Bette Davis The Little Foxes 4 1941 Metal Print

"Attempt the impossible in order to improve your work."

"An affair now and then is good for a marriage. It adds spice, stops it from getting boring. I ought to know."

[referring to her parents' divorce when she was 7] "Of course I replaced my father. I became my own father and everyone else's."

"I will never be below the title."

"If you want a thing well done, get a couple of old broads to do it."

"Today everyone is a star - they're all billed as 'starring' or 'also starring'. In my day, we earned that recognition."

[about Katharine Hepburn's tie for the 1968 Oscar with Barbra Streisand] "I wanted to be the first to win three Oscars, but Miss Hepburn has done it. Actually it hasn't been done. Miss Hepburn only won half an Oscar. If they'd given me half an Oscar I would have thrown it back in their faces. You see, I'm an Aries. I never lose."

[referring to her fourth husband, Gary Merrill] 'Gary was a macho man, but none of...

I first became obsessed with photography and motion pictures while growing up in post WW2 Manila in the Philippine Islands in the late 1940's/early 1950's. Film noirs were a particular influence. But my first love remains the theater. I acted in numerous amateur productions from 1958 to 1978. In 1979 I earned a MA in drama from the University of Arizona; earlier getting a BA in English from the University of Minnesota, where I co-founded the first film society on campus and ran it for four years. While at the U of A, I studied with the master black and white photo essayist W. Eugene Smith (1918-1978) the last year of his life. I am the last person cited in Jim Hughes' definitive biography of Gene, as I wrote about attending his final...