“... to the medium of film which preserved his artistry, left the most indelible legacy. ‘He was,’ Orson Welles said, ‘as we’re now beginning to realise, the greatest of all the clowns in the history of the cinema.’Keaton’s comic outline was as carefully judged as his pratfalls. On his first day in front of a camera, to separate himself from the ...”

“... own right, notorious for the insolence with which he treated such fellow performers as Al Jolson, Orson Welles and W.C. Fields. When, late in life, Bergen became the father of a flesh and blood child called Candice, he whimsically brought her up as Charlie McCarthy’s kid sister. In her impressively restrained autobiography, Knock Wood, Candice Bergen ...”

“... Who, now, watches The Long, Hot Summer, a clunking melodrama from 1958 notable only for a cameo by Orson Welles? They were no Bogart and Bacall: all of Newman’s most successful films – Cool Hand Luke, The Verdict, Hud, The Sting – were made without Woodward.One of the documentary’s recurring themes is that although Woodward had more dramatic ...”

“... as Penman puts it, an ‘amalgam of Bertolt Brecht, Joe Orton, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Sid Vicious and Orson Welles’. By 1978, when he made his contribution to Germany in Autumn, a portmanteau film about the crisis caused by the Red Army Faction’s final, suicidal actions, he was famous enough to appear simply as himself, to argue cruelly with his ...”

“... The Transit of Venus introduces an alternative postwar male in Adam Vail, a man who looks like Orson Welles and who ‘concerns himself with humanitarian and political causes’. Caroline (who is also in the civil service) meets him as part of a deputation to persuade the British government to intervene to save some men in a South American country ...”

“... literary feint, an emperor whose nakedness surpasses royal finery’. That is objectively an Orson Welles parody, but here’s the thing: I was as excited as anyone. As I read I pictured myself as a small pink cartoon character jumping furiously up and down on a pile of mattresses at the city dump, which is how I know I’m having a good time. Why ...”

“... of regeneration. The utopian future of Thamesmead was all used up, as Marlene Dietrich said of Orson Welles in Touch of Evil. Southmere Lakeside and the soothing water features contrived by Robert Rigg as part of a GLC initiative in the 1960s had turned sour by the time of Stanley Kubrick’s film of A Clockwork Orange in 1971. Dystopian violence ...”

“... Feuchtwanger, Franz Werfel and Bertolt Brecht rubbed shoulders with Peter Lorre, Charles Laughton, Orson Welles, Jean Renoir, Marlene Dietrich, Charlie Chaplin, Harpo Marx and many others. Brecht and Christopher Isherwood had briefly lived and worked in the cottage where I was pounding out the first draft of an adaptation in collaboration with my ...”

“... he again fell out with a cinematographer of high reputation – Russell Metty, who had worked with Orson Welles and Douglas Sirk – and once again he took over entirely, leaving Metty to drink and comment from the sidelines. Kubrick could hardly change the credits, however, and the paranoid punishment fitted the egotistical crime. Spartacus was denied an ...”

“... experimentation except that it was done in a work of popular art.’ This is similar to Orson Welles’s remark that The Outlaw Josey Wales would have been regarded as a masterpiece if it had been directed by someone other than Clint Eastwood, and the point of my description is to suggest, however sketchily, just how much may be going on in any ...”

“... with no key, the sort of cryptogram Tynan’s favourite film, Citizen Kane, would have become had Orson Welles’s studio bosses cut the childhood episodes which explain Kane’s dying word, ‘Rosebud’. The Tynan for whom she forsook her own first marriage in 1964 was a man glittering with success and his own pleasure in it: leading drama critic of ...”