"Where on the screen I am invariably a sonofabitch, in life I am a dear, dear boy."

"Hard times will make a monkey eat red peppers."

"I'm a girl who loves to be manhandled! After all, what are a few contusions or abrasions if you get the man you love?"

"A laugh and information!"

"We're home free in the new mediated womb of the Naomi persona — which is to say, trapped, by our own desire."

"In Boyer, self-belief and theatrical technique are seamlessly fused together."

"This MGM movie is studio-system filmmaking at its most protective, and it's designed entirely to showcase Leslie Caron . . ."

"Wasn't he just there, standing right in front of us?"

"Go sit on a flagpole!"

"Ingmar can't fully follow his own gloomy party line as he stares at this simple, oblivious, wondrous creature."

"You'd never get tired of having her around, because she'd always be someone else for you."

"His characters have tended to be more bewildered by life and disgusted by a world that won't cooperate."

"Funny, tender, a little neurotic, a little erotic, and always spontaneous . . ."

A genius self-destructs, with a little help from Hollywood

"Like every other skilled fabulist on earth there would forever be a part of Stroheim that truly believed his own fantasies."

"The women of To's world are not just endearingly kooky, but often unacceptably bizarre and amoral in their excited reactions to events."

If she was forced, like so many actors, to live a closeted life, she at least did it as much on her own terms as she could in those tricky times.

"If I ever bore you, it'll be with a knife."

"Speaking of impurity: what was Rita Hayworth's image supposed to be in the '40s?"

"Get Burt!"

"I'm not a star, I'm a woman, and I want to get fucked!"

The screwball comedy's back, and Weaver's got it

Turning "the male gaze" on men

"I was never young, and if you were never young, how can you ever feel old?"

Sexual ambiguity is one of the hallmarks of Hong Kong cinema's golden age, and no one did it better than Lin Ching-Hsia, aka Brigitte Lin

"Easy to overlook but endlessly rewarding to look over"

"She's got the eyes of a great one, putting over something incalculable."

"Now . . . here comes the paradox."

The "deadly China doll" widely viewed, during her heyday in the early 1970s, as the female Bruce Lee

Bree Daniels trumps all Fonda's real-life characters

On Million Dollar Baby and a million-dollar career

The only actress who ever built a movie career on swimming

In which Stella tells all — or at least most

The ascension of Arnold — salvation, apocalypse, or trigger for a resurgent left?

Her brilliant career

The downright peculiar pleasures of pre-Code Wheeler & Woolsey

Now we really need him

Hollywood Rhythms, Vol. 2 on DVD offers relief for the Ginger-deprived

Camp — and coded queerness — finds a surprisingly happy home in the films of Will Smith

A superstar talks Trash and papayas

"See that girl? Her ass is a song."

The life of the Pink Flamingos star, as told by his mother in My Son Divine

Livin’ large with the Hung One

The New Yorker takes a slap at Julia Roberts

Jackie spills his guts — verbally, this time. A 1993 interview from the Bright Lights archives.

This forgotten star was caught up — and perhaps crushed — by larger historical forces

Liberated porn queen or psychological wreck? You be the judge

Dogme secrets revealed by Lars von Trier's "most promising actress"

Marlene Dietrich, Clara Bow, Tallulah Bankhead, Virginia Bruce, Billie Dove, Marion Davies, and Norma Shearer

John Oller's Jean Arthur: The Actress Nobody Knew is a surprisingly detailed, highly readable account of a complex woman whose integrity and perfectionism — and sometimes pettiness and even arrogance — both fueled her work and undermined it at almost every turn.

In an interview, Sylvia Miles discusses her Oscar-nominated performance in Midnight Cowboy, her peerless rendering of a washed-up B-movie star in Paul Morrissey's Heat, and dumping a plate of spaghetti on critic John Simon's head after a particularly nasty review.

Are Rock and Doris Hollywood's strangest romantic team? How about Rock and Tony Randall?

By many accounts one of the most generous, inspiring actors on the set, he's also frequently portrayed as an impossible perfectionist who lashes out at what he sees as the imperfections of others.

Working-class Joe, a product of New York's foster homes and reform schools, was unique among Andy Warhol's menagerie of pathologically self-deluded, speed-talking "superstars." If most of them made up in personality what they lacked in looks or humanity, Joe was just the opposite — a sweet, shy, deliriously sexy cipher whose unflappable calm provided its own kind of campy counterpoint to Warhol's shrieking harridans and maniacal drag queens.