Carl Rollyson Quotes

The real acting parts go to the character actors. —DANA ANDREWS

The world seemed to turn on Michael’s likes and dislikes—as I learned when I mentioned I was giving a talk about Dr. Johnson at Cambridge. Michael objected to him as though Johnson was just another To...

Then he landed the part of Old Atrocity. For the first time, Brennan brought home a whole script, just as he had promised his family he would do one day. He cried, and as his daughter remembered on Th...

Then we got round to Michael’s health. He’s reached a rather difficult stage, Julie said and began to talk about Michael’s digressions, his seeming inability to get to the point or stay on it. It was...

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 lit...

To Rio Bravo, Brennan brought his own brand of realism. He explained his reaction to the script to reporter Steven H. Scheuer: They tell me I’m playing a crippled old man who’s got a rifle built into...

To say that Ruth Brennan was at the center of her husband’s life is no understatement. He never disparaged her supporting role, never spoke like some men do of the wife, as if referring to a possessio...

Under contract to Sam Goldwyn for a decade beginning in 1935, he nevertheless saw himself as independent—in part because so many studios used him, and he was not part of the star machine If you’re not...

Ursula wanted to know about how Michael was coping with Jill’s death. Ursula knew that he had a regiment of women looking after him. I told him about Emma, the housekeeper-cook who had been married to...

Walter also became a hotelier, western style. A brochure touted Walter Brennan’s Indian Lodge Motel. The Motel of Distinction. Enjoy Your Vacation In The Switzerland of America. Fishing—Hunting—Swimmi...

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 insi...

We spent the morning discussing Michael’s role at Tribune, guiding the journal’s policy toward endorsing the creation of NATO and establishing an anti-Communist stance earlier than most other leftwing...

What miffed Brennan about working with Ford was the director’s lack of respect for fellow professionals. Unlike Howard Hawks, Ford was not much of a collaborator. He never gave Brennan the feeling tha...

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 mor...

With the Hellman biography, I encountered for the first time, the issue of authorization, a rather quaint notion that no modern historian would take seriously. Who gets to tell history?

Writing Michael’s biography had not occurred to me when I first contacted him. I was not prepared for this conversation and dropped it. Julie warned me that I did not have quite as free a hand with Mi...

[CR] I was reading another of your books in your library last night—Herbert Morrison’s autobiography. He’s got one paragraph on you. It’s the nastiest piece of business, calling you a TV personality....

[CR] This book is about how marriages stay together, even when there are these strains and tensions. [MF] That’s right.

My reliance on fair use in the Hellman biography became a template for how I was to approach my unauthorized biographies of Martha Gellhorn, Susan Sontag, and Sylvia Plath.

A pilot for Mr. Tutt, a series produced by Desilu and based on a Saturday Evening Post story about a curmudgeonly lawyer, was not made into a series, but it was broadcast on Colgate Theatre (September...