We spoke of other innovations—the fax machine, for example. Michael listened politely and though I offered to buy him one, emphasising how easy they were to operate, he could not be convinced. The wir...
We were invited to some of these royal functions, Michael said. Jill wanted to see what they were like. They had gone to Prince Charles’s wedding to Diana. There was a lot of nonsense about it. We had...
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...
Whatever misgivings Cooper had about entering the ring with Brennan, he also realized that Walter was too good an actor and had too refined a sense of ensemble acting to do anything other than make Co...
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...
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.
Whoopee! Michael said as his barbecued fish arrived. Look at that! Amazing. A meal was never just a meal; with Michael Foot it was a celebration. Nearly every mouthful got its own cry of satisfaction....
William Brennan did not live to see his son, now a remarkable transformative actor, win his first Academy Award, for Come and Get It, the first time the award for supporting actor was given. Edward Ar...
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...
Writing biography is a shameless profession, an exercise in bad taste, a rude inquiry.
You’ve got to be a bit ruthless, I think, to write a biography.—Peter Cameron, The City of Your Final Destination (2002)
[CR] Do you think John Smith would have done as well as Blair? [MF] Yes—better in some ways. He had better links with the Labour Party. There are some things he [Blair] seems to be careless about.
[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....
On an outdoor set, he watched a donkey braying at all the wrong moments, angering the sound technicians, who could not get the animal to perform on cue. (Walter loved to tell this story, and of course...
Devotion that drove other actors out of the tent. Although Brennan’s political convictions were decidedly conservative, he remained outside the political arena, which perhaps accounts for why he playe...
[CR] What about Barbara Castle. You never had a sexual relationship with her? [MF] No. Never. I wanted to, maybe, but in 1938 we went across the channel together, waiting to start on our new jobs. I h...
[T]HE LEATHER, SUN-DRENCHED FACE THAT MOST COMMONLY HELPED tame the wild frontier was that of Walter Brennan, writes critic Manny Pacheco. Not Gary Cooper, not John Wayne, not Randolph Scott—or any ot...
Appearing. After seeing the completed film, Brennan thanked Goldwyn for persuading him to do it. It’s stories like these, he told Hedda Hopper, that make you realize it isn’t all beer and skittles in...
As Brennan’s roles became more important, he acquired the services of a stand-in. Years later, he recalled learning from his first stand-in, Dick Dickinson, about lighting and blocking. An alert stand...
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