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Beth Grant Quotes

Character actress

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Famous Beth Grant Quotes

“Milton Katselas said, "Who are you to look down your nose at Anna Magnani and Maureen Stapleton? Who do you think you are?" I was doing this kooky meditation at the time called inner-guide meditation, where you go into a cave and you have a guide, and you fly around. So I said to my inner guide, "Take me to the energy that's blocking me from accepting my casting" - because I understood it intellectually, but I didn't want to do it in my heart.”

“My father died right after the movie Rain Man was released. He got to see it, then literally the day before he died, he asked Mama to take him to see it one more time - because he knew he was declining. Tom's assistant at the time told him my father died, and he wrote me a very personal note. I haven't seen him since, but you can't say anything bad about Tom Cruise to me, because anybody who takes the time to do that is very special.”

“Patrick Swayze was in an acting class with me. We were working on Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf together, and there was this beautiful blonde who was playing Honey - and I'm playing loudmouthed Martha - and she was so gorgeous, and the two guys were flirting and having fun with her, and so I started crying. Buddy came over and said, "Don't you know that you're beautiful? Don't you know that these women are beautiful?" It meant so much to me, because he was already sort of a star.”

“It's Richard Kelly's brilliance, because he led me to Donnie Darko performance. He wanted sincerity, he didn't want it to be one color, and he made me go vulnerable, and I think that's why it works. When you can get all those different colors and levels in one line. Time Out New York voted it "Best Line Of The Year" - which is crazy, because how many words is it? "Sometimes. I. Doubt. Your. Commitment. To. Sparkle. Motion." Eight words. It's crazy.”

“All of a sudden I got a vision of Guernica - Pablo Picasso's painting, which is one of my all-time favorite paintings in the world. I remember reading that it was very controversial at the time - some people said even used the word "childlike drawing" - and all of a sudden I thought, "This is like Guernica in Los Angeles!" And then it all made sense to me. It was all the elements that are the Southland.”

“I love to take chances. I love first-time directors. I love super-low-budget movies. I've done 80-something movies, and I want to just keep experimenting. First-time directors have new, fresh ideas, and lot of times they're risking a lot to do it, so it means so much to them. They're not just hired; they have their heart on the line, because if you've gone that far, you're probably a very passionate person.”

“The brilliant costume designer Mary Zorphres had done all this research on West Texas in 1980. Every woman looked like that. At a certain age, they would get their hair cut off, let the gray go in, get that permanent, and wear those big glasses. She gave me a beanie bra so my boobs would hang down, and these old dresses. My hat's off to her, because I thought it was perfect for the movie. It was so great to have some comic relief right at that moment. No Country For Old Men is such an intense film.”

“I never heard Coen brothers get defensive, ever. You get with these filmmakers doing the hardest work in the world, and they're not defensive. They're happy together, they crack jokes together, they have different opinions - and it doesn't bother them that they have different opinions. So no wonder their work is so good, because you're getting two for the price of one.”

“My daughter loved All About Steve movie, because she's 6 feet tall and she's different. And I got a lot of great e-mails from people who are different. I'm a gay icon. I'll just say it. That's what they say to me, so I'll accept it. I got so many e-mails saying that it meant so much to those people. My daughter said, "They didn't like it just because she didn't get the guy! If they had lived happily ever after, people would have liked that movie."”

“I have such a great thing I want to do with Lady Macbeth - make her one of the witches - and I have this whole thing where she's very light and dressed in pink and dancing Gaelic dances and throwing roses, but then when her husband's coming home, she does incantations and pulls her hair back, puts on a black leather trenchcoat. I mean, I could tear it up if somebody would give me the chance! But do you think someone would ever let me do Lady Macbeth? I doubt it. But I'm going to keep talking about it.”

“The book by William Goldman, Adventures In The Screen Trade, great, awesome book. He talks about this very thing - that you can't get a star to do a part that's not what their public expects. And Sandy's Bullock not like that. She's taken a lot of chances over the years. And Patrick Swayze certainly wasn't like that. But I mean, maybe that is true. Maybe that's exactly why they didn't like All About Steve.”