Tennessee Williams: I Want To Believe in Audrey Hepburn


Interview with Tennessee Williams
Conducted by James Grissom
New Orleans
1982


There is an advantage to growing up in the dark, hugging a radio and dreaming of a life--a better life--somewhere else. You craft this life for yourself, and you run toward it. It's good for a period of your life to not know precisely how things work, because you can then design how they should work. This is, I think, called dreaming, in the best sense of the word, and this is when you find your own character and that of others. I think this magical time of which you're speaking came about because the world was far more innocent and far more daring because we managed somehow to not believe that we were limited in what we could work for and work with, and so the world had Garbos and Hepburns--both Katharine and Audrey. We had movie factories and movie palaces, glorious places for finding ways to get lost in dreams and to make life more palatable. I think now we are urged to get on with things. We are told a lot that this is how things are going to be, and we have to adapt with affirmations and drugs and positivism. Well, I don't want to accept the things I cannot change; I don't want to be happy with a fucking half glass of anything. I want to believe that great plays and great films and great people are coming. I want to believe that a malnourished girl who once hid from Nazis will float through a door in a Givenchy gown and, though guile and charm and kindness, transport all of us. I want to believe in Audrey Hepburn.



© 2014 James Grissom

Comments

  1. Yes, she gave us a reason to dream and believe.....Thank you for this.

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