Lupe “The Spitfire” Velez in a better mood.

Article originally published in the Los Angeles Times on July 25th, 1940:

“Lupe Velez, tempestuous Mexican actress, outlined in Hollywood the reception she had planned for a gypsy fortune teller who allegedly bilked her of $2500 last December. Nancy Miller, alias Mary Baker, 23, was arrested in Indiana and will be extradited.

“I’m so happy they got her,” Miss Velez said. “I’m really going to fix her up. Number one—I punch her in the nose. Number two—I kick her in the teeth. Number three—I pull her hair.”

(Velez punched many noses & fired off not a few pistols in her day, most famously when she shot at a railroad car carrying her boyfriend Gary Cooper from a crowded train platform.)

Peter Lorre in M (1931, dir. Fritz Lang) 

“My trouble is that I try to cover a part entirely. When you do there’s the danger that the patron will leave the theatre feeling that you are so perfectly suited to the character he has just seen that he can’t imagine you in any other part. Mothers with children ran from me in the street. Terrible letters came to me. Letters came from strange people; people who I never believed lived in the world; depraved and disturbed minds, thinking they saw in me the perfect companion, a fellow psychopathic. A success can be too great, I tell you.”

-Lorre, on his role in M

“I was a murderer, but I was a matinee idol.”

-Peter Lorre, on his breakthrough role in M (1931, dir. Fritz Lang)

Monica Vitti in L’avventura (1960, dir. Michelangelo Antonioni)

Katharine Hepburn in publicity still for Sylvia Scarlett (1935, dir. George Cukor)

”I strike people as peculiar in some way, although I don’t quite understand why. Of course, I have an angular face, an angular body and, I suppose, an angular personality, which jabs into people.”

Elizabeth Taylor as Martha (“the best performance I ever gave”) in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966, dir. Mike Nichols) (photo by B. Willoughby)

Sandy Dennis in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966, dir. Mike Nichols)

“Sandy is really one of the most genuine eccentrics I know of. She sat on the set of Virginia Woolf like a schoolmarm and suddenly produced the most gigantic belches, like a drunken sailor. Elizabeth [Taylor] is also a good belcher, so they had competitions, but Sandy nearly always won.”

-Richard Burton

Edith Piaf & Alain Delon, 1959 

John Gilbert can think only of Garbo in Flesh and the Devil (1927, dir. Clarence Brown)

Greta Garbo (1925, photo by Arnold Genthe) (via)

“I asked Garbo if she and [Gloria] Swanson had been friends.

‘Yes. When we both lived in Hollywood, I used to know Miss Swanson. But it has been years since I talked to her. Three years ago, though, she wrote me a letter. It said, ‘Dear G., we both live in New York, near each other, we are both alone, we have similar lives. Why don’t we have dinner sometime? Please come over and have dinner with me.’

‘Did you?’ I asked.

‘No. I didn’t even answer her letter.’

‘Why?’

She paused and thought deeply. A hint of sadness crossed her face. Her answer to my simple question spoke volumes about Greta Garbo. ‘There was no one to make me.’”

-excerpted from William Frye’s Vanity Fair profile The Garbo Next Door

“You’re looking at a species of flimsy little two-legged animals with extremely small heads whose name is Man…Very tiny undeveloped brain; comes from primitive planet named Earth. Calls himself ‘Samuel Conrad’. And he will remain here in his cage with the running water and the electricity and the central heat- as long as he lives. Samuel Conrad has found the Twilight Zone.”

-Rod Serling, “People Are Alike All Over”, The Twilight Zone 

Tippi Hedren in opening shot of Marnie (1964, dir. Alfred Hitchcock)