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Link	Quote	Stars	Tags	Author
ce98f4d	April 17: Schwab's Pharmacy, Hollywood and Beverly Hills, bills Mrs. Marilyn Miller $11.42 for two prescriptions.			Carl Rollyson
ace0361	No other supporting player won three Academy Awards, and you would be hard-pressed to name another character actor whose performances frequently overwhelmed those of ostensible leads like Joel McCrea and Barbara Stanwyck in Banjo on My Knee. "We're supporting you. Be nice to us," McCrea and Stanwyck joked with Brennan. Those stars had the fights of their lives trying to stay on equal terms with old Walter. Sure, other character actors have ..			Carl Rollyson
956098a	Michael was the male partner in a dance, but he did not know how to lead. Or rather, he led by default, since Jill did not challenge his authority. He simply filled a vacuum. As a political man, he would have the same problem: he had a solid group of adherents, but he could not use that base to assert his authority. He was a sort of effigy of a great man and he seems to have known it, since he became leader of the Labour Party only after co..			Carl Rollyson
82b2b9c	There is value, too, in showing the rough edges of biography, the stops and starts, in an unapologetic fashion. I wonder if there has ever been a biography that has treated a British political and literary figure in quite so revealing a fashion.			Carl Rollyson
0c894da	I think Walter Brennan was the greatest example of a personality that I've ever used. . . . When I was in trouble, I called on Brennan. He always came through. --HOWARD HAWKS IN CONVERSATION WITH JOSEPH MCBRIDE			Carl Rollyson
f3b4f29	I slept on a sofa bed in Michael's library. Each night before retiring, I would go through a shelf or pile of books (his only filing system) filled with letters and reviews and notes. Every night brought a new revelation. A few letters from Mary Welsh, Hemingway's fourth wife, whom Michael had known in the war, were tucked into Hemingway books. In a debunking biography of Michael's hero, Aneurin Bevan, founder of the National Heath Service,..			Carl Rollyson
788067e	Michael had been an all-day walker for much of his life, but at eighty-seven, the rises robbed him of air and he had to stop frequently to tell his anecdotes. Yet he was still taking buses and clattering along with his cane, sometimes hitting posts with it for emphasis. The walking stick had also become a prop, an animated exclamation mark. Sometimes Michael would wave it high and take my breath away, since I was certain that he would take ..			Carl Rollyson
6780628	Brennan was as wily as many of the characters he played, which meant he finessed the constraints of the studio system, mocked studio bosses--even playing tricks on them--and took possession of his roles with an aplomb and shrewdness that made his appearance on movie sets a welcome relief to fellow actors worried about their own positions in the highly stratified Hollywood system.			Carl Rollyson
fb45ae8	I often thought of Boswell and Johnson during my stays with Michael Foot. In Michael's company, I was very much a Boswell, keen to get the great man to talk. I recorded everything, compiling a hundred hours of Michael reminiscing and nearly another hundred of others commenting on him.			Carl Rollyson
9b70190	I was beginning to feel uneasy about falling into the authorised biographer's trap of becoming privy to secrets that could not be divulged. I could see that I was heading toward some kind of confrontation with Michael. The way he handled it would be another means of assessing his character.			Carl Rollyson
266e6dc	The real acting parts go to the character actors. --DANA ANDREWS			Carl Rollyson
a87c840	When Michael greeted me at the entrance to their home only three months after Jill's death, his pallid complexion shocked me. I thought that I had arrived at death's door. He appeared to have aged more than a decade. I remembered that he sometimes stumbled, even with a cane, but now he was all wobble, yet his voice was as strong as ever and as engaging as it always had been.			Carl Rollyson
cef4ec1	Absalom, Absalom! That novel is an object lesson for biographers because it is about the obsession with knowing what really happened in the past, as well as about the utter futility of ever coming to a final, definitive, determination as to what can be known.			Carl Rollyson
07ed214	I brought up Michael's passionate support of Indira Gandhi. "I read The Asian Age every morning, you know," Michael said by way of stressing his deep concern with Indian politics. Much to the outrage of Michael's fellow Labour Party members and supporters, Michael went to India during the emergency Indira Gandhi had enforced."			Carl Rollyson
cab0e3b	Scholars estimate that Boswell spent something like four hundred days in Samuel Johnson's company. Over a period of three years and ten trips to England, I lived for something like one hundred days with Michael. Boswell knew Johnson much longer (more than twenty years), but he did not live with his subject and see him throughout the entire course of a day and night. I was with Michael from breakfast through to dinner in the evening and ever..			Carl Rollyson
971d5fc	Michael was never one to discuss relationships in depth. I would have to press him again and again--usually in response to what others said--to get him to open up. His pauses were blanks I had to fill in by talking to others.			Carl Rollyson
784e6d8	I went to this party for Francis Wheen's book [on Marx]. I went and sat on a chair--at these places I can't stand up and so I sat there and a woman came up to me--I gather from the Telegraph. It was just the day before Princess Margaret had died ... The woman said something like, "What do you think about [Princess Margaret's death] and I said, "I don't give a bugger about such things. I'm not giving any interview to you and she printed it. ..			Carl Rollyson
bb8782c	But if you are a biographer, you know that some of those people the biographer so fulsomely thanks cannot possibly be that good. In our contemporary language, we'd have to say those acknowledgments just do not compute.			Carl Rollyson
55a0428	This is not a conventional biography. I rely not on documents, but almost exclusively on recorded interviews and memories of Michael Foot constituting a raw record of conversations not smoothed over by a biographical narrative. This is a book about process.			Carl Rollyson
b9ba686	Biographers are often made to feel like supplicants. But Michael's first phone call was a wooing,			Carl Rollyson
ca66162	Brennan, who appeared in more than two hundred films and countless television productions over a fifty-year career, is Hollywood.			Carl Rollyson
2a7ad59	Brennan almost never accepted the clothes that studios designed for his parts. He called himself a "dirty actor," by which he meant that the grungy duds he wore on-screen were his own. Brennan had to smell his own dirt and would not wash his getups, which became so soiled that his wife insisted he keep them in the garage." --			Carl Rollyson
66e0dff	Just then Michael was exercised about a letter he had received from Michael Scammell, Arthur Koestler's authorised biographer, raising doubts that his subject had actually raped Jill. Certain of her friends had expressed their skepticism to Scammell, he reported. Michael pronounced Scammell's name so that it sounded to me like "Scoundrel."			Carl Rollyson
3982b41	Friendship was, I think, a deep enchantment for Michael. He built up his favourite as a nonpareil. He touted you. But if you broke the spell, he would erupt with fury and then subside in a silence that just cut you out entirely.			Carl Rollyson
09f37eb	Walter Brennan spent virtually his entire life making motion pictures, perfecting a persona, and embodying a range of characters that he began to observe and imitate during his earliest days on the docks in Swampscott, Massachusetts, where he got his start, and where this biography properly commences.			Carl Rollyson
11fae2f	Like the best character actors, Brennan brought a badly needed realism to the screen, where it served as an antidote to the soft-focus lighting and toupee-topped stars that romanticized movies.			Carl Rollyson
00920bd	Michael and Jill were connoisseurs of personality, transcending politics. They loved Randolph Churchill, who ran two losing campaigns against Michael in Plymouth and they adored Benjamin Disraeli, Mrs. Pankhurst, Lady Astor--all of them affiliated with the Tories. Sometimes, as I would later learn, Michael would go into contorted arguments to support those he liked even when they manifestly stood for views opposite to his own.			Carl Rollyson
8a989ee	To study Brennan is also to understand what it took to remain at the very top of a precarious profession for more than thirty years. Through Brennan and his pictures, we see Hollywood in the early stages of the sound era, its ascent to a golden age in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and then its decline owing to the advent of television--a technological innovation as formidable and threatening as sound had been to silent film in the late 19..			Carl Rollyson
1aec6a9	My legs are not quite properly operating and I'm having physiotherapy every Tuesday," Michael said after Emma had beaten him to the phone. I accompanied him on one of these sessions, where he had to wait like anyone else for his turn. I was amazed that he did not have someone come to the house and that the therapy was not more frequent. He could barely walk now. But he was loyal to the National Health Service, the creation of his hero Nye B..			Carl Rollyson
7fdbeb4	How did Brennan achieve this mythic status, this power over not just audiences but also his fellow actors? Today, the question remains unanswered, and this figure key to understanding the power of Hollywood remains largely undiscovered.			Carl Rollyson
4d3efba	A Private Life of Michael Foot is an effort to show how a biographer struggles to tell his own story, even as family and friends cherish differing narratives about that same subject.			Carl Rollyson
2c00923	We read Byron's letters there [in Venice] together. Then we were going up in the world, having the bloody government pay for our holidays. . . Venice revived him [Byron]. It restored him," Michael insisted. "Venice is the happiest place on the planet, in my opinion. That's why I can't stand the Thomas Mann business." I laughed. "A damn travesty," Michael asserted. "Venice is not like that at all. Stendhal's got all that in--how and why it w..			Carl Rollyson
6a5109b	Like other actors who worked for Goldwyn, Brennan was fond of repeating famous Goldwynisms, such as, "in two words: im-possible," and "include me out." Then there was the time Goldwyn called studio head Darryl Zanuck. "Darryl," said Goldwyn, "we're both in trouble." "Both," replied Zanuck. "Why?" "Because you got an actor," said Goldwyn, "and I want him." Actors often questioned Brennan about why he worked for Goldwyn so long. "If he makes ..			Carl Rollyson
9d6ee76	It was rare for Walter Brennan to express more than satisfaction at work well done. But Three Godfathers (March 6, 1936) was something special. With its combination of an unusual director, Richard Boleslawski, and an ensemble of actors--Chester Morris, Lewis Stone, and Brennan-- inspired by what has to be called a spiritual western, Three Godfathers told the story of how three outlaws come to care for and save the infant of a dying mother t..			Carl Rollyson
c5aa431	Whether it was Byron, Wells, Hazlitt, Swift, or himself, Michael saw mating with women through a romantic screen that ennobled him and his heroes, no matter what grief they caused others.			Carl Rollyson
9f363a3	Michael often spoke of his father and their book discussions. Isaac Foot would visit London nearly every fortnight, Michael recalled, and they would see each other. Michael rarely spoke of anyone else in his family. Even more than Michael, Isaac was immersed in the world of books, accumulating a huge library. Sooner or later Michael seemed always to take up the books his father had prized. Montaigne and Conrad became part of the Foot canon ..			Carl Rollyson
7366784	Anyone coming from a fresh viewing of Barbary Coast will notice that Walter Brennan cleans up very well. No trace of Old Atrocity is visible in one of Come and Get It's first scenes, in which the wiry, acrobatic Swede leaps into Barney's arms, wrapping his thighs around the rotund Arnold's midsection as though about to take his buddy out for a ride. For once, Brennan plays a man near to his own age with his six-foot-one frame--no stooping o..			Carl Rollyson
51fc026	By the time he was six, Walter was luring tramps and other unsavory characters home with the promise of a meal. He loved to hear their tall tales. A year later, imitating an Irish neighbor, he began collecting dialects, a lifelong pursuit that helped him, by listening carefully, play characters by ear, getting their "voice tone" and phrasing right. He had an unusual sympathy for old people, a fondness for underdogs, and a "fine scorn for st..			Carl Rollyson
0c86489	In June 2000, I had settled into a cosy stay at Pilgrim's Lane. Only later would I begin to see that by providing me with so much access and comfort, Michael was buffering the biography. I don't mean that he made some sort of calculation that I would be indebted because of his generosity--although this is exactly what his nephew Paul Foot would later say: I was abusing Michael's hospitality by dealing with issues that for Michael's sake sho..			Carl Rollyson
e9e85b9	Michael had an aching need to show the world what Jill had not been able to display herself, much as Thomas Carlyle had done for his late wife Jane and H. G. Wells had done for his Jane after she died. These men relied on women to perform in what Martha Gellhorn liked to call "the kitchen of life."			Carl Rollyson
6715fca	January 17: Epoca (Italy) publishes John Florea's cover shot of Marilyn leaning out of the back seat of a car, dressed in her dancehall girl outfit from River of No Return.			Carl Rollyson
965bd11	January 17: A terrified Montand, who does not know much English, works on his lines with his wife, the actress Simone Signoret. Marilyn suddenly informs the studio that she will not be coming in the next day.			Carl Rollyson
b0b0066	Brennan's best small role is in Fritz Lang's Fury (May 29, 1936), another MGM production. Brennan plays "Bugs" Meyers, a deputy who locks up Joe Wilson (Spencer Tracy), falsely accused of murder, and is almost lynched. Brennan's portrayal goes way beyond the scope of what is actually in the film's script. He plays a new modern type, an ordinary man suddenly elevated to importance because he plays a small but highly visible part in a widely ..			Carl Rollyson
d3f386e	The next day, Michael introduced a new subject: "One of the reasons I've never been in favour of writing autobiography is because you can't tell the truth." I agreed. "All the great autobiographers have been charlatans," Michael said, warming to his topic."			Carl Rollyson

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