After my mother died, I found, a little book of hers which recorded everything I had ever done, how I had done it, and how proud she was of her son Conrad. |
An actor remembers his first piece of published praise. It is written on his heart. |
For me, half the joy of achieving has been the struggle and the fight, the pitting myself against the world and all its competition - and winning. |
Have you ever walked late at night through a forest when you are first in love? |
I am indifferent if my spinach is leaf or creamed; if I work to fatiguing point or spend days doing nothing; if I smoke fifty cigarettes a day or none at all; if it rains or shines; if the dentist hurts, or the shoe pinches, or I secure a bargain. |
I can see now that I should have been strong enough to conquer myself. |
I have no illusions about my art. I am what the public made me and, consequently, I am not likely to forget my debt to them. |
I think the motion picture industry is a stupid business and I despise acting the scenes in short snatches, one at a time. I hate this film work. I am disgusted with myself. On the stage I could never play a part unless I felt it with all my heart and soul. |
I think, myself, it is harder for two artists, both ambitious, both temperamental, both perhaps egotistical, to jog along equably in the necessarily restraining atmosphere of a double harness. |
I turned down the first script offered to me, and the second. I lay on my back one day under an umbrella, in the garden, reading the third, and wondered why I had turned down the first. |
I used to think then that I was Bohemian, but I know now that I am not. I prefer order and precision to untidiness and looseness. |
I was appalled at the amount of study necessary in order to qualify in medicine, and gradually my desire was blunted by a keener - and secret - wish to become an actor. |
I was elated by my success in my work, but shattered over my mother's death, and miserable about the way my marriage seemed to be foundering. And one day when my wife was away, I walked out of the house, and out of her life, trying to escape from something I could put no name to. |
I was never a villain on the stage. I always played strong, sympathetic types. My first stage role with a speaking part, believe it or not, was as a priest. It wasn't until I began acting in films that the producers and directors saw me primarily as a bizarre villain. |
I wish, naturally to prevent the possibility that someone may write an accidental, superficial, incomplete and perhaps untrue picture of me. |