Scorn

by Parris, Matthew;

Bette Davis

  There’s a kind of flowering dullness about her, a boredom in rowdy bloom.

  Joyce Haber on Julie Andrews

  She needs open-heart surgery, and they should go in through her feet.

  Julie Andrews on Joyce Haber

  It’s a new low for actresses when you have to wonder what’s between her ears instead of her legs.

  Katharine Hepburn on Sharon Stone

  I like a drink as much as the next man. Unless the next man is Mel Gibson.

  Ricky Gervais, introducing Gibson onstage at the Golden Globes

  Literally, physically, she has a very big mouth … I was aware of a faint echo when I was kissing her.

  Hugh Grant on Julia Roberts

  I thought I told you to wait in the car.

  Tallulah Bankhead, when greeted by a former admirer after many years. Attrib.

  She was always a star, but only intermittently a good actress.

  Brendan Gill on Tallulah Bankhead, in The Times

  Systematically invading her own privacy she was the first of the modern personalities.

  Lee Israel on Tallulah Bankhead

  I’m as pure as the driven slush.

  Tallulah Bankhead

  The T is silent, as in Harlow.

  Lady Margot Asquith, explaining that her name should not be pronounced ‘Margot’. The reference is to Jean Harlow.

  This was Doris Day’s first picture; before she became a virgin.

  Oscar Levant on Doris Day in Romance on the High Seas

  Guido Nadzo was Nadzo Guido.

  Brooks Atkinson on Valentino look-alike Guido Nadzo

  Not content to stop the show, she merely slowed it down.

  Anonymous, of Elaine Paige

  It is greatly to Mrs Patrick Campbell’s credit that, bad as the play was, her acting was worse. It was a masterpiece of failure.

  George Bernard Shaw on Mrs Patrick Campbell

  When you were a little boy, somebody ought to have said ‘hush’ just once.

  Mrs Patrick Campbell to George Bernard Shaw

  GEORGE BERNARD SHAW: I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play. Bring a friend … if you have one.

  WINSTON CHURCHILL: Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second … if there is one.

  Exchange between George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill, sometimes attributed to correspondence between Randolph Churchill and Noël Coward

  She was so dramatic she stabbed the potatoes at dinner.

  The Reverend Sydney Smith on Sarah Siddons, a melodramatic actress

  Do you know how they are going to decide the Shakespeare-Bacon dispute? They are going to dig up Shakespeare and dig up Bacon; they are going to set their coffins side by side, and they are going to get Tree to recite Hamlet to them. And the one who turns in his coffin will be the author of the play.

  W.S. Gilbert on Herbert Beerbohm Tree

  At the end, when the whale has lured Harris north with a come-hither flick of its tail, Miss Rampling is caught in the ice floes, leaping from one to t’other and clad in thigh boots, homespun poncho and a turban, as if she expected David Bailey to surface and photograph her for Vogue’s Arctic number.

  Alexander Walker on Charlotte Rampling in Orca the Killer Whale, in the Evening Standard

  Dame Anna Neagle was game enough to have a little stab at the Charleston, and was wildly and sympathetically applauded by admirers who plainly felt any gesture more extravagant than holding a hand above her head – as though hailing a cab, or conceivably signalling for help – was a grave imposition upon a Lady of her advanced years.

  Kenneth Hurren reviewing No, No, Nanette, in the Spectator

  A plumber’s idea of Cleopatra.

  W.C. Fields on Mae West

  She has a face that belongs to the sea and the wind, with large rocking-horse nostrils and teeth that you just know bite an apple every day.

  Cecil Beaton on Katharine Hepburn

  Katharine Hepburn ran the whole gamut of emotions from A to B.

  Dorothy Parker reviewing The Lake by Dorothy Massingham and Murray MacDonald

  I have knocked everything but the knees of the chorus girls, and nature has anticipated me there.

  Percy Hammond, critic, on a musical

  It’s like getting a prize from the snipers because they have missed you.

  Michael Caine on winning an award from the London Film Critics Circle

  Insecurity, commonly regarded as a weakness in normal people, is the basic tool of an actor’s trade.

  Miranda Richardson

  Remember, it’s not who you know – it’s whom.

  Joan Rivers

  An actor’s a guy who, if you ain’t talking about him, ain’t listening.

  Marlon Brando

  You can pick out actors by the glazed look that comes into their eyes when the conversation wanders away from themselves.

  Michael Wilding

  Actors should be treated like cattle.

  Alfred Hitchcock

  Theatre actors look down on film actors, who look down on TV actors. Thank God for reality shows or we wouldn’t have anybody to look down on.

  George Clooney

  George Clooney always looks like he’s in an advert for George Clooney.

  Geoff Dyer

  Acting is the most minor of gifts … after all, Shirley Temple could do it at the age of four.

  Katharine Hepburn

  Directors are people too short to be actors.

  Josh Greenfield on film directors

  He was once Slightly in Peter Pan, and has been wholly in Peter Pan ever since.

  Kenneth Tynan on Noël Coward. Attrib.

  He was his own greatest invention.

  John Osborne on Noël Coward

  Television? Television is for being on, dear boy, not for watching.

  Noël Coward

  Two things should be cut – the second act and the child’s throat.

  Noël Coward on a dull play with an annoying child star

  If they’d stuffed the child’s head up the horse’s arse, they would have solved two problems at once.

  Noël Coward on a performance starring a child and a horse, which defecated on stage

  Not just an artist, but a critic, too!

  Sir Thomas Beecham, during a performance when a horse on stage defecated

  He’s the kind of man who thinks Mea Culpa is an Italian starlet.

  Brian Viner on the impresario Lord Grade

  The reason why so many people turned up at Louis Mayer’s funeral was because they wanted to make sure he was dead.

  Sam Goldwyn

  Give the public what they want to see and they’ll come out for it.

  Anonymous on the crowds at the funeral of Hollywood mogul Harry Cohn

  What critics call dirty in our movies they call lusty in foreign films.

  Billy Wilder

  Monica Lewinsky has agreed to host a new Fox reality show called Mr. Personality. Lewinsky says this way, when people ask her the most degrading thing she’s ever done, she’ll have a new answer.

  Tina Fey

  Television? No good will come of this device. The word is half Greek and half Latin.

  C.P. Scott

  Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.

  T.S. Eliot, in the New York Post

  If a tree falls in a forest and there is no one to record the event on YouTube, does it still make a sound?

  E. Jane Dickinson

  Swearing on television is now like Muzak in a lift: an ambient noise that is pumped routinely into the atmosphere without any particular purpose.

  Jenny McCartney

  TV is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your living-room by people you wouldn’t have in your home.

  David Frost

  I once saved David Frost from drowning.

  Peter Cook, asked if he had a
ny regrets in his life

  The bubonic plagiarist.

  Peter Cook on Sir David Frost

  He rose without trace.

  Kitty Muggeridge on the career of David Frost

  I’m afraid I’m watching television that night.

  Peter Cook, invited by David Frost to dinner with Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson

  Looking at the past by digging holes in the ground is like making a cookery programme exclusively by examining the washing up.

  AA Gill on TV archaeology programmes

  We are drowning our youngsters in violence, cynicism and sadism … The grandchildren of the kids who used to weep because the Little Match Girl froze to death now feel cheated if she isn’t slugged, raped and thrown into a Bessemer converter.

  Jenkin Lloyd Jones

  You know, I go to the theatre to be entertained … I don’t want to see plays about rape, sodomy and drug addiction … I can get all that at home.

  Peter Cook, caption to cartoon in the Observer

  Popular Stage – playes … are sinfull, heathenish, lewde, ungodly Spectacles, and most pernicious Corruptions; condemned in all ages, as intolerable Mischiefes to Churches, to Republickes, to the manners, mindes and soules of men. And that the Profession of Play-poets, of Stage-players; together with the penning, acting, and frequenting of Stage-players, are unlawful, infamous, and misbeseeming Christians.

  William Prynne, 17th-century critic

  It had only one fault. It was kind of lousy.

  James Thurber on a play

  I saw it at a disadvantage – the curtain was up.

  Walter Winchell on a show starring Earl Carroll

  I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn’t it.

  Groucho Marx

  The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster.

  Oscar Wilde

  What a tiresome affected sod.

  Noël Coward on Oscar Wilde

  Busy yourselves with that, you damned walruses, while the rest of us proceed with the play.

  John Barrymore, throwing a fish into the stalls of a coughing audience

  I would just like to mention Robert Houdini who in the eighteenth century invented the vanishing bird-cage trick and the theatre matinee. May he rot and perish. Good afternoon.

  Orson Welles, addressing the audience at the end of a matinee performance

  I’ve seen more excitement at the opening of an umbrella.

  Earl Wilson, reviewing a play

  If you love The War of the Worlds then crank up the volume at home. Don’t waste your money on this.

  Ann Treneman on a 2016 production of The War of the Worlds

  The touring production of Five Guys Named Moe … performed a bluesey, doleful number with so little feeling that I suspect the only cotton their ancestors ever picked was out of an Anadin bottle.

  Victor Lewis-Smith, newspaper critic, 1994

  There was laughter at the back of the theatre, leading to the belief that someone was telling jokes back there.

  George S. Kaufman on a Broadway comedy

  Darling, they’ve absolutely ruined your perfectly dreadful play.

  Tallulah Bankhead to Tennessee Williams after seeing the film version of Orpheus Descending, entitled The Fugitive Kind

  There is enough Irish comedy to make us wish Cromwell had done a more thorough job.

  James Agee on Fort Apache

  A film so awe-inspiringly wooden that it is basically a fire risk.

  Peter Bradshaw on Grace of Monaco

  I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.

  Roger Ebert on North

  To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not just to climaxes but to prefixes.

  Roger Ebert on the end of The Village

  No.

  Leonard Maltin’s complete review of Isn’t It Romantic?

  Very well then: I say Never.

  George Jean Nathan on Tonight or Never

  Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first person she meets and then teams up with three strangers to kill again.

  Rick Polito’s synopsis of The Wizard of Oz

  There were no wolves in the movie.

  Amazon user Joe Watson on The Wolf of Wall Street

  Too many monsters.

  Amazon user Joe A. Gonzales on Monsters, Inc.

  My friend Carl told me to watch this. Carl is no longer my friend.

  Amazon user M.W. Malone on The Expendables 2

  I don’t know what’s happening. I bought this movie to have something happened.

  Amazon user Eric Majewski on The Happening

  How many times must Willy be freed before he’s freed?

  Amazon user pauljolly65 on Free Willy: Escape from Pirate’s Cove, the fourth film in the series.

  Hunger isn’t a game.

  Amazon user Ryan Galaska on The Hunger Games

  If Peter O’Toole was any prettier they’d have to call it Florence of Arabia.

  Noël Coward on O’Toole’s T.E. Lawrence in the film Lawrence of Arabia

  As synthetic and padded as the transvestite’s cleavage.

  Frank Rich, ‘The Butcher of Broadway’, on La Cage aux Folles, in the New York Times

  It is not true that Andrew Lloyd Webber and I are no longer speaking to each other. I saw his last show. At least I hope it was his last show.

  Sir Tim Rice

  There is less in this than meets the eye.

  Tallulah Bankhead on the revival of a play by Maurice Maeterlinck

  It can probably be said that Pinter raised to a new level of acceptability the kind of play in which the audience not only has no precise idea of what is going on, but seriously doubts whether the author has, either.

  Kenneth Hurren on The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter, in the Mail on Sunday

  A theatrical whore of the first quality.

  Peter Hall on Bertolt Brecht

  Shakespeare, Madam, is obscene, and, thank God, we are sufficiently advanced to have found it out.

  Frances Trollope on William Shakespeare

  Crude, immoral, vulgar and senseless.

  Leo Tolstoy on William Shakespeare

  One of the greatest geniuses that ever existed, Shakespeare undoubtedly wanted taste.

  Horace Walpole on William Shakespeare

  This enormous dunghill.

  Voltaire on William Shakespeare

  We can say of Shakespeare that never has a man turned so little knowledge to such great account.

  T.S. Eliot on William Shakespeare

  Pale, marmoreal Eliot was there last week, like a chapped office boy on a high stool, with a cold in his head.

  Virginia Woolf on T.S. Eliot

  I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.

  Charles Darwin on William Shakespeare

  A sycophant, a flatterer, a breaker of marriage vows, a whining and inconstant person.

  Elizabeth Forsyth on William Shakespeare

  Shakespeare never had six lines together without a fault. Perhaps you may find seven, but this does not refute my general assertion.

  Samuel Johnson on William Shakespeare

  A strange, horrible business, but I suppose good enough for Shakespeare’s day.

  Queen Victoria giving her opinion of King Lear

  When I read Shakespeare

  I am struck with wonder

  that such trivial people

  should muse and thunder

  in such lovely language.

  D.H. Lawrence

  The intensity of my impatience with him occasionally reaches such a pitch, that it would positively be a relief to me to dig him up and throw stones at him.

  George Bernard Shaw on William Shak
espeare, Dramatic Opinions and Essays

  George too Shaw to be good.

  Dylan Thomas on George Bernard Shaw

  The way Bernard Shaw believes in himself is very refreshing in these atheistic days when so many people believe in no God at all.

  Israel Zangwill on George Bernard Shaw

  He is an old bore; even the grave yawns for him.

  Herbert Beerbohm Tree on Israel Zangwill

  He is the true Elizabethan blank-verse beast, itching to frighten other people with the superstitious terrors and cruelties in which he does not himself believe, and wallowing in blood, violence, muscularity of expression and strenuous animal passion as only literary men do when they become thoroughly depraved by solitary work, sedentary cowardice, and starvation of the sympathetic centres. It is not surprising to learn that Marlowe was stabbed in a tavern brawl: what would be utterly unbelievable would be his having succeeded in stabbing anyone else.

  George Bernard Shaw on Christopher Marlowe, Dramatic Opinions and Essays

  The first man to have cut a swathe through the theatre and left it strewn with virgins.

  Frank Harris on George Bernard Shaw

  Dramatized stench.

  A review of George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession

  He hasn’t an enemy in the world, and none of his friends like him.

  Oscar Wilde on George Bernard Shaw

  Oscar Wilde’s talent seems to me to be essentially rootless, something growing in a glass on a little water.

  George Moore, novelist

  He was over-dressed, pompous, snobbish, sentimental and vain. But he had an undeniable flair for the possibilities of commercial theatre.

  Evelyn Waugh on Oscar Wilde

  I really enjoy only his stage directions … He uses the English language like a truncheon.

  Max Beerbohm on George Bernard Shaw

  Mr Shaw is (I suspect) the only man on earth who has never written any poetry.

  G.K. Chesterton on George Bernard Shaw

  He writes like a Pakistani who has learned English when he was twelve years old in order to become a chartered accountant.

  John Osborne on George Bernard Shaw in the Manchester Guardian

  There are no human beings in Major Barbara; only animated points of view.

  William Archer on Major Barbara by George Bernard Shaw, World

  More than once, I found myself asking: ‘Is this homage or just horseshit?’ In many instances I couldn’t decide, concluding that it must be both. Surely no one makes a movie this bad by accident?

  Mark Kermode on Grace of Monaco