And yet because of my attempt at sincerity I have been condemned, hooted at, reviled; filthy rumors have been circulated about me, not about my characterizations but about me personally, my private self.
As soon as I had seen Fay Wray and spoken with her for a few minutes, I knew I had found the right girl.
Because I select my players from a feeling that comes to me when I am with them, a certain sympathy you might call it, or a vibration that exists between us that convinces me they are right.
Bobbed hair makes women look uniform. They lack individuality.
Fay has spirituality too, but she also has that very real sex appeal that takes hold of the hearts of men.
For my Vienna is as different from what they call Vienna now as the quick is different from the dead.
I am just old-fashioned enough to prefer long hair.
I could not work with a girl who did not have a spiritual quality.
I was reared in an atmosphere where a great deal of attention was paid to women's hairdressing.
I would like to have you quote me, Erich von Stroheim, as having said on this day of this month of this year this one thing: you Americans are living on baby food.
If I speak of Vienna it must be in the past tense, as a man speaks of a woman he has loved and who is dead.
If you didn't have one in production within the last three months, you're forgotten, no matter what you have achieved ere this.
In Hollywood - in Hollywood, you're as good as your last picture.
It is not because I do not love my adopted land - it is the natural feeling of one far from home, who remembers those happy, carefree days when life flowed at full tide, without responsibility, flashing past one like the drama in a fascinating story of adventure and romance.
Lillian Gish is to me the supreme artist, having that quality to the nth degree.
One looks at Zasu Pitts and sees pathos, even tragedy, and a wistfulness that craves for something she has never had or hopes to have. Yet she is one of the happiest and most contented women I have ever known.
Since that first showing of Foolish Wives I have seemed to walk through vast crowds of people, their white American faces turned towards me in stern reproof.
The picture has made its million back in four months; I have been overwhelmed by letters, hundreds of them, literally, begging me in my next production not to swing over the shallow trash of mother love, father love, sister love, brother love.
When you ask me why I do such pictures I am not ashamed to tell you the true reason: only because I do not want my family to starve.
It is characteristic of the epistemological tradition to present us with partial scenarios and then to demand whole or categorical answers as it were.
Von Stroheim is buried at Maurepas Cemetary in Maurepas, France.
Von Stroheim wrote a novel entitled Paprika which was published in the mid-1930's.
Von Stroheim the actor was easy to work with according to most directors but Von Stroheim the director was a legendary tyrant who drove his actors crazy and constantly went over budget.
Von Stroheim never learned how to drive an automobile. In the two scenes he's seen driving in Sunset Boulevard, the first was in a fake car on top of a flatbed truck and the one outside Paramount Studios the car was pulled with ropes by off-screen personnel.
Von Stroheim played a sympathetic German POW commandant in Jean Renoir's classic 1937 anti-war film The Grand Illusion.
Von Stroheim was 5 feet, 7 inches tall.
Von Stroheim immigrated to the United States on board the S. S. Prince Friedrich Wilhelm and arrived in New York on November 25, 1909.
Von Stroheim claimed to be from an aristocratic background but in reality his father owned a garment factory.
Von Stroheim was awarded the Legion of Honor by France in 1957 shortly before he passed away.
Sunset Boulevard was the final American produced film in which Von Stroheim appeared. He spent his later years living in France.
Von Stroheim portrayed German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in the 1943 film Five Graves to Cairo. Some critics said he was too sympathetic in the role.
Von Stroheim was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 1950 for his performance as butler Max von Mayerling in Sunset Boulevard.
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