🌟Classic Off-Screen Quotes: Bette Davis

“Without wonder and insight, acting is just a trade. With it, it becomes creation.”

🌟Classic Off-Screen Quotes: Gene Tierney

 "Everyone should see Hollywood once, I think, through the eyes of a teenage girl who has just passed a screen test"

 

 

🌟Classic Off-Screen Quotes: Barbra Streisand

 “I was a personality before I became a person - I am simple, complex, generous, selfish, unattractive, beautiful, lazy and driven” 

 

 

⭐Actors on Actors: Myrna Loy on Joan Crawford

 “When you made a friend in Joan you had a friend for life”-Myrna Loy

 

 

⭐Actors on Actors: Spencer Tracy on Jean Harlow

 “A square shooter if there ever was one.” — Spencer Tracy 

 

 

 

🌟Classic Off-Screen Quotes: Joanne Woodward

 “Acting is like sex. You should just do it and not talk about it”

 

 

Doris 'Birth' Day!

 “I love to laugh. It’s the only way to live. Enjoy each day-it's not coming back again!” 

Remembering Doris Mary Anne Kappelhoff aka Doris Day born today in 1922 in Cincinnati, Ohio. 

 

🌟Classic Off-Screen Quotes: Barbara Stanwyck

“I was never really young. I had to learn self-reliance early. So, I probably deserve little or no credit for the self-reliance with which I’m always ticketed. After all, self-preservation is pretty basic.”

 

 

🌠International Woman's Day & Star Profile: Ida Lupino

In honor of International Women's Day, let's shine a light on the remarkable Ida Lupino!

 

Born on February 4, 1914, into a family of actors in showbiz, this London-born actress, producer, screenwriter, and director made her mark in Hollywood in her teens and twenties at Warner Bros.  Despite a bout with polio in late 1934, her strength, determination, and talent propelled her to fame with films such as They Drive By Night (1940), High Sierra (1941), The Sea Wolf (1941), Ladies in Retirement (1941), and The Hard Way (1943).

They Drive by Night (1940) with Humphrey Bogart

 

Escape Me Never (1947) with Errol Flynn

  

 

Following a heart attack suffered by director Elmer Clifton while filming Not Wanted (1949), co-writer and co-producer Ida Lupino assumed the directing role without taking any credit. The last female director in Hollywood prior to Lupino was Dorothy Arzner, who retired in 1942. In 1948, Lupino and her then-husband Collier Young formed an independent company, The Filmakers Inc. -developing a series of short, low-budget independent films about taboo, social, and personal topics.During the early days of polio treatment in the U.S., "Never Fear" (1949) portrayed the reality of patients. "Outrage" (1950) examined the negative consequences of rape and victim-blaming. "Hard, Fast and Beautiful" (1951) explored the mother-and-daughter relationship. In "The Hitch-Hiker" (1953), the pathology of the American psycho was examined. "The Bigamist" (1953) dealt with bigamy and pregnancy out of wedlock, while "The Trouble With Angels" (1966) explored the challenges of growing up as a woman under rigid Catholic morality.

 

Co-written by and directed by Lupino- Never Fear (1949)

"Ida has more knowledge of camera angles and lenses than any director I've worked with, with the exception of Victor Fleming. She knows how a woman looks on the screen, what light she should have." — cinematographer Archie Stout

Lupino once referred to herself as a "bulldozer" in order to acquire funding for her production firm, yet she referred to herself as "mother" on set. The back of her director's chair was labeled "Mother of Us All" on set.
 

 

Producer-Director Lupino at the center of a parade of her colleagues at her company The Filmakers during production of Hard, Fast and Beautiful (1951)

 

 

 

 

 

Ida Lupino and Robert Ryan in On Dangerous Ground (1951)

 

 

 

 

 

In a male-dominated atmosphere, she made an effort to appear nonthreatening. stating, "That's where being a man makes a great deal of difference. I  don't suppose the men particularly care about leaving their wives and children. During the vacation period, the wife can always fly over and be with him. It's difficult for a wife to say to her husband, come sit  on the set and watch."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hard, Fast and Beautiful (1951) Directed by Lupino

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Roadhouse (1948) with Richard Widmark

 

The Bigamist (1953) with Edmond O'Brien directed by Lupino.  “I got more satisfaction out of directing than acting.  I enjoyed it much more.” 

 

 

She was acutely conscious of budget considerations, planning scenes in pre-production to avoid technical mistakes and retakes, shooting in public places to avoid set-rental costs, and reusing sets from other studio productions. Lupino had a sharp eye for casting her actors and a knack for instinctively knowing how to light them.

 

She continued to act while directing a few more films before switching to television. Directing more than 100 TV episodes between 1949 and 1968, among them, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Daniel Boone, Bewitched, Batman, Charlie’s Angels, The Donna Reed Show, the pilot episode of Gilligan's Island, 77 Sunset Strip, The Rifleman, Have Gun Will Travel (When Clint Eastwood was shooting Rawhide, he would often take a break to watch the filming of Have Gun Will Travel next door. He admired the way she would ride alongside the cameraman to get the perfect action shots), The Untouchables, The Fugitive and one of the top five best episodes of TV's The Twilight Zone- The Masks in 1963. Her last feature film was the Rosalind Russell, Hayley Mills comedy The Trouble with Angels (1966).

 

Director Ida Lupino and Hayley Mills working on The Trouble With Angels (1966)

 

Lupino's direction of the 145th episode of The Twilight Zone, entitled 'The Masks', marks her as the sole female director to helm an installment of the iconic series. Lupino has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for contributions to the fields of television and film. During her 48-year career, she appeared in 59 films and directed 8.Her feature films, The Hitch-Hiker and Outrage, were both added to the National Film Registry in 1998 and 2020, respectively.

Ida Lupino bid goodbye to the film-making business in 1984 and left the Brentwood, California home she shared with soon to be Ex Actor Howard Duff (a frequent co-star) to a smaller residence in Van Nuys. Ida sorrowfully passed away at the age of 77 from a stroke, following her treatments for cancer in Los Angeles, on August 3, 1995.

"I'd love to see more women working as directors and producers. I want to do pictures of poor, bewildered people. Because that’s what we all are.” 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ida Lupino was so much more than a gifted actress - she was an incredible driving force behind classic cinema. Her prowess for the craft enabled her to create an unprecedented, pioneering directing style, blending narrative components and realism to create something captivating. As a woman in the demanding, sexist Hollywood industry, she started out as an actress before to finding her calling as director. A risk-taker and visionary, Lupino responded to difficult commitments with tight time limits and budgets with a fierce tenacity and power continually taking on ambitious, even daring projects others would find hopeless. Despite her limits, she consistently surpassed expectations and deadlines. Let us take a moment on International Woman's Day to revel in the accomplishments of this astonishing filmmaker - she most certainly deserves it!

“I held my own in the toughest kind of man’s world.”

 

🌟Classic Off-Screen Quotes: Marlene Dietrich

 

 

"Life is a long rehearsal for a film that is never made"- Marlene Dietrich 

⭐Classic Off-Screen Quotes: Elizabeth Taylor

"My god, I had black hair — it was photographed blue-black it was so dark — and thick bushy eyebrows. And my mother and father had to stop them from dying my hair and plucking out my eyebrows. The studio even wanted to change my name to Virginia. They tried to get me to create a Joan Crawford mouth when I first began using lipstick at fifteen. They wanted, you know, Joan Crawford, the ‘40s and everything. Every movie star, Lana Turner, all of them, painted over their lips: and I’m sure that some of them had perfectly fine, full lips — but thin eyebrows were the fad…and God forbid you do anything individual or go against the fad. But I did. I figured this looks absurd. And I agreed with my dad: God must have had some reason for giving me bushy eyebrows and black hair. I guess I must have been pretty sure of my sense of identity. It was me. I accepted it all my life and I can’t explain it. Because I’ve always been very aware of the inner me that has nothing to do with the physical me"

🌠 Happy 90th Birthday Kim Novak

“I loved acting, which was never about money, the fame. It was about a search for meaning. It was painful” 

 

Happy 90th Birthday to Kim Novak! A film and television actress, painter and visual artist. Born on this day in Chicago, Illnois in 1933. 

 

 

 

Watch the fantastic Kim Novak Interview for the 2013 TCM Festival here: https://u.pcloud.link/publink/show?code=XZRmldkZO2wJkm77zj41v8MFGRe3lV9l6E07

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

⭐Classic Off-Screen Quotes: Barbara Stanwyck

Stanwyck at Home

"Put me in the last fifteen minutes of a picture and I don't care what happened before. I don't even care if I was IN the rest of the damned thing - I'll take it in those fifteen minutes."
—Barbara Stanwyck

Stanwyck at Home

 

🌟Classic Off-Screen Quotes: Ginger Rogers

“The truth is that when I did my first film, they asked me to smoke.  I really was caught on to smoking, by a certain director…for just a few years.  Then I saw what an ugly habit it was, and thought how my fingers and hair smelled just like smoke, so I decided to get rid of that.  I danced much better after I got rid of it, I must tell you.”  

- Ginger Rogers interviewed in 1980.