Carroll Baker in Baby Doll (1956, dir. Elia Kazan) (via)

Katharine Hepburn in The Sea of Grass (1947, dir. Elia Kazan) (via)

Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951, dir. Elia Kazan)

“Blanche is a woman with everything stripped away. She is a tragic figure and I understand her. But playing her tipped me into madness.” 

(via)

Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951, dir. Elia Kazan)

Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951, dir. Elia Kazan)

“The audience at the beginning should see her negative effect on Stella and want Stanley to tell her off. He does, he exposes her, and then we gradually see how genuinely in pain, how actually desperate she is, how warm, tender, and loving she can be (the Mitch story) - then we begin to go with her. The audience realizes that they are witnessing the death of something extraordinary - colorful, varied, lost, witty, imaginative, of her own integrity - and thus they feel the tragedy. 

Blanche, out of place, unappreciated, a stranger in the modern, rough, coarse South; yet despite sickness and unbalance, she has more warmth than any of them. It is important symbolically that Blanche is an English teacher. She is the last repository of culture, abandoned, not prized, deformed, destroyed, gone begging for protection.

At the end, the grandeur and nobility belong to Blanche, and the “victors”, Stella and Stanley, are left with each other, a relationship of vulgar crudity and, for Stella, of growing emptiness and terror. (Also, Tennessee [Williams] wants desperately to be with other people, yet be superior to them.)”

-Elia Kazan, quoted in Kazan on Directing

Marlon Brando applying his make-up on the set of On the Waterfront (1954, dir. Elia Kazan)

“[In On the Waterfront] there was a scene in a taxicab, where I turn to my brother, who’s come to turn me over to the gangsters, and I lament to him that he never looked after me, he never gave me a chance, that I could have been a contender, I coulda been somebody, instead of a bum…It was very moving. And people often spoke about that, ‘Oh, my God, what a wonderful scene, Marlon, blah blah blah blah blah.’

It wasn’t wonderful at all. The situation was wonderful. Everybody feels like he could have been a contender, he could have been somebody, everybody feels as though he’s partly bum, some part of him. He is not fulfilled and he could have done better, he could have been better. Everybody feels a sense of loss about something. So that was what touched people. It wasn’t the scene itself. There are other scenes where you’ll find actors being expert, but since the audience can’t clearly identify with them, they just pass unnoticed. Wonderful scenes never get mentioned, only those scenes that affect people.”

-Brando, quoted in Lawrence Grobel’s Conversations with Brando (1993)

Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951, dir. Elia Kazan)

Vivien Leigh in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951, dir. Elia Kazan)

“The thing about the ‘tradition’ in the 19th century was that it worked then. It made a woman feel important, with her own secure positions and functions, her own special worth. It also made a woman at that time one with her society. But today it is an anachronism. So Blanche requires protection - a haven, a harbor. She is a refugee, punch drunk and on the ropes, making her last stand, trying to keep up a gallant front, because she is a proud person. But still - she’s also a misfit, a liar, her ‘airs’ alienate people…She doesn’t know how to make a living. She doesn’t know to work…She’s a last dying relic of the last century now adrift in our unfriendly day.”

-Elia Kazan on Blanche