Quotes

If I were just a bit taller and I was a little more handsome or something like that, I could have played all the roles that I have played, and played many more. There is such a thing as a handicap, but you've got to be that much better as an actor. It kept me from certain roles that I might have had, but then, it kept others from playing my roles, so I don't know that it's not altogether balanced.

I did a picture called Double Indemnity (1944) with Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck for Paramount. It was, in fact, the third lead. I debated accepting it; Emanuel Goldenberg told me that at my age it was time to begin thinking of character roles, to slide into middle and old age with the same grace as that marvelous actor Lewis Stone. Gladys was hospitalized again, and I had empty night hours to debate the decision. In the end it came to this: Wherefore was this night different from any other night (a question asked at the passover seder table by the youngest celebrant in regard to the anniversary of the Jewish exodus from Egypt)? Wherefore was this picture different from any other picture? I was never the handsome leading man; I could proceed with my career growing older in roles that would grow older, too. And (forgive me for being mercenary) there was, instead of a decrease in pay, a slight hike. The decision made itself.

I have not collected art. Art collected me. I never found paintings. They found me. I have never even owned a work of art. They owned me.

To last you need to be real.

To be entrusted with a character was always a big responsibility to me.

To my mind, the actor has this great responsibility of playing another human being . . . it's like taking on another person's life and you have to do it as sincerely and honestly as you can.

Ah yes, I remember well what it was like to be a true collector, that soft explosion in the heart, that thundering inner "Yes!" when you see something you must have or die. For over 30 years I made periodic visits to [Pierre-Auguste Renoir's] "Luncheon of the Boating Party" in a Washington museum, and stood before that magnificent masterpiece hour after hour, day after day, plotting ways to steal it.

I remember just before going onto the soundstage, I'd look in my dressing room mirror and stretch myself to my full 5'5" or 5'6"--whatever it was--to make me appear taller and to make me able to dominate all the others and to mow them down with my size.

Of course, I started as a collector. A true collector. I can remember as if it were only yesterday the heart-pounding excitement as I spread out upon the floor of my bedroom The Edward G. Robinson Collection of Rare Cigar Bands. I didn't play at collecting. No cigar anywhere was safe from me. My father and uncles and all their friends turned their lungs black trying to satisfy my collector's zeal. And then came cigarette cards, big-league baseball players. I was an insatiable fiend, and would cheerfully trade you three Indian Joes for one of that upstart newcomer, Ty Cobb.

Paintings never really belong to one of us. If we are fortunate, as I have been, we are allowed at most a lovely time of custody.

Acting and painting have much in common. You begin with the external appearance and then strip away the layers to get to the essential core. This is reality and that is how an artist achieves truth. When you are acting, you are playing a part, you are being somebody else. You are also, at the same time, being yourself.

Some people have youth, some have beauty--I have menace.

The sitting around on the set is awful. But I always figure that's what they pay me for. The acting I do for free.

[on Humphrey Bogart] Bogie had a manner, a personality - yes, an immense talent - that has made him almost immortal. Working with him, I think I understood it better than his fans. For all his outward toughness, insolence, braggadocio, and contempt (and those were always part of the characters he played, though they were not entirely within Bogie), there came through a kind of sadness, loneliness, and heartbreak (all of which were very much part of Bogie the man). I always felt sorry for him - sorry that he imposed upon himself the facade of the character with which he had become identified.

[om writer/director Richard Brooks] As feisty, individual, unpredictable and honest as any man I've ever known.

[on being cast in The Ten Commandments (1956)] Cecil B. DeMille returned me to films. Cecil B. DeMille restored my self-respect.

Every one of us bears within him the possibility of all passions, all destinies of life in all its manifold forms. Nothing human is foreign to us.

[to good friend Jesse Lasky Jr., screenwriter of The Ten Commandments (1956)] You gave me the greatest exit a 'heavy' ever had. No actor would break friendship with a writer who created a tempest, then an earthquake, then opened a fissure and had me fall through into hell. Even in Little Caesar (1931) I never had an exit as good as that!

[on Cecil B. DeMille, who gave Robinson the role of Dathan at a time when the actor was blacklisted] No more conservative or patriarchal figure existed in Hollywood, no one more opposed to communism or any permutation or combinations thereof. And no fairer one, no man with a greater sense of decency and justice. I'm told that when the part of Dathan was discussed in his new Ten Commandments, somebody suggested that I would be ideal but that under the circumstances I was, of course, unacceptable. Mr. DeMille wanted to know why, coldly reviewed the matter, felt I had been done an injustice, and told his people to offer me the part.

[his Oscar acceptance speech, read by his widow] It couldn't have come at a better time in a man's life. Had it come earlier it would have aroused deep feelings in me; still, not so deep as now. I am very grateful to my rich, warm, creative, talented, intimate colleagues who have been my life's associates. How much richer can you be?

To go on, for a moment, with my "career," it was obvious that while I was forgiven my premature antifascism, I was doomed, both by age and former political leanings, to a slow graveyard. The top directors and producers wouldn't have me and while I'm grateful to those who did in the period and bow low to them for their guts, what I needed was recognition again by a top figure in the industry. I've already mentioned the name of that top figure - Cecil B. DeMille.