Quotes

[about films] I love to see them. I just don't like to make them.

I have never felt the need to belong to any exclusive, self-defining or special group. I find it difficult to answer questions about "'gay life" in Hollywood when I was living and working there. There were, of course, gay cliques, but I had no close friends who belonged to any of them, and I had no desire to become involved with any of them . . . I was never ashamed, and I never felt the need to explain or apologize for my relationships to anyone.

I was very lucky when I first started. I had [Nicholas Ray] and before that Lewis Milestone, and I was a kid and very naive, with no training at all. They really took care of me. And then I began to get directors who weren't as good as [Ray and Milestone] were, and I soon realized I didn't know what the hell I was doing, and I'd better find out because I could no longer trust this sort of father symbol of the director anymore. In those days you were a movie star or you were a Broadway actor, and movie stars weren't considered actors. So I couldn't call myself an actor unless I worked in the theater for any length of time.

[on leaving the Samuel Goldwyn after Hans Christian Andersen et la danseuse (1952)] I finally bought my contract from him. Couldn't stand working for him anymore, and I just wanted to work in the theater for a bit. I didn't want to be a movie star. I didn't think it was my place in life. It took all the money I had in the world, and I had a wonderful agent then, Charles Feldman [Charles K. Feldman]. He got me in this movie in Italy. I was all set to come to New York and set up shop, but I did the [Luchino Visconti] movie [Senso (1954)] out of necessity. I made an awful lot of money on that one since I had signed for just three months, and it dragged on for nine.