Quotes

The cinema world is not easy. it's full of envy from little people - heads of studios, for example, who hate people for their attractiveness.

I haven't aged into a character actor. I'm still an old leading man.

I was a good costume actor, but I shortened my career because I made the wrong choices.

I've never done a film I'm proud of.

[on Joan Collins, 1984] She's common, she can't act - yet she's the hottest female property around these days. If that doesn't tell you something about the state of our industry today, what does?

[on friends] "Damn 'em all except six - and they can be pallbearers. If they stumble, damn them, too."

I don't know which was the greatest disaster: my career or my wives.

(quote about the play, "The Circle") "Old Granger's back! But some people are going to be shocked. If they've watched me on an afternoon film looking young and smooth, heaven knows what they'll think when they come to the theatre and see this elder-statesman figure with white hair!"

[on Phyllis Calvert] I must be a very good actor to play all those love scenes with Phyllis Calvert, as we didn't like each other very much.

[on Elizabeth Taylor] The incredibly beautiful and curvaceous Liz Taylor, who disappointed me by having a rather squeaky voice, but you can't have everything, can you, and she had practically everything else in abundance.

[on Deborah Kerr] I made "King Solomon's Mines" and I became popular because Quatermain was a mysterious man with a leopard skin around his hat. It was Africa romantic. Deborah Kerr and I made love up a tree. I said to Deborah -- I had a six month affair with her -- that we should never have come down from that tree.

[on James Mason] He was one of the closest friends I ever had. A wonderful actor, and a humble and wonderful man.

[on Alan Ladd] Spencer Tracy was an actor's actor. Everybody thought he was great. Marlon Brando is an actor's actor -- or was. Richard Burton also. I don't try to be cruel, but Alan Ladd was not an actor's actor. But he was a very successful film star.

[on Robert Taylor (Granger worked with him in All the Brothers Were Valiant (1953) and The Last Hunt (1956)] He was such a nice guy, but he had even more hang-ups than I had. Bob Taylor was the easiest person to work with but he had been entirely emasculated by the MGM brass who insisted that he was only a pretty face. He was convinced he wasn't really a good actor and his calm acceptance of this stigma infuriated me.

I hated working with Fritz Lang - he was a Kraut and it was a bloody awful film. I wanted to produce and act it in Cornwall and made them buy the book. MGM turned it into a big colour film. "Moonfleet" was not Lang's type of film - it is a romantic child's film. It wasn't a bad part.