Quotes

I'll only work with new people. If you stick with your contemporaries, you're dead.

I was as scrawny as a plucked hen. The Rank Organisation did supply me with dumbbells. All I did was put on two sweaters and then put my shirt on.

I love the camera and it loves me. Well, not very much sometimes. But we're good friends.

First there was the war and then the peace to cope with, and then suddenly I was a film star. It happened all too soon.

Childhood for me was basically a backyard, a spade and a bucket of mud with someone to look after you.

Geniuses are notoriously loony, because it's a very fine line between madness and genius.

TV? Never! I don't want my audience going for a piss or making tea while I'm hard at work.

Cinema is just a form of masturbation. Sexual relief for disappointed people. Women write and say, "I let my husband do it because I think it's you lying on top of me".

There's something wrong with actors, we've always been a suspect breed. Socially, I find myself more admissible now in England because I've written books.

[speaking in 1979] "The kind of acting I used to do no longer exists because your prime consideration is the budget, running time, the cost - and whether they'll understand it in Milwaukee.

If you write about Hollywood, you can only write farce. It's so way over the top, you can't believe it. It's Boulevard du Crépuscule (1950), it really is. And it's cut-throat at the same time.

[speaking in 1983] Everyone wants to get into movies, but there aren't any movies left.

I've got a good left profile and a very bad right profile. I was the Loretta Young of my day. I was only ever photographed on the left-hand profile.

I simply love the camera and it loves me. But the amount of concentration you have to use to feed the camera is so enormous that you're absolutely ragged at the end of a day after doing something simple - like a look.

[on fans] The local police were always having to come and remove girls from their nesting places under the bushes. Like an orphan girl who twice escaped from a home at Birmingham. We only discovered her because she used the potting shed as a lavatory which seemed to indicate an alien presence. I think we got her fixed up as a kennel maid, which gave her dogs to love in place of me.

[on the Cannes Film Festival] My idea of hell. You see all the people you thought were dead and all the people who deserve to be dead. After a while, you start to think you might be dead, too.

[1955] It seems to be almost impossible to find in this country the type of role which has made actors of the Brando [Marlon Brando] and James Dean style. Mine has I think some affinity which hitherto I have only been able to employ in the theatre.

[to Russell Harty during a 1986 interview] But I'm still in the shell, and you haven't cracked it yet, honey.

[on Simone Signoret] I suppose it is fair to say that I fell hopelessly in love with Simone Signoret the very first time I clapped eyes on her in a modest Ealing film called Les guerriers dans l'ombre (1948). I placed her then on the very peak of her profession and as far as I am concerned she has never budged from it and I still love her dearly.

[on Alain Resnais] Resnais is one of the genius directors, too, however difficult it is to work in his way on a script as complex as Providence (1977). He's the only poet director I'm aware of.

[on Kay Kendall] She was without question the greatest female clown we ever had -- apart from someone like Beatrice Lillie, whom your audience won't have heard of. Or Cicely Courtneidge.

[on Rex Harrison] He's the actor I've learned most from. Whenever I used to think about how I would play a part I would first think how Rex would approach it.

[on actress/dancer Jessie Matthews] She was a much greater dancer than Ginger Rogers and I thought a better actress.

'.... the only way I financed an art film like 'The Servant'was out of of my fame as a J. Arthur Rank star. I really wanted Ralph Richardson to play the lead in that but when he turned it down I did it myself. For a year after we finished it we couldn't find a proper distributor.

I had to go along with it. I was selling the product - and the product was me.

By 1966, I was splendidly on the skids.

A dubbed performance is not a performance at all. An actor's voice is, in my opinion, more than seventy per cent of his work.