Quotes

Intellectually, I'd love to play Stanley Kowalski in "A Streetcar Named Desire". Can't you just imagine me down in the streets yelling, "Stella! Stella!". God, the critics would have a lot of fun with that one.

[on his more well-known roles as a child actor] I really liked Lassie, but that horse, Flicka, was a nasty animal with a terrible disposition. All the Flickas--all six of them--were awful.

My whole life I've been trying to prove I'm not just yesterday.

I enjoyed being in movies when I was a boy. As a child, you're not acting--you believe. Ah, if an adult could only act as a child does with that insane, playing-at-toy-soldiers concentration!

[in 1976, on his fellow former child stars] Compare us to your high school graduating class. You'll discover there is always a percentage of successes, and those who fall by the wayside to become alcoholics, dopers, or just plain losers. Sure there are the Bobby Driscolls, the tragedies, but don't forget the others: Elizabeth Taylor, Hayley Mills, Natalie Wood, Gene Reynolds--who's a successful producer--and so many others.

I absolutely adore movies. Even bad ones. I don't like pretentious ones, but a good bad movie, you must admit, is great.

All you can do is make a piece of product, sell it on its own terms, stand behind it and hope that people will go see it. If you try to be like something else or appeal to any given group, then you can very easily end up being gratuitous and imitative. There's not much to be gained by that and I think too much time is spent going around trying to be like someone else.

[on Mia Farrow] Trying to describe Mia is like trying to describe dust in a shaft of sunlight. There are all those particles. Her conversation is clotted.

[on the Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton romance] I knew back in Rome when we were making Cleopatra (1963) that it would never work. Elizabeth doesn't just love someone; she possesses them. And Richard isn't a man to be possessed. I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did.

[in 1968, on his career] . . . totally isolated, really suffocating. As a child, I was always lied to about myself and about the world.

I can't say I was unhappy as a child actor in films, because I wasn't. I had a particularly wonderful time. The only trouble was that by the time I got to be 17 or 18, Hollywood was still thinking of me in terms of what I had delivered at the age of 11. They said I couldn't play anything but an English boy. I knew I could. So I went to New York and started to study, because I knew I had to learn a lot about myself as an actor; you can't act the same as you did as a child. Fortunately, I happened to go east at a time when live television was centered in New York. For six years I played every kind of role, from Mexican-Americans to Midwestern Americans. I did different roles on the stage: a Chicago boy in Compulsion and a southerner in No Time for Sergeants.