Contract Player Quotes

In my early days I was a contract player at Universal and I had a wonderful mentor named Monique James, who was head of talent there, and she used to drag me on sets to do parts.

The sum of all technical knowledge cannot make a master contract player.

M.G.M. never really gave me a break. They loaned me out for leading roles but cast me in programme pictures.

When the major studios flourished many years ago, an actor was groomed, developed, and worked frequently at his craft. The studios really took care of their actors.

As a kid, I just was a contract player at MGM Studios. They put me into goodness knows how many different roles.Some of them were wonderful and some of them were very just distasteful and awful because I was playing out of my age range and I was thoroughly uncomfortable, let's put it that way. So it took me many years to find my acting feet.

In my day, the only people who achieved real independence were my father, Mary Pickford and Charles Chaplin, who, with D. W. Griffith, formed United Artists. Other than that, everybody belonged to the big studios. They had no say in their own careers.

I was doing acting work at Fox - bit pieces with Greg Peck in The Gunfighter and things like that - and grew up more or less as a Fox contract player in about two years.

What happened is I was going to college in 1950. L. A. City College. A guy I knew was going to an acting class on Thursday nights. He started telling me about all the good-lookin' chicks and said, "Why don't you go with me?" So I probably had some motivation beyond thoughts of being an actor. And sure enough, he was right. There were a lot of girls and not many guys. I said, "Yeah, they need me here." I wound up at Universal as a contract player.