“The only reason they come to see me is that I know life is great - and they know I know it.”

-Clark Gable 

“At the best of times, gender is difficult to determine.”

-Marlene Dietrich (via)

Marlene Dietrich in Paris, acompanied by her husband, Rudolf Sieber (1933, photo by Imagno/Getty Images)

On true love:

“It’s a flower: Trillium erectum [aka the American True-Love]. Also called birthroot and bethflower. Medicinal use: astringent. 

It is strong enough to survive sub-zero temperatures and its blossoms smell like rotting meat.”

-Dietrich, quoted in Marlene Dietrich’s ABC

Katharine Hepburn on the MGM lot during the filming of Without Love (1945)

Calvin Klein: Your style, did it come from you? Or was it someone else that influenced you?

KH: No, no one influenced me. I think that I must have been very self-conscious about my appearance, that I wanted to present something that looked as though it had just come out of the woods or something, and everyone thought, ‘I’ve never seen anything like that before.’

I liked to look as if I didn’t give a damn. I think you should pretend you don’t care … but it’s the most outrageous pretense. I said to Garbo once, ‘I bet it takes us longer to look as if we hadn’t made any effort than it does someone else to come in beautifully dressed.’

CK: Were you influenced by any of the men you knew at that time?

KH: No! I never dressed up for any man. If I thought he cared how I looked, I would have thought he was a fool. I really would have.

The men dressed for me, you know. Nobody ever made a pass at me unless I fully expected them to and welcomed the notion.

CK: Good for you.

KH: I’m rather a forbidding character.

-excerpted from Washington Post Magazine interview (March 9th, 1986)

“All the gallant lyrics of all the songs I have ever written rise up and mock me while I lie in the dark and listen. It has little to do with the person involved, little to do with anyone but myself.

To me, passionate love has been like a tight shoe rubbing blisters on my Achilles’ heel. I resent it and love it and wallow and recover and it’s all part of ‘life’s rich pattern’ and I wish to God I could handle it, but I never have and I know I never will.” 

-Noël Coward, excerpted from The Noël Coward Diaries (photo via)

Bela Lugosi taking a cigar break on the set of Dracula (1931, dir. Tod Browning)

(via)

Michael Caine in Funeral in Berlin (1966, dir. Guy Hamilton) 

Katharine Hepburn on the set of Sylvia Scarlett (1935, dir. George Cukor) (via)

“I am, at heart, a gentleman.”

-Marlene Dietrich (photographed on the set of Morocco, 1930) (via)

Anouk Aimée, c. 1960. Photographer: Sam Lévin (via)