Quotes

It took Sydney Pollack a long time to get me to do Tootsie (1982). I asked myself if I wanted to play some frothy, ditzy character after I had just done Frances (1982). Obviously, I'm thrilled that I did.

All through life, I've harbored anger rather than expressed it at the moment. Once I started on Frances (1982), I discovered it was literally a bottomless well. It devastated me to maintain that for eighteen weeks, to be immersed in this state of rage for twelve to eighteen hours a day. It spilled all over, into other areas of my life. I was really hell to be around.

[on what counts in her career] Box office success has never meant anything. I couldn't get a film made if I paid for it myself. So I'm not 'box office' and never have been, and that's never entered into my kind of mind set. It is the kind of acknowledgment by other actors, really. That's really what is most meaningful.

For me, acting was always a way to explore emotions - to dip into the well and really try to reach rock bottom down there.

Coming out of the '60s, when it was still the last gasp of bohemia, I just never thought in terms of career or profession.

[when asked by Stephen Colbert if she has any feuds with anyone in 2017] No... but for instance... I feud in my head with people, but I don't have (real feuds with anyone)- but right now I'm carrying on a feud with Kellyanne Conway. If you are given a script as an actor by your agent, and the writers preface it by saying "you've been offered this part", a character who is one of the most important women in the government right now. She's a counsel to the President (of the United States), she's a spokesperson (for the Trump administration), and you pick up the script, you read it, and you think "they've gotta be kidding! They can't (be serious)!" You got a scene where this character talks about alternative facts, you've got a scene where this character imagines that a (common) microwave is turning into a camera, you go to the Presidential inauguration dressed as a Nutcracker... You can imagine how the conversation would go: "Are you kidding me? Nobody's going to take this character seriously, she's a joke!!"