Quotes

I grew up in a house on 89th Street that was always full of these gorgeous models: Veruschka von Lehndorff, Ali MacGraw, Lauren Hutton, no matter what I did, I would be the ugly duckling. As a little girl, I figured I'd have to be the most famous actress in the world...

[observation, 1969] When we come to the day when no one in this country feels funny about taking off his clothes, then we've come to a healthy time.

[performing nude] I have been nude many times in many movies, but I almost never do full frontal nudity because I think there's value in keeping some mystery.

[on when the New York Times asked her in 1968 why she gets naked onscreen so much] I said, "Look, you can't carry a gun on a naked body. I'm opposed to the war in Vietnam." That was very real. So it was all about tearing down the establishment. My mother was the establishment. She was telling people to put clothes on. I was telling them to take them off.

[getting over shyness and becomeming the first nude actress] I stopped being shy sometime in the early '60s,with what's called "the private moments" at the Actors Studio where I do my imitation of Marilyn Monroe on the calendar. I would find some way to take my clothes off in a private moment, and with Lee Strasberg's support. Pretty soon, everybody in the Actors Studio was waiting for me to take my clothes off.

[ on her family's reaction to her acting nudity] My mother understood it. My father was furious and my grandparents, Philadelphia mainline, all that. I was a debutante. They could not understand how I could ruin my life.

[being one of the first nude actresses on stage in America] So I did a play called Sweet Eros by Terrence McNally in 1968 and that became the very first nudity in theater in America. It opened before Hair. It opened before Oh Calcutta.