Quotes from Famous Actresses Trivia Quiz

Answer: Lana Turner

Actress Lana Turner lived from 1921-1995. Born in Idaho to parents who were only in their teens; the young couple separated shortly after. When Lana was five her father, on his way back home after winning some money, was robbed and murdered before he made it there. Her mother worked up to eighty hours a week to support herself and her daughter from that time until Lana grew famous, when she took over management of her daughter's career. Lana made fifty-five films during her life. Her most well known was the 1957 "Peyton Place" for which she received an Academy Award nomination. This film centres around the lives, loves and scandals of the various inhabitants in a small New England town.

Lana's personal life was a troubled one. Married eight times (twice to the same man), and with many lovers, the above quote is an interesting indication of her overall attitude towards love. Most of those relationships were extremely abusive, with Lana once describing her life as a "series of emergencies". Her most famous (and violent) romance was with underworld figure Johnny Stompanato. On April 4, 1958, during the course of another terrible fight, Lana's daughter grabbed a knife and ran towards the couple to try to protect her mother, stabbing and killing Stompanato in the ensuing struggle. This created a feast for the hungry media for months afterwards. Lana Turner's beauty and acting skills bought her fame and money, but never any lasting happiness. She died a lonely and unloved woman, with only her long time maid by her side. That indeed was the longest relationship Lana had ever had with anyone.

Answer: Katharine Hepburn

The amazing Katharine Hepburn, who won four Academy Awards during the course of her career, lived from 1907 until 2003. She was feisty, as her quote above indicates, outspoken and different from every other woman of her era. She was talented, had a beauty that crept up on you when you least expected it to and, for twenty-five years of her life, had a long and passionate relationship with actor Spencer Tracy. He was the man for her and she didn't care who knew it. Long after his death in 1967, the pain of that loss was still evident on her face whenever she spoke of Spence.

I love all her movies. She's outstanding in every single one. Perhaps if I had to name one that always makes me smile no matter how many times I see it, it would have to be the hilarious 1949 "Adam's Rib" in which she starred with Spencer. In this film, they play a married pair of lawyers, Amanda and Adam, who have a severe, but screamingly funny, falling out over a court case in which they play the defense (Katharine) and prosecuting (Spencer) lawyers arguing an attempted murder case in court. These two great actors are perfect together on the screen, with a volatile chemistry never seen since in any other long term screen partnership between two actors. One of the funniest scenes takes place when both actors are absent visibly on screen, but can be heard in the next room having a violent disagreement involving a neighbour who is in love with Kate. We see none of the three actors at all during this action until they finally burst out the door, but we do hear the argument while we stare mesmerised at an empty hall. Hepburn's sudden "How DARE you!" makes me laugh every time because we know full well what has just taken place.

Answer: Barbara Stanwyck

Barbara Stanwyck lived from 1907-1990. Born in New York, she was orphaned at the age of four when her mother died after being accidentally knocked off a streetcar by a drunken man. Two weeks after this tragedy, her father took off to work on the Panama Canal, but was never seen again. Amazingly, her nine year old sister, Mildred, raised Barbara and her brother on her own for some years following this double tragedy, until she found work as a showgirl, after which Barbara and her brother were shuffled from foster home to foster home. Touring with Mildred during the summer holidays however, where she watched the performances from behind the scenes, instilled a love of the stage in the small girl, but she was actively discouraged from that life by Mildred whenever she expressed a wish to act. Disappointed, she dropped out of school at the age of fourteen and worked in a series of other jobs instead, until Mildred finally relented and allowed her to try her hand as a performer. Barbara's first work in the theatre, at the age of sixteen, was as a Ziegfeld Follies' dancer. And so the curtain rose on the career of a woman who became known as a more than accomplished, extremely professional actress, with eighty-five films credited to her name during her long career.

Barbara's most notable film, made in 1944 when she was the highest paid woman in the US, was "Double Indemnity" opposite actor Fred MacMurray. In this she plays a murderous, scheming housewife wishing to have her husband "accidentally" killed, so she can claim a large insurance policy she has placed on his life. Fred MacMurray plays the insurance salesman, unable to resist her, and drawn into her web of murder, deceit and double betrayal. This is one very engrossing movie. Barbara Stanwyck, one of Hollywood's most brilliant actresses, had a personal life that would delight the heart of any soap opera producer. It soared with tragedy, death, drama, romance, passion, lovers, illicit affairs and heartbreak. She survived it all, this tough and feisty lady of the silver screen, finally dying of congestive heart failure and lung disease at the age of eighty-two. Wishing no funeral, she had her ashes scattered instead, from a helicopter, over Lone Pine, California, the site of many of her favourite films.

Answer: Marilyn Monroe

Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962) was probably the most complicated personality to ever weave enchantment up on the silver screen. Born to a mother with troubled mental health, Marilyn's early life consisted of: being shunted from foster home to foster home; sexual abuse at times; periodic placement back with her mother who tried at one stage to kidnap the child from another foster home by zipping her up in a duffel bag; a very early marriage; "discovery" by a modelling agency; divorce and finally the movies. There she was molded and shaped like a piece of Plasticine to become the star the producers envisioned, with her own personality shrinking further and further back under the layers of deleted scenes that littered the studio floor. Massively insecure, intelligent but not allowed to display it, talented but limited to roles of a sex goddess, Marilyn was prodded, poked and pushed in every direction by film studios, chased by men, seduced then abandoned, in a pattern that became an unceasing part of her normal, troubled existence for the remainder of her life. Finally, at the age of thirty-six, rejected again by another lover, sacked by her current film studio, terrified her looks would slip away and that nobody would want her either for herself, or for her screen persona, this beautiful, vulnerable and mentally troubled "lost child" killed herself. Her life, and her death, were heartbreaking.

My favourite film of Marilyn's was the hilarious "The Seven Year Itch" in which she starred opposite Tom Ewell. Ewell, in his character of Richard Sherman, plays a safely married middle-aged business man with a very active imagination - who is having a chronic and extremely funny mid-life crisis. With his wife and son away on holidays in the middle of a very hot summer, Marilyn's character of The Girl enters his life. She is a beautiful temporary tenant on the next floor up, an actress in town to shoot toothpaste commercials - and she has designs, not on Richard, but on his air-conditioning unit. Over the days that follow, Richard imagines himself in more and more impossible romantic situations with The Girl, who is oblivious to all but trying to keep cool. I won't spoil the ending for you if you haven't yet seen this hilarious film, but it really is worth watching. Marilyn made us laugh continually. That was her job. Then, finally, she made us cry. That was her life.

Answer: Vivien Leigh

Vivien Leigh (1913-1967) was an English actress who won two Academy Awards during the course of her career. The most well known of those roles was that of the scandalous, feisty, spoiled Scarlett O'Hara in the 1939 "Gone With the Wind", a tumultuous love story set against the background of the American Civil War (1861-1865). Vivien's own life was just as tumultuous and troubled, mainly as a result of her bi-polar illness. This went un-diagnosed for years, but when finally recognised, was beyond Vivien's ability to control, something she had managed to do on her own up until then. Laurence Olivier, her second husband, described it in his autobiography as "Throughout her possession by that uncannily evil monster, manic depression, with its deadly ever-tightening spirals, she retained her own individual canniness - an ability to disguise her true mental condition from almost all except me...".

Vivien's life, in its latter half, alternated between increasing periods of deep depression, babbling incoherence, chronic insomnia, erratic behaviour, and struggling under the added burden of ongoing bouts of tuberculosis. Yet all the while, until the end, she maintained her beautiful and fascinating façade of the glittering star for the benefit of the public. She was an actress on the world stage, portraying the glamorous life of a star for all to see whenever the faces turned to her, but struggling with psychological and physical demons behind the scenes whenever the lights dimmed and the cameras had ceased rolling. She brilliantly played this ongoing tragic role until she died, so desperate and ultimately all-consuming that she finally lost herself altogether, and became a great, never ceasing, utterly tragic reality production instead.

Answer: Rita Hayworth

Rita Hayworth (1918-1987) was at the height of her fame during the 1940s, with her most famous role being that of Gilda in the 1946 film of the same name. In this she plays a seductive and beautiful femme fatale trapped in a love-hate marriage of revenge, hatred and passion. Rita was lovely, she was talented and she was a very good dancer, having plied that trade from a very young age. At the age of sixteen while working at a nightclub, she was "discovered" by the head of Fox Films, and her fate was sealed. She appeared in sixty-one films over the next thirty-seven years, but fame did not bring her happiness. Locked into the sex goddess roles she disliked, she was unable to portray her talents as a fine comedienne, and when her beauty began to fade, so did the film offers. She married five times, all of which ended up unhappily. Of her personal relationships, this chronically shy woman, who, in spite of her beauty, had a marked inferiority complex, would remark wistfully that "Men fall in love with Gilda, but they wake up with me".

She was kind and she was gentle, but she had a temper, and flew into a full blown rage when her famous film persona's name, Gilda, was painted on the nuclear bombs being tested at Bikini Atoll. Orson Welles would recall of this that "...Rita almost went insane, she was so angry. She was so shocked by it! Rita was the kind of person that kind of thing would hurt more than anybody". As the years went by, this lovely, complicated woman began to drink more and more heavily as each of her marriages and relationships crumbled, and her behaviour began to deteriorate accordingly. It wasn't until years later that it was found that her alcoholism was masking early onset Alzheimer's disease. She passed away in 1987 as a victim of this illness, at the age of sixty-nine, having lived with its progressive worsening effects for the last fifteen years of her life. The lovely Gilda, however, had died and gone from us, long before her life finally ended. It was a tragedy.

Answer: Shirley Temple

Shirley Temple was a very famous child actress, singer and dancer who lived from 1928 until 2014. She began her film career at the very young age of three, made a total of sixty-one films over her career, and retired from acting in the movies completely, aged only twenty-two. In her later life she became a politician and US ambassador to Ghana and Czechoslovakia and then moved into the position of Chief of Protocol of the United States. During her film career, such was Shirley's popularity that she was the top box office draw for four consecutive years in a row, and is rumoured to have been the sole reason several film studios avoided bankruptcy. One of her most popular films was the 1934 "Bright Eyes" which relates the story of a bachelor pilot (James Dunn) fighting to maintain custody of his orphaned godchild (Shirley). It has a lovely ending, with all parties finally deciding to live together as the one large family. For her various movies produced that year, Shirley was awarded a special Juvenile Academy Award in 1935.

Here's a bit of trivia that should give you a chuckle: Late that year, 1935, Shirley and her parents were invited to Washington to meet President Roosevelt and his wife, Eleanor. During the course of the visit, all attended a cook-out at the President's home in Hyde Park. As the stately Eleanor bent over the grill to check on the progress of the cooking, a pebble struck her on the backside - fired by Shirley holding a small slingshot she took with her everywhere, kept securely hidden from parental eyes in her small tote bag.

Answer: Natalie Wood

The lovely Natalie Wood (1938-1981) was on a yacht with her husband Robert Wagner (whom she had married, divorced, then remarried) and her co-star (Christopher Walken) in the film on which she was currently working, when the two men got into an heated argument, after which Natalie argued with her husband.

She is believed to have got into a dinghy in an attempt to row to shore, but slipped and drowned. However, controversy has surrounded her death ever since. Natalie, who had been an actress since the age of four is perhaps most well known for her role in the musical "West Side Story", a story revolving around gang warfare between two of these groups in Manhattan, and in which she plays the leader of one gang's younger sister, who falls tragically in love with the former leader of the rival gang. Natalie appeared in fifty-two movies during her short life, and was nominated for many awards during this time.

Answer: Kristin Scott Thomas

Born in Cornwall in 1960, Kristen Scott Thomas is an English actress who also holds French citizenship. Nominated many times for her work in films, she was, ironically, told she would never make an actress when she first studied this skill in England. Moving to France, and while initially working as an au pair girl, she was determined to prove her critics wrong, and again began studying acting, this time at the ENSATT in Paris. Upon graduation, she was immediately offered work as an actress, and, up to and including 2015, has been working constantly in that medium ever since. So much for the critics. Of her many nominations for various awards, one included an Academy Award for Best Actress in the 1996 "The English Patient".

In this film, she plays the lovely Katherine Clifton, a woman torn between her husband and her love for a young Hungarian cartographer working in the Libyan desert during the Second World War.

It ends very sorrowfully indeed. This film took out an astonishing numbers of trophies on completion, including nine Oscars, two Golden Globes and six BAFTA awards.

Answer: Bea Arthur

American actress, Bea Arthur, lived from 1922 until 2009. Born in New York, and before she went on to become the star she was, Bea served in the United States Marine Corps during the Second World War. Following that great horror, she studied acting in New York before commencing her long career on stage, in film and, most particularly, in television.

Her long term television roles included several appearances in "All in the Family", a sitcom set around a working class family and its bigoted patriarch, in which she played an ultra-liberal white collar worker named Maude.

This led to that show's spin-off "Maude" from 1972 until 1978, based around her character, and in which she starred. Her most famous role of all perhaps was in the sitcom "Golden Girls" (1985-1992) in which she played Dorothy Zbornak, a divorcee living in a house in Miami with two other women of the same age, and her feisty, very short, mother - all of whom were, more or less, "on the market".