Make them laugh, make them cry, and hack to laughter. What do people go to the theatre for? An emotional exercise. I am a servant of the people. I have never forgotten that.

Happy Birthday Mary Pickford! | April 8, 1892 – May 29, 1979

fairbanksjr:

Happy Birthday Marion Davies!

January 3, 1897 - September 22, 1961

I wish to live until 150 years old but the day I die, I wish it to be with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of whiskey in the other. 

Ava Lavinia Gardner | December 24, 1922 – January 25, 1990 

always-fair-weather:

“I never wanted to be an actor and to this day I don’t.  I can’t get a handle on it.  An actor wants to become someone else.  I am a song-and-dance man and I enjoy being myself, which is all I can do.”

— Dick Van Dyke (born December 13, 1925)

francisalbertsinatra:

Happy Birthday Frank Sinatra!
(December 12, 1915-May 14, 1998)

When Frank sings a song, he wraps himself around it and sinks himself into it. You can just feel every syllable and you know his soul is in it. Sinatra leaves behind a legacy of music, a legacy that will live forever. Five hundred years from now, people will be listening to his recordings and they’ll say, ‘There was only one Sinatra.’ And that’s not an opinion, it’s a fact. -Tony Bennett

This man is a giant. Not that there aren’t other good singers around. But he has imagination and scope of the rarest. After all these years, there is still no one who can approach him. -Nelson Riddle

What Sinatra has is beyond talent. It’s some sort of magnetism that goes in higher revolutions than that of anybody else, anybody in the whole of show business. -Billy Wilder

Right from the beginning, he was there with the truth of things in his voice. He was one of the very few singers who sang without a mask. -Bob Dylan

To hear this man control those 6,000 people in the audience in such a masterful manner convinces you he is a genius. He doesn’t just sing the lyrics, he plays the lyrics, and gets the emotion from them as though he were Shakespeare. He’s the greatest performer of song we’ve ever had. -Joshua Logan

His music helped us understand our own lives more clearly because he was authentically honest about himself. -Shirley MacLaine

There is not even the remotest possibility he will have a successor. -Benny Green

I don’t know what other singers feel when they articulate lyrics, but being an 18-karat manic-depressive and having lived a life of violent emotional contradictions, I have an overacute capacity for sadness as well as elation. I know what the cat who wrote the song is trying to say. I’ve been there—and back. I guess the audience feels it along with me. They can’t help it. Sentimentality, after all, is an emotion common to all humanity.
-Frank Sinatra

Happy Birthday Jobyna Lancaster Raulston ~ Jobyna Ralston
21 November 1899 - 22 January 1967