Friday quotes - Tallulah Bankhead

"Nobody can be exactly like me.Sometimes even I have trouble doing it"
Tallulah Bankhead(1902-1968)
I read Tallulah Bankhead's autobiography when I was ten.  I loved her dry sense of humour and strong character.  She was a very talented actress, personality, bon vivant and later talk show host.
Tallulah famously lived at the Algonquin Hotel in New York, in Hollywood and London.  Her parties

Goodbye, Patricia Neal

Patricia Neal, movie star

Academy-Award winning actress Patricia Neal died yesterday at her home in Martha's Vineyard. She was 84 years old and succumbed to lung cancer.

Kentucky Born and Tennessee Raised
Neal was born in Packard, Kentucky in 1926, but raised in Knoxville, Tennessee. As an adult, she studied acting at Northwestern University (B.S. 1947). While still a student, Neal stared on Broadway in Lillian Hellman's Another Part of the Forest. For her role as Regina Hubbard, Neal won a Tony for Best Featured Actress. The Tony Award and rave notices, not to mention her stunning good looks, brought Neal to the attention of Hollywood.

Hollywood Comes a Calling

Gary Cooper and Neal in The Fountainhead

Signed to a contract with Warner Bros., Neal starred opposite future president Ronald Reagan in John Loves Mary (1949). She made another film that year with Reagan (The Hasty Heart), but it was the over-the-top film version of Ayn Rand's bestselling novel, The Fountainhead, that received all the attention. Although not a critical or commercial success, the chemistry between Neal and costar Gary Cooper kept the pages of movie fan magazines burning for several years. In reality, Neal and Cooper had a very torrid love affair that almost destroyed Cooper's marriage and Neal's sanity. When the relationship collapsed, Neal suffered a nervous breakdown and abandoned Hollywood for Broadway. Ironically, she starred in another Helman play, a revival of The Children's Hour. During its run, Hellman introduced Neal to children's author Roald Dahl. The two were married in 1953.

The Play's the Thing
During the late 1950s, Neal devoted herself almost entirely to working on the stage, appearing in only one film: Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd (1957), costarring Andy Griffith. Film fans would have to wait until Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) to see Neal on the big screen again.

Oscar Winner

Neal won a Best Actress Oscar for her role in Hud.

During the early sixties, the leading-lady roles Neal was used to playing all but dried up. After a series of personal tragedies sidelined her from the screen, Neal played a worn-out housekeeper in Martin Ritt's Hud (1963) costarring Paul Newman in the title role. For what many considered a supporting role, Neal won an Oscar as the best actress of the year. Major film roles started coming Neal's way again including Otto Preminger's big-budget World War II classic In Harm's Way (1965). In a cast of many Hollywood notables, Neal received third billing behind John Wayne and Kirk Douglas.

Tragedy and Triumph

Jack Albertson and Neal in The Subject is Roses

Pregnant with her fifth child in 1965, Neal suffered a number of strokes that nearly killed her. After emergency brain surgery and several weeks in a coma, Neal found herself confined to a wheelchair. Neal's husband helped her with her physical therapy and withing two years, she had learned to walk and speak again. So remarkable was her recovery that she was offered the role of Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate (1967), but turned it down, thinking it was too soon for her to return to the screen. A year later, she took the lead role in The Subject Was Roses. It was a remarkable comeback; Neal was nominated once again for Best Actress. She lost the award to Barbra Streisand and Katharine Hepburn, who tied that year, but it was a personal and professional triumph for Neal. Although more major film roles didn't come her way, Neal consistently worked in movies and TV, including Flying By released in 2009.

Patricia Neal, star of stage and screen, is survived by four children (daughter Olivia preceded her in death) and seven grandchildren.

Bogart, Bergman, and Henreid...none wanted to be in "Casablanca"

Today, Casablanca is one of the best-loved movies of all time, so it's hard to believe that its three main stars didn't want to be in it.

Bergman, still relatively new to Hollywood, had her sights set on the role of Marie in Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls.  Gary Cooper and Vera Zorina had been cast, which disappointed Bergman who had been author Hemingway's choice to play Maria. For Bergman, filming Casablanca was an ordeal to get through as quickly and pleasantly as possible. Although she had no real conflicts with Bogart, Bergman didn't sense any real camaraderie with her chain-smoking costar. Another problem for Bergman and the other actors was that the script wasn't completed when filming started. No one knew what was happening, which caused Bergman some anxiety. She didn't know which actor she would end up with in the end. She assumed it would be Bogart because he had the male lead, but we all know how that turned out.

Zorina dropped out of For Whom the Bell Tolls, so Bergman eventually got the role she wanted, the one she thought was the role of a lifetime.  For Whom the Bell Tolls was a big hit and one of the biggest productions of 1942, and Bergman received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress for her performance, but it hasn't weathered the years nearly as well as Casablanca. For years, the popularity of Casablanca alluded Bergman until she finally viewed the film objectively for herself. She realized that it really was a great film and audiences had been right to praise it as such

Henreid started out his career in America as Paul Von Henreid, appearing in Goodbye Mr. Chips and several other films under his given name. By 1940, he was being billed as Paul Henreid and earnestly pursuing a career in Hollywood as a leading man. When he was offered the role of Victor Lazlo, Henreid thought playing the second male lead would do nothing for his career, especially after all the buzz from his costarring performance opposite Bette Davis in Now Voyager. It was Davis, a close friend of Henreid's, that convinced him to take the role. Davis convinced him there was more to the role than what was written in the script and it would be good for his career. Henreid finally agreed with Davis, but only after the studio promised him star billing equal to that of Bogart and Bergman. Davis's advice was confirmed after the film's release and Henreid went on to play male leads opposite some of Hollywood's most popular leading ladies.

Bogart's reasons are not as clear as Bergman's and Henreid's, but from all accounts, Including Bergman's, he wasn't thrilled with the idea of playing Rick. Bogart, who was just emerging as a major star in his own right, could not have anticipated the impact Casablanca would have on his career. Almost overnight, he became a romantic lead, something that had seemed impossible with his far-from-handsome face and years spent playing second leads and gangsters killed in the second reel. It didn't hurt that he had Bergman, arguably one of the screen's great beauties, convincingly acting as if she really loved him. After Casablanca, Bogart went on to become one of the biggest movie stars of all time. He is ranked number one male movie star of all time by the American Film Institute, topping fan favorites Cary Grant, James Stewart, Henry Fonda, and Spencer Tracy.

Only during the golden age of Hollywood could a film, regarded as just another movie that its contract players had to endure, remain so popular over 65 years after its initial release.