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Technique is nothing more than failed style.
-- John Waters
Acting is the most minor of gifts and not a very high-class way to earn a living. After all, Shirley Temple could do it at the age of four.
-- Katharine Hepburn in 1941
In a moment of self-analysis, Duse wrote, "I use everything that I pick up in my memory and everything that vibrates in my soul." And about her characters: "I don't care if they've lied, betrayed, sinned or if they were born perverse — provided I feel that they have wept . . . because feminine compassion is greater, more concrete, sweeter and more complete than the grief that men are used to allowing us." Curiously, that statement was made in a letter to a critic.
For her the greatest joy was not acting but going to the theater to meet the other actors for rehearsal. "In these moments, I feel I'm with my family," she said. "And sometimes I have the childish illusion that we are hidden there, in the half-light, as if for a conspiracy, a plot, something clandestine and pleasantly dangerous. All the rest is nothing more than noise, chaos, vanity, fatigue and bitterness."
-- Mel Gussow, reviewing Helen Sheehy’s biography Eleanora Duse
Vanessa Redgrave as Mary Tyrone in Long
Day’s Journey Into Night
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