Betsy Blair

Betsy Blair was an actress and the author of The Memory of All That: Love and Politics in New York, Hollywood and Paris.

Betsy Blair in conversation with Andrew O’Hagan at the London Review Bookshop, April 2005.

I was a blacklisted Hollywood fellow-traveller, a champagne socialist, a Pinko. Not that I wasn’t serious about my ideas and ideals. I was as serious as a 17-year-old arriving on the Coast, newly and ecstatically married to the about-to-be movie star Gene Kelly, could possibly have been. That is to say, I was easily and happily serious, feeling good about myself, rebellious and righteous and pure. I was also being spied on by the FBI.

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