Gracie Allen: On my way in, a man stopped me at the stage door and said, “Hiya, cutie, how about a bite tonight after the show?”
George Burns: And you said?
Gracie Allen: I said, “I’ll be busy after the show, but I’m not doing anything right now.” So I bit him.
“All I had to do was say, ‘Gracie, how’s your brother?’ and she talked for 38 years,” Burns once remembered. “And sometimes I didn’t even have to remember to say, ‘Gracie, how’s your brother?'”
Michael Caine’s real name is Maurice Joseph Micklewhite.
He originally took the stage name Michael Scott, but his agent learned that another actor was using it and asked him to choose another one quickly.
Caine was standing in a phone booth in London’s Leicester Square. He looked around, saw The Caine Mutiny playing at the Odeon cinema, and suggested Michael Caine.
He once told an interviewer that if he had looked the other way, he would be known as “Michael One Hundred and One Dalmatians.”
Dutch prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende is nicknamed Harry Potter.
Guess why.
“For 40 years I’ve been an actor on the American stage. My entire family is well represented in the entire field of show business. I’ve played this very city of Cincinnati for 30 or 40 years. I’ve never had a decent reception here. I’ve been waiting all this time, ladies and gentlemen, to say to you that you, the people of Cincinnati, are the greatest morons, the most unintelligent, illiterate bastards I have ever appeared before in my entire life. Take a good look at me, because you’ll never see me again.”
— Vaudeville performer Richard Bennett finally gives up
Oscar Wilde: “Do you mind if I smoke?”
Sarah Bernhardt: “I don’t care if you burn.”
The Barrison Sisters after asking “Would you like to see my …” — well, you can guess.
“The Wickedest Girls in the World” toured vaudeville between 1890 and 1910.
Films winning the most Academy Awards:
Ben-Hur: 11
Titanic: 11
The Return of the King: 11
West Side Story: 10
Gone with the Wind: 9
The Last Emperor: 9
The English Patient: 9
Gigi: 9
From Here to Eternity: 8
On the Waterfront: 8
My Fair Lady: 8
Cabaret: 8
Gandhi: 8
Amadeus: 8
“There’s a lot of great movies that have won the Academy Award, and a lot of great movies that haven’t,” Clint Eastwood said. “You just do the best you can.”
George Lucas originally wanted Orson Welles to provide the voice of Darth Vader.
Finally he opted for James Earl Jones, whose voice was less recognizable.
Jim Morrison’s grave, in Paris. Officially, the Doors frontman died on July 3, 1971, but some questions remain. For one thing, no autopsy was performed; a French physician attributed his death to heart failure on the advice of Morrison’s wife, who was the only one to see the body (and who died herself a few years later). When The Doors’ manager arrived, Morrison’s body was already in a sealed casket.
Beyond that, it’s known that Morrison was tired of fame and had told his bandmates that he wanted to fake his own death. Short of an exhumation, we’ll never know for sure, but Doors keyboard player Ray Manzarek has said, “If there was one guy that would have been capable of staging his own death — getting a phony death certificate and paying off some French doctor … and putting a 150-pound sack of sand into a coffin and splitting to some point on this planet — Africa, who knows where — it is Jim Morrison who would have been able to pull it off.”
While completing his last movie, James Dean filmed a safe-driving announcement aimed at teenagers.
“The life you save,” he concluded, “may be mine.”