Nominate a Biography: Across the continents quotes
Anna May Wong
"From Paris, Anna May moved to London, where she began shooting Piccadilly, directed by E. A. DuPont. She was an immediate sensation in London. Anna May rented an apartment in the Mayfair District in the Park Lane Hotel, where rooms overlooked Hyde Park. Lulu and she received guests there with an American enthusiasm. They made trips down the Thames to Maidenhead and visited Limehouse, where London's Chinese population resided. She told reporters she liked London enormously because everyone was friendly to her. Her impact on the public was immediate. People mobbed her everywhere she went, making her forays into the city difficult. English girls tinted their faces ivory with ochre color to get the "Wong complexion." They cut their hair with bangs in front to achieve the "Wong haircut." p.81
Anna May Wong: from laundryman's daughter to Hollywood legend, by Graham Russell Gao Hodges, 2004.
Martin Scorsese
"Marty was watching Michael Powell's Tales of Hoffman all during Raging Bull because of the movement in it. He said that Michael Powell taught him so much about physical and facial movement. He was watching it over and over again. He would stop, run it back and forth, and back and forth. He borrowed a 16-millimeter print from the museum several times. One time he wanted it and couldn't get it. They kept telling him, "The film is out. The film is out." And I remember, once, he said, "Who is this? Who keeps borrowing this film besides us? I want to know who it is." And you know, it was the director George Romero, who is one of the biggest fans in the world of Tales of Hoffmann." p.147
Martin Scorsese: a journey, by Mary Pat Kelly, 1991.
Clive James
"Also, I took her out a lot, principally to the National Film Theatre. She sat through a whole Vincente Minelli season, each film prefaced by a long free lecture from me, delivered on the bus. Walking back across Waterloo Bridge in the first fogs of winter, I would deliver a further monologue concerning the finer points of what we had just seen. She seemed appropriately grateful for all this instruction, which she was getting for almost nothing. Out of my weekly wage, after stoppages, I paid for all my own cigarettes and cider, on top of most of my rent. All Lilith had to do was buy the NFT tickets and provide the occasional small loan when we dined out together." p.85
Falling towards England (Unreliable Memoirs Continued), by Clive James, 1985.
Steven Spielberg
"[George] Lucas also provided Spielberg with a first-rate British crew and support staff, many of whom had worked on Star Wars and the Empire Strikes Back. Most of Raiders was filmed in places where Lucas had shot the earlier films, including the so-called "Star Wars canyon" in Tunisia and EMI-Elstree Studios in Borehamwood, England. Additional filming took place in France, Hawaii, and Long Beach, California. The London area was chosen as the film's base of operations both for cost reasons and because its distance from Hollywood enabled the film-makers to keep a lid of secrecy on the project, as Spielberg had done in Alabama on Close Encounters." p.319
Steven Spielberg: a biography, by Joseph McBride, 1997.
Paul Robeson
"In the years since, his identification with the Welsh had grown - with their ethnic insistence, their strength of character, their political radicalism. His strong bonds with the people of the Rhondda Valley would endure for the rest of his life, and the film he was soon to make about the Welsh miners, The Proud Valley, would always be the one in which he took the most pleasure. In 1938 at Mountain Ash, seven thousand people gathered to commemorate the thirty-three men from Wales who had died in Spain. Veterans of the International Brigade marched behind the flags of Wales and Republican Spain onto a platform filled with one hundred black men, women, and children from Cardiff, as well as a group of orphaned Basque children. The speakers included the Dean of Chichester and Arthur Horner, president of the South Wales Miners' Federation, who introduced Robeson to the audience as "a great champion of the rights of the oppressed people to whom he belongs." Robeson sang, recited two poems Langston Hughes had composed in Spain, and told the audience, "I am here because I know that these fellows fought not only for Spain but for me and the whole world. I feel it is my duty to be here." The audience gave him a standing ovation." p.228
Paul Robeson, by Martin Bauml Duberman, 1989.
