To be a movie star, you have to invent yourself.

My most useful acting tip came from my pal John Wayne. Talk low, talk slow, and don't say too much.

I don't do it often, but I do cry. I also laugh a lot; people tell me I'm funny and I do like to laugh.

If I work with a bad actor, my reaction is to immediately become worse than they are.

I come from the slums; I come from a hard background; I come from a poor family; and I was a soldier.

I've been acting a long time, and I can play a Cockney gangster or a womanizer in my sleep or standing on my head. But what I try to do is I try to find characters that are as far away from me as I possibly can and then make them real. A French Nazi is about as far away from me as I can possibly get without actually going to Mars or something.

My problem was that I was blond. There were no heroes with blond hair. Robert Taylor and Henry Fonda, they all had dark hair. The only one I found was Van Johnson, who wasn't too cool. He was a nice, homely American boy. So I created my own image. It worked.