Rosalind Russell Tribute

Everything you need to know right here. Great post – go read it!!! And then come back here for some book excerpts.

Some quotes from Rosalind Russell’s wonderful autobiography (I highly recommend it – it’s a great read, she was quite funny in real life as well). Example:

I was born in a house on Chestnut Avenue, and when I was four years old I ran away from home. Or at least I walked away, and found myself clear down on the Green, in the center of Waterbury’s business section. A neighbor who saw me there, swinging on a hitching post, stopped short and cried, “Rosalind, what are you doing here?”

“My name is not Rosalind,” I said. “I’m from out of town.”

Four-year-old traveling fibbers don’t get too far (the neighbor went straight to my mother and told her where I was), but the episode hints at my future theatrical bent.

And here are some quotes on His Girl Friday:

Hawks was a terrific director; he encouraged us and let us go. Once he told Cary, “Next time give her a bigger shove onto the couch,” and Cary said, “Well, I don’t want to kill the woman,” and Hawks thought about that for a second. Then he said, “Try killin’ ‘er.”

And once Cary looked straight out of a scene and said to Hawks (about something I was trying), “Is she going to do that?” and Hawks left the moment in the picture — Cary’s right there on film, asking an unseen director about my plans.

Ha – I love that moment. Cary turning to Hawks and saying, “Is she going to do that?”

Another excerpt:

A good director also knows when not to direct. Nobody ever tried to direct Gable. They let Gable be Gable. I don’t mean that he wouldn’t take direction, but when he walked in with the gun and the uniform, and he’d just been over the top, what more could anybody do about that? Gable was the same sitting on the sidelines as he was when he got up and played the scene, and nobody wanted him to be anything else. People like Gable, Wayne, they’re personalities, and a personality is an asset, you don’t destroy it or mess with it.

Cary Grant was different; he wasn’t just a personality, he could immediately go off into a spin and become any character that was called for. He was terrific to work with because he’s a true comic, in the sense that comedy is in the mind, the brain, the cortex …

Grant loved to ad lib. He’d be standing there, leaning over, practically parallel to the ground, eyes flashing, extemporizing as he went, but he was in with another ad-libber. I enjoyed working that way too. So in His Girl Friday we went wild, overlapped our dialogue, waited for no man. And Hawks got a big kick out of it.

Then I started worrying that all this noisiness and newsroom high spirits might seem too chaotic to a watcher, and one night after we were finished I again went to Hawks. “I’m afraid,” I said, “that audiences won’t follow us.”

“You’re forgetting the scene you’re gonna play with the criminal,” Hawks said. “It’s gonna be so quiet, so silent. You’ll just whisper to him, you’ll whisper, ‘Did you kill that guy?’ and your whispering will change the rhythm. But when we’re with Grant, we don’t change it. You just rivet in on him all the time.”

I love stuff like that.

Here’s Russell on William Powell – this made me laugh:

He was not only dear, he was cool. If an actor thought he could get any place by having tantrums, watching Bill Powell would have altered his opinion. I remember a story conference during which he objected to a scene that he felt wasn’t right for him. He was at once imperious and lucid. “It’s beyond my histrionic ability to do this,” he said. I thought that was delicious.

Here’s a great excerpt, showing her smarts as an actress, her intellect:

Talent is wonderful, but I’ve played with actors who have more talent than I, and you can’t hear them in the fourth row, they just don’t have the energy, nothing in the belly, nothing in the guts that brings it all out and sells it across the orchestra pit and into the twenty-third row.

In Boston with Clivey’s troupe — I couldn’t do it at Saranac, I didn’t have the time — I used to sit on the stage apron and watch every rehearsal I wasn’t involved in. I’d be thinking, Why can’t he get a laugh on that? It’s a funny line — and taking the thing apart in my head to see why it wasn’t working. Half the pleasure of doing comedy in the theatre is that even before you hear a laugh, you sense where the laugh should be. Something happens in the audience, you feel it, you go to work on it. Until one day, all of a sudden, you’re rewarded with a titter. You keep working on the line and finally you get a real belly laugh. After that you generally push too hard and lose it, and you have to pull away and inch your way back.

Here’s an excerpt from the introduction to her book written by her husband. Rosalind Russell was responsible for launching the career of James Galanos, designer. Here is an unbelievably moving story, told by Freddie Brisson (Russell’s husband) about the special relationship between Russell and Galanos:

In 1960, after she had the first mastectomy, Rosalind went to Galanos. He says it was the only time he ever saw her break down. She had come to his office, very crisp, very businesslike. “I’m going to tell you something nobody in the world knows except Freddie and my doctor. I’ve had my breast removed, and I want to keep it quiet. So long as I can be active, I don’t want to be thought a freak, I don’t want people looking at me in person or on the screen and wondering about my sex life.” (You have to consider the era. Women had not yet begun to go public about their mastectomies.)

“I want you to start thinking in terms of how I can now be dressed,” Rosalind said to Jimmy, and then she began to take her clothes off. She started to cry, and he saw that she could hardly lift her left arm, it was so swollen, and he broke down too. From that day forward, he specially designed every piece of her clothing, and neither he nor his fitter ever told a soul.

Another excerpt from the introduction, by her husband:

After she died I found a petition she had tucked away in her prayer book. It said in part, “Keep my mind free from the recital of endless details; give me wings to get to the point. Seal my lips on aches and pains. They are increasing, and love of rehearsing them is becoming sweeter as the years go by.”

And again, here’s the link to the tribute. GREAT stuff.