Jean Arthur Net Worth
Publish date: 2024-08-09
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| 1 | [While she was a model] Someone in the studio noticed me sitting in the background. They asked me whether I would pose for girls' hats, and with some diffidence I consented. My first posing was terribly self-conscious. The photographer liked my type, and employed me steadily that summer. I got $5 an hour and sometimes had five or six sittings in a day. |
| 2 | [About her early career] I was all right in long shots, but when it came to close-ups, sustained emotion was beyond me. I knew nothing about acting and often wondered why I had not continued with my plan to become a teacher of modern languages. |
| 3 | I wanted to become a really accomplished actress, but I didn't know how to act, and had no chance to learn. In those days the studios didn't have coaches or drama schools and it was almost impossible to get on the sets to watch the older players. I finally decided there was only one thing to do: go back to New York and try to get into some plays there. |
| 4 | [About her first marriage] There was nothing tragic about it - it was a case of willfulness. |
| 5 | [In 1940] Those two and a half years on Broadway were the happiest years of my life. I loved the stage. I think every girl who wants to become an actress should put in some years on the stage. |
| 6 | [on director George Stevens] George Stevens started out as a cameraman with Laurel and Hardy, and he learned so many wonderful tricks, like having us walk forward while looking backward and then bumping into something. George was a darling man, so great with comedy. It's too bad he got serious. |
| 7 | [1977 comment on Gary Cooper] I loved working with Gary Cooper. Gary was my favorite. He was so terrific-looking, and so easy to work with. |
| 8 | [on making Only Angels Have Wings (1939)] I loved sinking my head into Cary Grant's chest. |
| 9 | [on her first marriage, which only lasted a day] Julian [Julian Anckner] looked a lot like Abraham Lincoln, and that's probably why I fell in love with him. One day we were out driving and he suddenly said, "Hey, why don't we get married?" So we lied about our ages and got married in a sheriff's office. You should have heard our families' reactions - all sorts of screaming and shouting and carrying on about suicide. Well, neither Julian nor I had enough income to make it possible for us to live together, so our marriage lasted one day. |
| 10 | [on her early acting days] My very "naturalness" was my undoing. I had to learn that to appear natural on the screen requires a vast amount of training, that is the test of an actor's art. It would be more spectacular if I could say that out of the hurt and humiliation of that failure was born a determination to success, to prove I had the makings of an actress. But it wouldn't be true. That urge came later. |
| 11 | [speaking in in the 1930s] I've never had a single close intimate girlfriend in all my life. I never had a chum to whom I could confide my secrets. I suppose that accounts for the fact that now it is so painfully difficult for me to open my heart and confide in people who are, so often, almost strangers. You have to learn so very young to open your heart. |
| 12 | It's hardly fair for women to do the same things at the same hours every day of their lives, while men have new experiences, meet new people every day. I felt that way as a little girl, with two older brothers around the house. It seemed to me that they led adventurous lives, compared with mine. I felt cheated and frustrated. I became a tomboy in self-defense. I decided that I was going to do things that were exciting, or at least interesting. |
| 13 | First I played ingénues and western heroines; then I played western heroines and ingénues. That diet of roles became as monotonous as a diet of spinach. The studio wouldn't trust me with any other kind of role, because I had no experience in any other kind. And I didn't see how I was ever going to acquire any other experience if I couldn't get any other kind of role. It was a vicious circle. |
| 14 | I bumped into every kind of disappointment, and was frustrated at every turn. Roles promised me were given to other players, pictures that offered me a chance were shelved, no one was particularly interested in me, and I had not developed a strength of personality to make anyone believe I had special talents. I wanted so desperately to succeed that I drove myself relentlessly, taking no time off for pleasures, or for friendships - yet aiming at the stars, I was still floundering. |
| 15 | (on doing interviews) Quite frankly, I'd rather have my throat slit. |
| 16 | If people don't like your work, all the still pictures in the world can't help you and nothing written about you, even oceans of it, will make you popular. |
| 17 | [on Hollywood] I hated the place - not the work, but the lack of privacy, those terrible prying fan magazine writers and all the surrounding exploitation. |
| 18 | The fact that I did not marry George Bernard Shaw is the only real disappointment I've had. |
| 19 | I am not an adult, that's my explanation of myself. Except when I am working on a set, I have all the inhibitions and shyness of the bashful, backward child . . . unless I have something very much in common with a person, I am lost. I am swallowed up in my own silence. |
| 20 | I guess I became an actress because I didn't want to be myself. |
| 21 | It's a strenuous job every day of your life to live up to the way you look on the screen. |
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