Voices Carry

 

Just who do Mel Blanc and Arthur Q. Bryan think they are?

This should answer your qwestion, heh-heh-heh-heh-heh.

Quips and Quotations (Uncommonly Good Edition)

 

1946-2025

Choosing the freedom to be uninteresting never quite worked for me.

--Diane Keaton (née Hall)

 

Under the Radar: Mae Questel

 

Thespian Mae Questel was born on this day in 1908 (she died in 1998.) If you don't recognize the name, you at least may recognize the iconic cartoon character to whom she lent her voice:

 

 

When Betty Boop made her animation debut in 1930, she was a dog. I don't mean that unkindly, that she was a homely human woman. No, I mean that literally. She was neither homely nor human but a member of the species Canis familiaris. Allow me to explain. At the time another anthropomorphic pooch named Bimbo was animation studio head Max Fleischer's most popular character. Fleischer came up with a story for a cartoon short that had Bimbo as a dishwasher in a nightclub in love with a sexy canine singer, and asked his leading animator Grim Natwick, to come up with a design. Natwick's Betty was similar to the later human version, except that she had droopy ears and a little black nose. The subsequent short, "Dizzy Dishes", did well, and Betty remained both a supporting player and a sexy dog (she's seen in a lacy bra in one pre-Code cartoon) for the next ten or so shorts (sources vary.) Theater operators made it clear to Fleischer that they wanted to see more Betty and less Bimbo. And that it wouldn't hurt to remove any urge towards bestiality on moviegoers' parts if they were given an actual member of the species Homo sapiens to drool over. And so Betty was humanized, her droopy ears replaced by earrings, and the dark nose transformed into a pert dash. As for Bimbo, he stuck around for a while as a supporting player, remaining a canine. Needless to say, the relationship between him and Betty from that point on was strictly platonic. Around this time (sources again vary), Mae Questel took over vocal duties from Betty's original portrayer Margie Hines and enacted the squeaky-voice flapper for eight years, longer than any other actor. However, that wasn't Questel's only acting achievement, as you'll find out in this interview from the 1980s:

 

Still sounds like Betty, doesn't she? Probably the reason Questel was asked to do the character one more time in 1988's Who Framed Roger Rabbit?:

Recently, a musical based on Betty Boop opened and very shortly thereafter closed on Broadway. Perhaps if the show's producers had found some psychic who could have channeled Mae Questel's vocal talents, it would still be running today.

Outback Pride

 

I just didn’t believe I was up there in fishnets and high heels actually doing it...It’s one of my strengths as a performer. I’ve got a kind of more developed feminine side so it was a chance to knowingly explore that.

--British actor Terence Stamp, on playing transgender woman/drag queen performer Bernadette Bassenger in the 1994 Australian comedy The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

1938-2025

Playing Platinum

 

Sure, she wanted to make it big in Hollywood, but that didn't mean she was going to...

...compromise her principles.

Loni Anderson (1945-2025) 

Best known for the highly-capable, and highly-paid, receptionist Jennifer Marlowe on WKRP in Cincinatti.

 

Quips and Quotations (Mobile Army Edition)

 

I mean, certain things had to remain the same. She had to remain one of the antagonists because that was the structure of the show. In the second season, we saw for the first time that she was unhappy with Frank and wanted more from her life. Then around the third or fourth year, in an episode called "The Nurses" (1976), Hot Lips gave the nurses a speech telling them how lonely she was because she was in charge and that's the way it was, so she couldn't really have any friends. Her marriage and her divorce changed her. Her affair with Hawkeye in "Comrades in Arms: Part 1" (1977) changed both characters, so that they were never really rivals again.

--Loretta Swit, Major Margaret "Hot Lips" Houlihan on MASH

1937-2025

 

 

 

Quips and Quotations (All's Well That West Ends Well Edition)

 

Gielgud and Richardson

John Gielgud is the biggest gossip I know, and I know several. He's a fabulous talent, has a magnificent voice, and he's the first to admit he's selfish and egotistic. How refreshing!

--Ralph Richardson

Quips and Quotations (1% Inspiration and 99% Anticipation Edition)

 

1959-2025

Being successful doesn't change things. There's a painful, lonely part of acting because you're always waiting. The thing about being a performer is doing, and when you have to wait, it's the same pain as when you're starting out and have no job. You think that thing will go away, but it doesn't. It just shifts. I remember Robert Duvall saying that being a successful actor is all about finding interesting hobbies, because if you don't have the right hobby, you die. It's very hard to maintain interest. Most actors don't. They become a little clichéd. You learn how to do tricks and stuff.

--Val Kilmer

(Kilmer was in a lot of well-known movies but rather than show clips from all of them--I don't exactly have the time for all that--I'm going to show a trailer from just one, 1985's True Genius, which happens to be the movie of his I first saw. It's no great shakes as a film, except for Kilmer's own performance, which if didn't make him a star right away, set him in the right direction--Kirk)

(As you can see, the military-industrial complex was fucked up even before Pete Hegseth got his hands on it.)

Vital Viewing (Logistics of Logic Edition)

 

Actor Leonard Nimoy was born on this day in--OOPS! I forgot something.

 

OK, that's better. Actor Leonard Nimoy was born on this day in 1931 (he died in 2015.) Nimoy is best known for playing the starship USS Enterprise's taciturn alien first officer Spock on the 1966-69 TV series Star Trek. In a series of posts I did nearly a decade ago, I argued that despite being regularly chastised by his fellow spacefarers as being all brains and no heart, Spock eventually became the moral center of Trek. Whether Nimoy himself saw Spock that way, I can't say. I do know the actor put a lot of thought into his character, as can be attested to by this following video from 2010. Watch:

Now listen as Nimoy continuously drops the F-bomb:

OK, but what's got him so fascinated?

Vulcans start young.

Vital Viewing (Good vs Evil Edition)

 

1930-2025

Did you hear that? The Pasadena Playhouse didn't think Gene Hackman would make it as an actor? Cancel my Rose Bowl tickets! Hackman proved himself to be one of the greatest actors of his generation, able to play heroes or villains. To demonstrate, I'm going to show you two clips. The first is of him as the heroic Popeye Doyle (for which he won an Academy Award) in 1971's The French Connection. The second is him as the villainous Lex Luthor in 1977's Superman. Watch:

I don't know. Hackman seems a bit safer to be around when he's the bad guy.

We'll Always Have Verona

 

Olivia Hussey 1951-2024

What light through yonder window breaks?

Quips and Quotations (Bass Player Edition)

 

1931-2024

Speech is a very important aspect of being human. A whisper doesn't cut it.

--James Earl Jones

 The Great White Hope (1970, based on a 1968 Broadway play, also starring Jones, for which he won a Tony--Kirk)

Claudine (1974. No great shakes as a movie, but I've always liked Jones in it--Kirk)

The Empire Strikes Back (1980. Yes, I know he voiced the same character in a movie before and a movie after, but you only get one clip out of me as I refuse to hand this blog over to the Force, no matter how tempting--Kirk)

Fences (1987 Broadway play for which Jones won his second Tony--Kirk)

CNN promo (1994. Made me want to watch the news--Kirk)

 

 

--

 

Quips and Quotations (Emerald City Limits Edition)

 

That was my one big Hollywood hit, but, in a way, it hurt my picture career. After that, I was typecast as a lion, and there just weren't many parts for lions.

--Bert Lahr

Quips and Quotations (The One with the '90s Sitcom Obit Edition)

 

1969-2023

I gravitate towards sort of broken characters who try to be better people.

--Matthew Perry, best known for playing Chandler Bing on Friends.

Quips and Quotations (A Lovable Space That Needs Your Face Edition)

 

1946-2023

Creating her was actually intellectual. How do I make her likable and loveable? ...Dumb blondes are annoying. I gave her a moral code. I imagined it was the childhood I would've liked to have had.

--Suzanne Somers, on her Three's Company character Chrissy Snow.

 

The Late Show

Dracula's Daughter? Morticia Addams? Nah, it's just French actress Sarah Bernhardt, circa 1873. She's not yet 30 and, though seen here in a coffin, still had fifty more years to go. In her day Bernhardt was considered the greatest actress in the world, but she was probably less Meryl Streep and more a thespian Lady Gaga: The-Artist-as-Weirdo. That's no slight but exactly what she wanted people to think, the first celebrity to conclude that there's no such thing as bad publicity. Take the coffin. As Sarah herself told it, she was nursing her tubercular sister back to health, letting her sleep in her own bed, while the actress slept in a casket that she just happened to have lying around the apartment. A manicurist dropped by, saw Sarah in the box, and ran out of the apartment screaming. From then on "all of Paris knew." So what else could poor Sarah do but have her picture taken in the sarcophagus and try her damnedest to make sure every man, woman, and child in France got a copy? It recalls another Artist-as-Weirdo, Michael Jackson, who a century later made sure a photo of himself sleeping in an oxygen chamber fell into the hands of the National Enquirer. That didn't hurt his record sales any (though a later revelation about an entirely different set of sleeping arrangements clearly did, proving that there IS such a thing as bad publicity.) Getting back to Sarah, it was just one of many eccentricities that she indulged in that the French loved gossiping about, from a private menagerie kept in that same crowded apartment to a private army of lovers, usually but not exclusively male, kept in that same private apartment. She wore belts below her hips, so much jewelry that she chimed as she walked, and, as if sleeping in a coffin wasn't enough, sculpted a death head of her recently departed husband. However, what truly shocked the normally open-minded French public wasn't what she did offstage but on it. Not satisfied with mere portrayals of Cleopatra or Salome, Sarah decided to play the title role in Hamlet as well! Later she is said to have donned a beard to play Shylock (if not the same gender, they at least shared the same religion.) 

Sarah sold tickets and continued to through the rest of her life, which included a major calamity in the 20th century portion of that life. Jumping upon an improperly placed mattress during a performance, she apparently broke her leg and didn't seek medical attention right away. It didn't happen overnight, but gangrene eventually cost her that leg. Still, she appeared on stage and now movies and on recordings. As is often the case with film footage from before World War I, her screen appearances look as though they were shot through a Coke bottle (because the print has disintegrated; contemporary audiences would have seen it clear as day.) In her 60s, she obviously can no longer play the ingenue, and there's the flailing of arms so often seen in silent pictures, as if Sarah herself was the manicurist who had just seen Sarah in a coffin. But that's all we have to go by. The 19th century part of her career, which so wowed contemporary audiences, only exists in photographs. What would 21st century audiences think of her? Given changes in acting styles, it seems unlikely she would still be considered the greatest actress in the world (George Bernard Shaw, 12 years her junior, found her exaggerated mannerisms to be "childishly egotistical") but that doesn't mean she wouldn't be fun to watch. We'll never know for sure, as Sarah Bernhardt is now Lost in Time...

 

Sarah Bernhardt lost a leg but not her reputation. Tragedy is relative.