Quotations and phrases - Gene Tierney

About my career I was serious and earnest, sometimes impatient.
-- Gene Tierney

As an actress, I was trained to show emotion I did not feel, or no emotion at all.
-- Gene Tierney

Cars, furs, and gems were not my weaknesses.
-- Gene Tierney

Chaplin was notoriously strict with his sons and rarely gave them spending money.
-- Gene Tierney

Children don't understand about people loving each other and then suddenly not.
-- Gene Tierney

Day after day, I spent long afternoons in the talent pool, being told how to walk, how to talk, how to sit.
-- Gene Tierney

Eccentric behavior is not routinely noticed around a movie set.
-- Gene Tierney

Everyone should see Hollywood once, I think, through the eyes of a teenage girl who has just passed a screen test.
-- Gene Tierney

Fonda and Gary Cooper had the best sense of timing of all the actors I knew.
-- Gene Tierney

For years it never occurred to me to question the judgment of those in charge at the studio.
-- Gene Tierney

Hollywood can be hard on women, but it did not cause my problems.
-- Gene Tierney

Houses are one of my passions. I probably should have been an interior decorator.
-- Gene Tierney

I admire anyone who rids himself of an addiction.
-- Gene Tierney

I always tried to play my hunches.
-- Gene Tierney

I am not the kind of woman who excuses her mistakes while reminding us of what used to be.
-- Gene Tierney

I approached everything, my job, my family, my romances, with intensity.
-- Gene Tierney

I ask myself: Would I have been any worse off if I had stayed home or lived on a farm instead of shock treatments and medication?
-- Gene Tierney

I dated dozens of young men, had fun with all, made commitments to none.
-- Gene Tierney

I do not recall spending long hours in front of a mirror loving my reflection.
-- Gene Tierney

I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.
-- Gene Tierney

I followed the same diet for 20 years, eliminating starches, living on salads, lean meat, and small portions.
-- Gene Tierney

I had been offered a Hollywood contract before my 18th birthday. It gave me the spark I needed.
-- Gene Tierney

I had known Cole Porter in Hollywood and New York, spent many a warm hour at his home, and met the talented and original people who were drawn to him.
-- Gene Tierney

I had no romantic interest in Gable. I considered him an older man.
-- Gene Tierney

I have a role now that I think becomes me. I am a grandmother.
-- Gene Tierney

I hole up now and then and do nothing for days but read.
-- Gene Tierney

I knew I could not cope with the future unless I was able to rediscover the past.
-- Gene Tierney

I learned quickly at Columbia that the only eye that mattered was the one on the camera.
-- Gene Tierney

I loved to eat. For all of Hollywood's rewards, I was hungry for most of those 20 years.
-- Gene Tierney

I needed to be accepted, not humored. I intended to act.
-- Gene Tierney

I remember the 1940s as a time when we were united in a way known only to that generation. We belonged to a common cause-the war.
-- Gene Tierney

I simply did not want my face to be my talent.
-- Gene Tierney

I used to annoy my father by telling him how much I felt luck was with me.
-- Gene Tierney

I used up every cent I earned as an actress.
-- Gene Tierney

I was fine when it came to cheering up others, not so fine with myself.
-- Gene Tierney

I was fortunate enough to work under directors who were, most of them, brilliant, emotional men.
-- Gene Tierney

I was going to live on my salary or go down swinging.
-- Gene Tierney

I was not cut out to be a rebel.
-- Gene Tierney

I was plunged into what was known as the debutante social whirl. This was one of the ways fathers justified their own hard work and sacrifices.
-- Gene Tierney

I'm not sure I can explain the nature of Jack Kennedy's charm, but he took life just as it came.
-- Gene Tierney

In later years, I craved foods that were almost always fattening.
-- Gene Tierney

In my early days in Hollywood I tried to be economical. I designed my own clothes, much to my mother's distress.
-- Gene Tierney

In the months leading up to World War II, there was a tendency among many Americans to talk absently about the trouble in Europe. Nothing that happened an ocean away seemed very threatening.
-- Gene Tierney

It is difficult to write about any form of mental disease, especially your own, without sounding as if you were examining a bug under glass.
-- Gene Tierney

It was the fashion of the time, still is, to feel that all actors are neurotic, or they would not be actors.
-- Gene Tierney

Jealousy is, I think, the worst of all faults because it makes a victim of both parties.
-- Gene Tierney

Life is a little like a message in a bottle, to be carried by the winds and the tides.
-- Gene Tierney

Men are wonderful. I adore them. They always give you the benefit of the doubt.
-- Gene Tierney

My departure from Hollywood was described as a walk-out. No one understood that I was cracking up.
-- Gene Tierney

My mother would not talk to me for weeks, would not stay under my roof for as long as I was married to Oleg.
-- Gene Tierney

Rehearsals and screening rooms are often unreliable because they can't provide the chemistry between an audience and what appears on the stage or screen.
-- Gene Tierney

Some women feel the best cure for a broken heart is a new beau.
-- Gene Tierney

The Hollywood structure was monopolistic, run by four or five big studios.
-- Gene Tierney

The Howard Hughes I knew began to change after his plane crash in 1941.
-- Gene Tierney

The main cause of my difficulties stemmed from the tragedy of my daughter's unsound birth and my inability to face my feelings.
-- Gene Tierney

The word actress has always seemed less a job description to me than a title.
-- Gene Tierney

There were days that I worked all the time, without a layoff, or a rest, finishing one picture and reporting for another sometimes on the same day.
-- Gene Tierney

Those who become mentally ill often have a history of chronic pain.
-- Gene Tierney

Throughout my career, I was to be cast as a frontier girl, an aristocrat, an Arabian, a Eurasian, a Polynesian, and a Chinese.
-- Gene Tierney

Trying to make order out of my life was like trying to pick up a jellyfish.
-- Gene Tierney

Unlike the stage, I never found it helpful to be good in a bad movie.
-- Gene Tierney

We cannot calculate the numbers of people who left, fled or were fished out of Europe just ahead of the Holocaust.
-- Gene Tierney

Wealth, beauty, and fame are transient. When those are gone, little is left except the need to be useful.
-- Gene Tierney

What a different world it was when I first sailed for Europe in 1930, with my mother, sister, and brother to spend six months abroad.
-- Gene Tierney

When I met Jack Kennedy, he was a serious young man with a dream. He was not a womanizer, not as I understood the term.
-- Gene Tierney

When my mood was high, I seemed normal, even buoyant. I felt smarter. I had secrets. I could see God in a light bulb.
-- Gene Tierney

When you have spent an important part of your life playing Let's Pretend, it's often easy to see symbolism where none exists.
-- Gene Tierney

All quotations and phrases said by Gene Tierney including famous quotes