Quotes

At the premiere of King Kong (1933) I wasn't too impressed. I thought there was too much screaming... I didn't realize then that King Kong and I were going to be together for the rest of our lives, and longer...

[2004, on her trip to England in 1934] As soon as I got off the boat, a man met me and said, "Will you please come up to the BBC studios and scream for us?".

[2004] I have come to believe over the years that Kong is my friend.

[2004, on the remake (King Kong (2005))] I have no advice for them.

[2004, on King Kong (1933)] My scream was a product of pure imagination. I had to imagine what was happening to me, and I imagined that the nearest help was far away. When I first saw the picture, I thought the screams were overdone. But they were an important part of the picture and I was delighted with how it all looked. My scenes with King were exactly the way I imagined them.

[2004, on her trip to England in 1934] One day, I was walking through Hyde Park and I overheard a Cockney woman tell her child, "If y' don't behive, I'll 'ave Fay Wrye arter yer!". I couldn't believe it.

[2004] Right after The Wedding March (1928) everything happened at once. Sound was coming in, and color was being used for the first time. It was very exciting to be a part of it.

[on working with Lillian Gish in The Cobweb (1955)] She was a lovely actress and I admired her very much. She was a very delicate and elegant lady.

[2004, on The Wedding March (1928)] That film changed my life.

[2004, on The Wedding March (1928)] That movie meant a lot to me; my heart was right up in my throat.

[2004] That one single movie [King Kong (1933)] has reached millions of people of all ages, all over the world--and audiences are still fascinated by it today.

[2004, on her role of Ann Darrow in King Kong (1933)] They put me in a blonde wig for the role.

[2004, on Doctor X (1932), Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) and The Vampire Bat (1933)] Those horror pictures were the parts I was being offered at the time, and the scream came into play in almost all of them. People today call them classics; that amuses me a little, because I had so many reservations about them when I made them. I thought they were much too gruesome.

[2004] [Erich von Stroheim] never got treated correctly in Hollywood, but he made me feel very happy.

[2004, on King Kong (1933)] When my youngest daughter first saw the film, she said, "Kong wasn't trying to hurt you, he was just trying to protect you", which was right.

[2004, on King Kong (1933)] When we did it, I just thought how lucky I was to be in the movies, where something like this was possible.

[2004, referring to King Kong (1933)] He [Merian C. Cooper] called me into his office and showed me sketches of jungle scenes and told me, "You're going to have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood." Naturally, I thought Clark Gable. But then he showed me this sketch of a giant ape up the side of the Empire State Building, and he said, "There's your leading man.".

[2004, on her favorite screen appearance, in The Wedding March (1928)] I still love that film, Erich von Stroheim was a wonderful human being, and he took a chance on me. I was only 19 when I did the screen test, but he saw something in me. After 75 years, it's still one of the happiest experiences of my life. And it was a nice part, wasn't it?

[2004] All my life I've written something, I've always cared much more about writing than I do about acting.

[2004, on the remake planned for King Kong (1933)] If they don't have it in their hearts, they shouldn't be doing it, but if they do, hey just need to feel their way through it, just like we did so long ago.

[2004] When I shot my scenes, Kong wasn't there at all. I had to use my imagination, which was exciting and terrifying at the same time. Acting is about the imagination, that's the great joy of it. But nothing quite like it had been done before, so I was a little nervous about how it would all come together.

I was known as the queen of the Bs. If only I'd been a little more selective.

Every time I'm in New York, I say a little prayer when passing the Empire State Building. A good friend of mine died up there.

[In a 1969 interview in The New York Times] When I'm in New York, I look at the Empire State Building and feel as though it belongs to me, or is it vice-versa?

[1993, on not being able to escape her role in King Kong (1933)] Recently, a six-year-old boy said to me, "I've been waiting to meet you for half my life.".

[on declining a role in Titanic (1997)] I think to have done Titanic would have been a torturous experience altogether.

[In a 1990 interview in "Films in Review"] King Kong is my friend. He's been my public relations man for years. It was an extraordinarily good role, but the richness of the role that I had in The Wedding March (1928) appealed to me more. and that's very understandable, I think, since there weren't many nuances in the King Kong (1933) role. That was a fantasy, and there was a broadness to it that seemed unreal.