All About Eve (1950)

Hugh Marlowe: Lloyd Richards

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Quotes 

• Lloyd Richards : I shall never understand the weird process by which a body with a voice suddenly fancies itself as a mind. Just when exactly does an actress decide they're HER words she's saying, and HER thoughts she's expressing?

  Margo : Usually at the point where she has to rewrite and rethink them, to keep the audience from leaving the theatre!

• Lloyd Richards : How about calling it a night?

  Margo : And you pose as a playwright? A situation pregnant with possibilities and all you can think of is everybody go to sleep.

• Lloyd Richards : That bitter cynicism of yours is something you've acquired since you left Radcliffe!

  Karen : The cynicism you refer to, I acquired the day I discovered I was different from little boys!

• Lloyd Richards : A Hollywood movie star just arrived.

  Margo : Shucks, and I sent my autograph book to the cleaner.

• Lloyd Richards : The general atmosphere is very Macbethish. What has or is about to happen?

• Margo : Margo Channing is ageless - spoken like a press agent.

  Lloyd Richards : I know what I'm talking about. After all, they're my plays.

  Margo : Spoken like an author. Lloyd, I'm not twenty-ish, I'm not thirty-ish. Three months ago I was forty years old. Forty. Four O. That slipped out. I hadn't quite made up my mind to admit it. Now I suddenly feel as if I've taken all my clothes off.

• Lloyd Richards : There comes a time that a piano realizes that it has not written a concerto.

  Margo : And you, I take it, are the Paderewski who plays his concerto on me, the piano?

• Lloyd Richards : Karen, let me tell you about Eve. She's got everything - a born actress. Sensitive, understanding, young, exciting, vibrant...

  Karen : Don't run out of adjectives, dear.

• Lloyd Richards : There are very few moments in life as good as this. Let's remember it. To each of us and all of us, never have we been more close, may we never be farther apart.

• Lloyd Richards : What makes you think either Miller or Sherwood would stand for the nonsense I take from you? You'd better stick to Beaumont and Fletcher! They've been dead for three hundred years!

  Margo : ALL playwrights should be dead for three hundred years!

• Llyod Richards : Eve did mention the play, but in passing. She'd never ask to play a part like Cora. She'd never have the nerve.

  Karen : Eve would ask Abbott to give her Costello.

• Llyod Richards : I understand that your understudy, Miss Harrington, has given her notice.

  Margo : Too bad.

  Bill Sampson : I'm broken up about it.

• Llyod Richards : You knew when you came in that the audition was over, that Eve was your understudy, playing that childish little game of cat and mouse.

  Margo : Not mouse, never mouse. If anything *rat*!

• Margo : This is my dear friend and companion, Miss Birdie Coonan.

  Birdie : Oh, brother!

  Eve : Miss Coonan.

  Lloyd Richards : Oh, brother, what?

  Birdie : When she gets like this, all of the sudden she's playin' Hamlet's mother.

  Margo : I'm sure you must have things to do in the bathroom, Birdie, dear.

• Margo : "I don't think you can rightly say we lost the war. We was more starved out, you might say. That's why I don't understand all these plays about love-starved Southern women. Love was one thing we were never starved for in the South."

  Lloyd Richards : Margo's interview with a lady reporter from the South.

  Birdie : And the minute it gets printed, they're gonna fire on Gettysburg all over again.

  Margo : It was Fort Sumter they fired on.

  Birdie : I never played Fort Sumter.

• Lloyd Richards : You've been talking to that venomous fishwife Addison DeWitt!

  Margo : In this case, apparently as trustworthy as the World Almanac!

• Margo : You disapprove of me when I'm like this, don't you?

  Lloyd Richards : Not exactly. Sometimes, though, I wish I understood you better.

  Margo : When you do, let me in on it.

• Lloyd Richards : Who's to give her that boot in the rear she needs and deserves?

• Lloyd Richards : Margo and Bill want us to meet them in the Cub Room tonight after the theater for a bottle of wine.

  Karen : Margo Channing in the Cub Room? I couldn't be more surprised if she'd said Grant's Tomb.

• Karen : It strikes me that Eve's disloyalty and ingratitude must be contagious!

  Lloyd Richards : All this fuss and hysteria because of an impulsive kid got carried away by excitement and the conniving of a professional manure-slinger named DeWitt. She apologized, didn't she?

  Karen : On her knees, I've no doubt!