“Directors at that time didn’t want actors to act, especially actresses. They were expected to be pretty. So they told me to stick to the theater. They said, ‘Your nose is too thin.’ My whole family went away to America to live. They couldn’t believe that I wouldn’t go with them. “Maria Luisa,” they said, ‘How can you stay alone in Italy?’ But I used their absence to become an actress. That’s how I became Monica Vitti. When they came back, my parents had to call me Monica. They had to acknowledge what had happened.”

-Monica Vitti née Maria Luisa Ceciarelli, 1986, Interview magazine

Monica Vitti’s photogenic existential despair via L’Avventura (1960, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni) (Hulton Archive/Getty)

The latest in 1910’s-era diving gear via Pearl of the Army (1916, dir. Edward José)

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964, dir. Stanley Kubrick)

“Some forms of reality are so horrible we refuse to face them, unless we are trapped into it by comedy. To label any subject unsuitable for comedy is to admit defeat.”

-Peter Sellers

Peter Sellers and Stanley Kubrick on the set of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964, dir. Stanley Kubrick) (via The Stanley Kubrick Archives)

“I love Peter. I think he’s a great actor, but I am never any good on this sort of thing. I’m terribly inhibited about discussing an artist like Peter, but I’ll cautiously torture out a statement - I’m peculiar about this, but it’s a very personal relationship you have with an actor.

He’s the hardest worker I know. I’d come into the [Dr. Strangelove] studio at seven o’clock in the morning and there would be Peter Sellers. Waiting, ready. Full of ideas. When you are inspired and professionally accomplished as Peter, the only limit to the importance of your work is your willingness to take chances. I believe Peter will take the most incredible chances with a characterization, and he is receptive to comic ideas most of his contemporaries would think unfunny and meaningless. This has, in my view, made his best work absolutely unique and important.”

-Kubrick on Sellers, quoted in Peter Sellers: The Mask Behind the Mask

Art of the Pose #4 - Lauren Bacall (circa 1955, via)

“Baby’s a real Joe.”

-Humphrey Bogart on Bacall

Charlie Chaplin & Edna Purviance in The Bond (1918, dir. Charlie Chaplin)

Geraldine Chaplin on the set of Doctor Zhivago (1965, dir. David Lean) (via)

Geraldine Chaplin: I shall get married, certainly. Everyone in the Chaplin household gets married. But I don’t know when, I don’t know to whom. You see…for anyone like me who has witnessed a love as great and incredible as the love that has bound, binds, my father (Charlie Chaplin) and mother (Oona O’Neill)…well, you feel crushed by the fear of never finding one like it. You search for it, a love as great as the love of your father and mother, and you know very well you’ll never find it, because miracles like that only happen once in a hundred, two hundred, years. And so you feel jealous, unhappy.

You think: I’ll never have what my father and mother have had, such a miracle, such luck. My father’s had such luck in his life! He’s also had griefs, troubles, humiliations, but in the end everything turned out all right for him, everything! And he’s had fame, respect, riches, love, everything! Even love! Everything! And a child, once he’s grown up, compares himself with him…and thinks things will never turn out as well for him, he’ll never be as good…as lucky…he’ll never have so much love…

Q: I’m going to ask, and I beg you to answer me sincerely because, I believe, it’s a very important question. A question that, obviously, concerns your father. This, Geraldine: are you afraid of him?

Chaplin: Certainly I’m afraid of my father… Certainly. Very, very afraid. And not only because he’s so unbending, so difficult, so strict. Not only because he always turns out to be right in the end, whatever he says or does. But because… because… how can I put it… I feel this constant reproof, this constant comparison, because I feel I’m in his shadow all the time, all the time, like all of us….yes, I feel that only when I’m no longer in his shadow, when I’m no longer afraid of him, that only then will I be able to do something myself.

-1965, published in The Limelighters (Michael Joseph, 1967)

Another excerpt from this interview previously posted here.

Sylvia Sidney in Sabotage (1936, dir. Alfred Hitchcock)

Alfred Hitchcock: Some days ago, walking along in New York, I saw myself reflected in a window, and before I recognized myself, I let out a yell of fright. Then I called to my wife, “Who’s that porker on two legs?” I didn’t want to believe it when she replied, “It’s you, dear.”

I imagine you don’t often yell with fright. Practiced as you are in frightening other people, fear must be completely unknown to you.

Hitchcock: On the contrary. I’m the most fearful and cowardly man you’ll ever meet. Every night I lock myself into my room as if there were a madman on the other side of the door, waiting to slit my throat. I’m frightened of everything: burglars, policemen, crowds, darkness, Sundays…Being frightened of Sundays goes back to when I was a child and my parents used to put me to bed at six o’clock so that they could go out. I used to wake up at eight o’clock, my parents weren’t there, there was only dim light, that silence of an empty house. Brrr! It wasn’t accidental, when I married, that I said to my wife, “Every Sunday I want a fine dinner with lots of light, lots of people and lots of noise.”

Being frightened of policemen started when I was about 11…and reached home after nine. My father opened the door and didn’t say a word, not a word of reproof, nothing. He just gave me a note and said, “Take it to Watson.” Watson was a policeman, a family friend. He’d no sooner got the note that he shut me in a cell, shouting, “This is what happens to bad boys who get home after nine o’clock.” Brrr! It was 53 years ago, but every time I see a policeman, I start shaking. 

And then I’m frightened of people having rows, of violence. I’ve never had a row with anyone, and I’ve no idea of how to come to blows. And then I’m frightened of eggs, worse than frightened; they revolt me. That round white thing without any holes, and when you break it, inside there’s that yellow thing, round, without any holes… Brrr! Have you ever seen anything more revolting than an egg yolk breaking and spilling its yellow liquid? Blood is jolly, red. But egg yolk is yellow, revolting. I’ve never tasted it.

And then I’m frightened of my own movies. I never go to see them.  I don’t know how people can bear to watch my movies.”

-Cannes, May 1963, via Alfred Hitchcock: Interviews

Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express (1932, dir. Josef von Sternberg)

“Shadow is mystery and light is clarity. Shadow conceals - light reveals. To know what to reveal and what to conceal and in what degrees to do this is all there is to art.”

-Josef von Sternberg