Silent Star Profiles.

Good dialogue simply isn’t enough to explain all the infinite gradations of a character. It’s behavior—it’s what’s going on behind the lines.

Lana Turner, 1942

“It’s interesting that Mother never thought of herself as beautiful. To her, the great beauties were brunettes. Dark was beauty, while women like herself and Betty Grable were bubbly, popular, and pretty, but not beautiful.  The epitome of beauty to Mother was Hedy Lamarr. She was so impressed by an entrance Hedy made at Ciro’s, glamour personified and wearing a single diamond on her forehead at her widow’s peak. Years later Mother was still impressed, telling me she had never seen anyone look as manificent in her life. Nevertheless, Mother didn’t do badly with what she had.”

- Cheryl Crane

Girls sent home from McKinley High School for wearing slacks and blue jeans, Chicago, 1946.

Alcatraz Island

San Francisco, California

Bob Cronk

Currently torn between wanting to learn something useful and wanting to escape reality.

“She’d have ice cream for breakfast, while reading Freud.” —Mack Sennett on Mabel Normand

(From Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle: A Biography of the Silent Film Comedian, 1887-1933 by Stuart Oderman, 1994)

“Dear mind, stop thinking so much. I need sleep.”

— Unknown

Norma Shearer in Let Us Be Gay, 1930

Leslie Howard and Norma Shearer (1902–1983) preparing for a dialogue on the balcony in movie Romeo and Juliet (1936)

“Vivien has a body of swansdown and the constitution of a GI on leave.” -Noël Coward

VIVIEN LEIGH in WATERLOO BRIDGE — 1940