I turned down the first script offered to me, and the second. I lay on my back one day under an umbrella, in the garden, reading the third, and wondered why I had turned down the first.

In the middle of my third Hollywood picture The Magician, the earthquake hit Hollywood. Not the real earthquake. Just the talkies.

For me, half the joy of achieving has been the struggle and the fight, the pitting myself against the world and all its competition - and winning.

Looking back across the years, so many pictures flash on the screen of my memory that just as I begin to see one clearly, another slides in, blotting out the first, itself to be pushed aside by the next and the next and the next.

There must have been something in my nature - I believe, with all my heart, that I have conquered it now - which prevented me from being perfectly happy or making a woman perfectly happy.

I was never a villain on the stage. I always played strong, sympathetic types. My first stage role with a speaking part, believe it or not, was as a priest. It wasn't until I began acting in films that the producers and directors saw me primarily as a bizarre villain.

I can see now that I should have been strong enough to conquer myself.