Quotes

The critics had an image of me, and they wouldn't accept any other... I was a cartoon character. A joke.

I was very flattered by the sex-kitten thing because I never thought of myself as that.

[on Elvis Presley] He's an animal. Definitely an animal. A very interesting animal.

[1975] I like to be pushed. I've been in 27 or 28 movies, and so many of the characters I played were cartoon characters, really. It's nice to play a three-dimensional person every once in a while for a change of pace.

[1975, on the hallucination scene in Tommy (1975) in which she cavorts in food] I knew when I read the script that that was going to be a rough scene to film, if we could do it at all. We shot 'Tommy' during a period of three months, and the television scene was the second to the last one we shot. Russell [director Ken Russell] needed all that time to prepare it.

People ask me how we did it. It was done exactly the way it seems to have been done. Those were real soapsuds, and real baked beans, and that was real chocolate. After we got the chocolate smeared all over, we had to take a day off from shooting - we didn't work on Sundays - and you wouldn't believe what that set was like by Monday, with the chocolate under the hot lights.

They only knew in theory how it would work; they had never tried it. What happened was that the room filled with suds - literally filled up. And I was rolling on the floor under the soap and I caught a piece of glass in my hand. Under liquid like that, you don't really feel the cut very much. I thought I'd nicked something, and then I saw the suds turning pink. And the next thing I knew, I'd had 23 stitches taken. That was bad enough, but as for the beans... To this day, I can't look a bean in the face.

[performing] I'm always a different person when I get up and perform, because then I don't have to be nervous. I don't have to be myself.