Scorn (21 page)

Liam Gallagher, the younger of the Oasis brothers, has the kind of eyes in which the pupils are half-hidden under the eyelids; as if the eyes had stopped between floors.
Alan Bennett

A man with a fork in a world of soup.
Noel Gallagher on Liam Gallagher

Zorro on doughnuts.
Noel Gallagher on musician Jack White

What has he done to me? Nothing. He's just somebody I'd like to hang.
Noel Gallagher on Robbie Williams

With people in the world such as Jamie Oliver and Clarissa Dickson-Wright there isn't much hope for animals.
Morrissey, a vegetarian, on chefs Jamie Oliver and the late Clarissa Dickson-Wright

It's the refuge for the mentally deficient. It's made by dull people for dull people.
Morrissey on dance music

The fire in the belly is essential, otherwise you become Michael Bublé – famous and meaningless.
Morrissey on passion

He referred to me as an ‘insufferable puffed-up prat'. This is a bit rich coming from a man who actually married his own mother.
Morrissey on daytime TV host Richard Madeley

St Mary's Secondary Modern School on Renton Road in Stretford may indeed be secondary, but it is not modern.
Morrissey on his school

What's the difference between God and Bono? God doesn't wander down Grafton Street thinking he's Bono.
Louis Walsh

There are probably more annoying things than being hectored about African development by a wealthy Irish rock star in a cowboy hat, but I can't think of them at the moment.
Paul Theroux on Bono

If I don't win, the award show loses credibility.
Kanye West

You've had three hairstyles, what's next for your career?
Zach Galifianakis to Justin Bieber

Your bus leaves in ten minutes … be under it.
John Cooper Clarke in response to a heckler

You couldn't get a fan if you were hangin' from the ceiling.
Nicki Minaj

Next time someone offers a penny for your thoughts – sell.
Peter Kay putdown to heckler

My apartment is too nice to listen to rap in.
Kanye West

 

Theatre, Film and Television

When your grandmother's swinging from a tree, it's really hard to care about best documentary foreign short.
Chris Rock on the historical lack of participation in the Oscars by black people, while presenting the Oscars

Mummy, what is that lady for?
Child at a matinee performance by Hermione Gingold

She was good at playing abstract confusion in the same way that a midget is good at being short …
Clive James on Marilyn Monroe

I watched
The Music Lovers
. One can't really blame Tchaikovsky for preferring boys. Anyone might become a homosexualist who had once seen Glenda Jackson naked.
Auberon Waugh in
Private Eye

I invariably miss most of the lines in the last act of an Ibsen
play; I always have my fingers in my ears waiting for the loud retort that means the heroine has just Passed On.
Dorothy Parker on Henrik Ibsen

A bargain basement Bette Davis, whose lightest touch as a comedienne would stun a horse.
Time
on Susan Hayward

What exactly is on your mind – if you'll excuse the exaggeration?
Inquiry by David Letterman

[A] vamp who destroys families and sucks on husbands like a praying mantis.
Il Tempo
on Elizabeth Taylor

Overweight, overbosomed, overpaid and under-talented, she set the acting profession back a decade.
David Susskind on Elizabeth Taylor in
Cleopatra

Miss Taylor is monotony in a slit skirt, a pre-Christian Elizabeth Arden with sequinned eyelids and occasions constantly too large for her.
New Statesman
on Elizabeth Taylor in
Cleopatra

Just how garish her commonplace accent, squeakily shrill voice, and the childish petulance with which she delivers her
lines are, my pen is neither scratchy nor leaky enough to convey.
John Simon on Elizabeth Taylor's Kate,
The Taming of the Shrew

Elizabeth Taylor has more chins than the Chinese telephone directory.
Joan Rivers

… An incipient double chin, legs too short, and she has a slight pot belly.
Richard Burton on Elizabeth Taylor

In general, Mr Burton resembles a stuffed cabbage.
Harry Medved and Randy Dreyfuss on Richard Burton in ‘The Assassination of Trotsky,'
The Fifty Worst Films of All Time

She cannot change her face, which is that of a worried hamster.
Review of Prunella Scales playing all six female parts in
Anatole France
by David Tylden-Wright

Like acting with two and a half tons of condemned veal.
Coral Browne on a leading man

He has taken to ambling across our stages in a spectral, shell-shocked manner, choosing odd moments to jump and frisk, like a man through whom an electric current is being intermittently passed.
Kenneth Tynan on Ralph Richardson in
The White Carnation

Tony Britton's habit of curling his lip villainously and so relentlessly gives one the impression that he had it permanently waved.
Plays and Players
on Tony Britton in
A Woman of No Importance
by Oscar Wilde

A bore is starred.
Village Voice
review of
A Star is Born
starring Barbra Streisand

She looks like a cross between an aardvark and an albino rat surmounted by a platinum-coated horse bun.
John Simon on Barbra Streisand

A woman whose face looked as if it had been made of sugar and someone had licked it.
George Bernard Shaw on Isadora Duncan

Marie Osmond is so pure, not even Moses could part her knees.
Joan Rivers

You should never say bad things about the dead, you should only say good … Joan Crawford is dead. Good.
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 any 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