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Francis Ford Coppola
Filmmaker, Producer and Screenwriter
Francis Ford Coppola: I was interested in two things, always. One was science, and the stories of the scientists and scientific experimentation. I liked very much to work in a shop down in the basement, and try to invent things and build gadgets. And at the same time I was interested in stories. And I had an older brother who was very interested in literature, and so I had an early exposure to literature, and what have you, and theater. My father sometimes would work in musical comedies, so I would have the opportunity to see musical comedies. Ultimately, those different technical, and sort of story interests -- around high school, or early high school -- I started to do the lighting, work on the lighting of the drama productions, and be around the shows. And so I started to become interested in theater, and I thought I wanted to be a playwright, because I was interested in stories and telling stories.
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Sheryl Crow
Award-Winning Singer and Songwriter
I was not a person growing up that ever thought I was going to be well known or famous, and it was never really interesting to me. I always wanted to be great. I grew up listening to Bob Dylan and to country artists because of where I grew up -- it was all country on the radio -- and most of what I heard was Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams, and then later on, Tammy Wynette and Loretta Lynn. Then I got into these great songwriters, Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen, and really sort of made a study of it, and really wanted to make an impact, really wanted to be a great songwriter, wanted to write about important things. So the whole fame thing was not ever very interesting, but definitely wanting to matter was more interesting.
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Olivia de Havilland
Legendary Leading Lady
Jack [Warner], for example, said, "Oh, you don't want to play Melanie. You want to play Scarlett." I said, "I don't want to play Scarlett. I want Melanie." It's because I was so young. I had for four years been earning my own living, going through all the problems of a career woman, self-supporting and even contributing to the support of others, which is what Scarlett did. That's what Scarlett did. So, I knew about being Scarlett in a sense, but Melanie was someone different. She had very, deeply feminine qualities. Scarlett was a self-absorbed person. She had to be. Career women have to be, that's all there is to it. But, Melanie was "other people-oriented," and she had these feminine qualities that I felt were very endangered at that time, and they are from generation to generation, and that somehow they should be kept alive, and one way I could contribute to their being kept alive was to play Melanie, and that's why I wanted to interpret her role.
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Olivia de Havilland
Legendary Leading Lady
I came back from this experience, and I thought -- because there was a great stigma to mental illness at that time, it was not understood, and families that had a case would never speak of it to anybody else, it was a true skeleton in the closet -- I thought, "These boys, their families, how are they going to react? They need education. They need hope, and the boys must be treated with some kind of understanding." And then, of course, The Snake Pit came along. That was wonderful. That was just after the end of the war, and here was my opportunity to do something about that. And it was a marvelous story, an autobiography written by this young woman who had become really seriously mentally ill, was institutionalized and remarkably was cured in a day when they had no drugs at all for treatment, but the therapy that they used then actually worked in her case, and so I thought this will educate families. People will understand. Patients will understand, and it's a hopeful story because it ends in a cure. That film, in New York, when it was released, ran one year in one theater. People flooded to it.
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Olivia de Havilland
Legendary Leading Lady
Olivia de Havilland: I saw her in the play, wonderfully played by Wendy Hiller, a brilliant performance, but very stylized. It was an adaptation of Henry James's Washington Square, as you know. And I thought, "I see another way to play Catherine," because stylization will not work on film. It would be artificial. I just knew, at the end of the second act, I had to play Catherine. I had to do it, and I was, of course, by now, completely independent and could make my own decisions to take my own initiatives. So, I thought of the directors who would have a particular feel for this material and whom I admired. Two of them I had worked with, and the third I had not worked with. The first two were caught up in other commitments and were not free. The third one had just founded, together with two other directors -- Capra and George Stevens -- his own independent film company, Liberty Films at Paramount, and that man was Willie Wyler. So my agent persuaded him to say nothing to anyone, to get on the train, go to New York, see The Heiress, and he, of course, was looking for material. It was quite wonderful. Never will forget the night I knew he had arrived, the day he arrived in New York, and I knew he would go straight to the theater to see the play, and he had promised to call me afterwards. Well, I waited for that phone call, and I waited, and it came, and he said, "I've seen it. I like it. Let's do it."
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