I didn't know I was doing film noir, I thought they were detective stories with low lighting!

I'd been trying for all of the eight years we'd been married to have a child, and finally I did.

Raft told me how to walk with him in a scene: We'd start off in a long shot normal, and about the time we got together in a close-up, I'd be bending my knees so I'd be shorter.

My forehead is sometimes too high, but bangs could correct this.

I'd say my happiest moment as an actress came when I learned I'd won the Look Magazine Best Supporting Actress Award for 1956 in The Killing.

I'd also say having Jack's son Chris living with us from his 13th year on helped in raising Rick.

For many years my inherited arthritis had given me problems.

I knew I had a great figure, but I never regarded myself as beautiful.

It finally became clear to me that they had no hopes of my ever walking again.

For instance, it was very rare for anyone there with dogs to allow them into the house.

Most actors are insecure enough already without having a director who adds to that.

I can't remember anybody saying, Let's get this show on the road.

Some actresses seem to thrive on chaos, and I've often wondered if they felt they had to be that way in order to perform well?

About that time, stronger features became fashionable on the screen.

Elisha Cook was a darling, and full of the devil. A wired - up little fellow who was always busy, busy, busy.

I had to do a tango with Raft and I learned to dance in ballet shoes with my knees bent.

Of course, in later years, I'd studied acting more than ever before - mostly with the late Stella Adler, who was marvelous! - but in my earlier years, I couldn't afford to do this.

The way animals were and are abused appalls me to this very day.

I thought my nose was too prominent so I had this corrected via plastic surgery in 1959.

This has taught me that being pleasant is always so much more productive, for I know well the rewards for being good-natured.

I'm 5 9, and there were two stars in my life who didn't mind that I was taller than they - George Raft and John Garfield.

This I regard as a classic example of my not being properly prepared for a part I very much wanted.

I got to know Sterling Hayden fairly well. He was a quiet man, who got more complicated as the years went on.

I didn't know I was doing film noir, I thought they were detective stories with low lighting!

So, I certainly subscribe to what Bette said about acting being very hard work.

But painting can be too lonely... I like being with people too much to have ever made that my life's work.

In '48 when I left Metro, I tried to go back to radio, but somehow just didn't do well at it.

The scene where I took my eyelashes off we did in two takes.

Regrettably, I do sometimes have to fight a tendency to be bitchy.

My best film composing experience was with Elia Kazan.

I was lucky enough to occasionally break out of that racist situation that prevails in the Hollywood film production community. But it was racist then and it will always be that way. It will never be otherwise.

'Batman' took 10 months to film, and by the time I stopped working on it, it took a long time before my English accent came out again. I was actually having to try for it.

Luck is everything... My good luck in life was to be a really frightened person. I'm fortunate to be a coward, to have a low threshold of fear, because a hero couldn't make a good suspense film.

I still feel that a movie has to attempt to say something - even if it fails miserably. But I've sort of given up on believing that I'm going to change the world with every film I choose to act in.

It's the difficulty we had with Mr. Bean, actually, when it went from TV to film. You certainly discover that you need to explain more about a character.

To make a documentary is one thing, to make a feature film is quite another.

I mean when the play was on in New York I was starting to get film offers coming through, and since the film's come out I get offered more than I used to, but it happens incrementally.

I think it would be very boring dramatically to have a film where everybody was a lawyer or doctor and had no faults. To me, the most important thing is to be truthful.

I like doing them and they're ridiculous and the actors can improvise a lot, and they don't have to be really realistic characters that hit a very specific tone as in a feature film. They're really fun, I want to make more of them definitely.

One of the most interesting aspects of the film project was collaborating with so many people - directors, filmmakers, and writers - over a five-year period. I learned that there are two components to this.

The best thing I can think of would be to create a union between something as beautiful and powerful and wonderful as Hollywood films and a criticism of the status quo. That's my dream, to make such a German film.

If he didn't fall in love he would have never come back near the end of the film. Because, what man is going to dishonor himself so that he comes back in front of the man that took a woman away from him... and warns her to save her life?

Robert Altman's Nashville is my all-time favorite film because it covers all the bases - it's original, moving, and has something to say, but also funny and incredibly entertaining.

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist.

I have a movie coming out called Spun, which will be at the Toronto Film Fest.

Well ironically my last three roles have all been a mother. One was a Canadian film where the baby was taken away because she is a drug addict, in Irish Jam I play a mother to a four year old. I think in the future I'll be able to handle the role with a lot more depth.

And when you see it the first time you put the film together, the roughest cut, is when you want to go home and open up your veins and get in a warm tub and just go away. And then it gradually, maybe, works its way back, somewhere toward that spot you were at before.

A good film script should be able to do completely without dialogue.

My advice to young film-makers is this: don't follow trends, start them!