original book and let people understand the story that couldn’t really be explained in the song. So we wanted a great actor — we thought of Donald Sutherland — and he was so encouraging and made it so easy for me. Whenever we were acting, he was my father. I just had to react to him like a child. He made it very easy."

"I’m really hoping that in some movie I’m doing, I die — but I die, me, Donald — and they’re able to use my funeral and the coffin … That would be absolutely ideal. I would love that."

"Donald was a brilliant actor and a complex man who shared quite a few adventures with me, such as the FTA Show, an anti-Vietnam war tour that performed for 60,000 active duty soldiers, sailors, and marines in Hawaii, Okinawa, the Philippines, and Japan in 1971. I am heartbroken."

"Donald Sutherland was one of the smartest actors I ever worked with. He had a wonderful enquiring brain, and a great knowledge on a wide variety of subjects. He combined this great intelligence with a deep sensitivity, and with a seriousness about his profession as an actor. This all made him into the legend of film that he became."

"I personally think one of the most important actors in the history of film. Never daunted by a role, good, bad or ugly. He loved what he did and did what he loved, and one can never ask for more than that. A life well lived."

"I love to work. I passionately love to work. I love to feel my hand fit into the glove of some other character. I find a huge freedom — time stops for me. I’m not as crazy as I used to be, but I’m still a little crazy."

"[Asked if he was conscious of being an unusual actor] Well, I was always cast as an artistic homicidal maniac. But at least I was artistic!"

"We had a housekeeper in Canada, a wonderful woman, whose father raped all of his daughters. She went to see him when he was dying and said, "I'm here to forgive you." He said, "Forgiveness for what? It was my right.""

"We’ve lost one of the greats. Donald Sutherland brought a level of brilliance to his craft few could match. A remarkable, legendary actor — and a great Canadian."

"I heard a voice saying hello and I looked down. Standing down there was a very small Kate Bush. … She wanted to explain what her video was about. I let her in. She sat down, said some stuff. All I heard was "Wilhelm Reich". I’d taken an underground copy of his The Mass Psychology of Fascism with me when I went to film Bertolucci’s Novecento in Parma. Reich’s work informed the psychological foundations of Attila Mellanchini, the character Bernardo had cast me to play. Everything about Reich echoed through me. He was there then and now he was here. Sitting across from me in the person of the very eloquent Kate Bush. Synchronicity. Perfect. She talked some more. I said OK and we made Cloudbusting. She’s wonderful, Kate Bush. Wonderful. I love that I did it."

"Jolly, chatty and extremely competent, she is an attractive, hearty person, the sort who can work all day and still have enough energy left to enjoy the evening. Anne taught me women often make better editors than men. They have more patience."

"[T]here were only certain jobs open to women. Things like hairdressing didn't really interest me. I might have been interested in photography, but women couldn't do that in those days. I found the most interesting job a woman could do, other than acting, was editing."

"[Asked: "How did your famous match cut in Lawrence of Arabia — the cut from a close-up of Peter O’Toole blowing out a match to a wide shot of the sun rising over the desert — come about?"] By accident. When we were cutting Lawrence, we were working on film, and so when we were running the sequence, we saw it cut together. Nowadays using digital, you would have done a [dissolve] in the machine, and you never would have seen it cut together like it was. Almost at the same moment, David Lean and I looked at each other and said, "That’s a fabulous cut." He said, "It’s not quite perfect — take it away and make it perfect," and I literally took two frames off the outgoing shot, and that's the way it is today."

"I used to have to get my courage up to offer my ideas to David Lean, but that improved as time went on. He used to say to me, "That’s a ridiculous idea, I’ve never heard of such a thing." And I would feel awful. But then he would come up to me a day or two later and say, "You know that idea you had, it's not exactly that but it's close.” It was always worth putting up the ideas. I'm not crushed if they don't want to use them, it's a point of view."

"But I was taught, or I must have heard it somewhere, that as it became a more important job, men started to get in on it. While it was just a background job, they let the women do it. But when people realized how interesting and creative editing could be, then the men elbowed the women out of the way and kind of took over. There were some wonderful women editors who helped inspire me to go into editing in England. In a way, I've never looked at myself as a woman in the business. I've just looked at myself as an editor. I mean, I'm sure I've been turned down because I'm a woman, but then other times I've been used because they wanted a woman editor."

"We had mostly pilots in the hospital, [...] and kids who had been playing with bombs they found on the ground and stuff. Pretty harroing, actually but it was intriguing for me just to be meeting other people (en) it opened my mind to communism and things like that which shocked my family."

"Women are mostly mothers and directors are mostly children, so the two go very well together."

"[On out-takes during the filming of Becket featuring Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole, two notoriously heavy drinkers] Oh, on the beach, they were having a real problem sitting on their horses. It’s a beautiful shot of the beach and I go from a very long shot of galloping into a big head. I had fun with it, but it was difficult. Because they were flubbing their lines, we had to shoot over two days. The clouds are there one day but not the next, and nobody notices that because the actors are so magnetic. The horses were perfectly well behaved, but it was mainly the boys who were trouble."

"When I first came in I wanted to be a director and then later on I had opportunities to be a director and turned them down, because I was married to a director. I never edited for my husband. He did ask me to, but I think if you're there all day working on something, you want to be able to go home and say, "I just worked with that idiot director and guess what he did today!" You can't do that if you’re married to him."

"I wanted to be a serious actress, but of course that didn't really happen. I did Desdemona [at the National, opposite Olivier] with great discomfort and was terrified all the time. But then everyone was terrified of Larry."

"I tend to head for what's amusing because a lot of things aren't happy. But usually you can find a funny side to practically anything."

"[On the attempted suicide of her husband, actor Robert Stephens, who was playing the lead in the film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) at the time] And after that it was just hopeless. We had two little boys. He didn't understand. I sure as hell didn't understand. It got worse and then it went on getting worse and worse. In the end it was destroying everybody. And he was having so many affairs. [Stephens saw doctors] I remember when he was diagnosed as hyper-manic asking what it meant and the doctor saying violent moods swings and indiscriminate sexual activity. And I thought "that about covers it really"."

"It's true I don't tolerate fools but then they don't tolerate me, so I am spiky. Maybe that's why I'm quite good at playing spiky elderly ladies."