The 30 Harshest Actor-on-Actor Insults in History

Cary Grant on Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, James Dean:

“I have no rapport with the new idols of the screen, and that includes Marlon Brando and his style of Method acting. It certainly includes Montgomery Clift and that God-awful James Dean. Some producer should cast all three of them in the same movie and let them duke it out. When they’ve finished each other off, James Stewart, Spencer Tracy and I will return and start making real movies again like we used to.”

Bette Davis on Cary Grant:

“He needed willowy or boyish girls like Katharine Hepburn to make him look what they now call macho. If I’d co-starred with Grant or if Crawford had, we’d have eaten him for breakfast.”

Richard Harris on Michael Caine:

“An over-fat, flatulent, 62-year-old windbag. A master of inconsequence masquerading as a guru, passing off his vast limitations as pious virtues.”

Marlon Brando on Leonardo DiCaprio:

"He looks like a girl."

Marlon Brando on Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable:

"Humphrey Bogart played himself in every movie. Clark Gable always played Clark Gable."

R1 fake quote. James Dean wouldn't have been mentioned with that group until after he died.

I agree James Dean is awful.

fuck brando! and not in the way his daughter did HAIYOOO!

R6 source:

Brando Unzipped Book by Darwin Porter

Harrison Ford on Shia LaBeouf:

“I think he was a fucking idiot.”

HA!

R9 find the original interview where he said it. I promise you, it doesn't exist. He never said that.

Damn Richard Harris threw some shade.

I prefer writer-on-writer insults. Truman Capote said of Jack Kerouac, "That's not writing, that's typing." And of Jacqueline Susann, he said she looked like a truck driver in drag.

"Nic Cage used to be an actor, but I wouldn't call him one anymore. How many times can you run out of a car or building that's exploding and still call yourself an actor? He's more of a performer now." -- Sean Penn.

To break that Cary Grant quote down- first of all, it reads like second rate dialogue from a Cary Grant movie. "That would certainly include Montgomery Clift and that God awful James Dean." He didn't speak like that. No one does.

Secondly, the quote supposes that Grant's career was on the skids. James Dean released only one movie while he was still alive in 1955. He died six months after it was released. He was nowhere near the kind of fame Cary Grant had. In 1955, Grant had an enormous hit with To Catch a Thief. He didn't need Clift, Brando or Dean to move aside. He was still making hit movies.

Finally, of the three actors mentioned, Brando was the only one who could've even come close to Grant's status at the time. Clift wasn't in the same class, and neither was Dean until after he died.

I believe that is one of those made up internet quotes. The author of Brando Unzipped (classy) lifted it and simply attached "Grant told an interviewer."

There are many other reasons the quote rings false. If anyone can find the interview where it was said (and it would have had to be in the six month window in 1955 between the release of East of Eden and Dean's tragic death) I'm all eyes. But I'd bet my life that quote was written by some idiot in around 2004.

[quote]Sir John Gielgud on Ingrid Bergman: “Dear Ingrid — speaks five languages and can’t act in any of them.”

Meow, John. Me-ow.

Then start your own thread, R13.

"Click, click, click."

Oh god, the Movieline interview Jlo did at the very beginning of her career. Shots fired at Gwyneth, Oliver Stone, Madonna and more.

Her publicist must have been shitting herself.

The Movieline interview with Charlie Sheen was fantastic. He questioned how it was that Coppola and Bertolucci could see Keanu Reeves and want to work with him? Then he went on to insult several other popular actors. He was drunk for the interview, of course.

Morgan Freeman kind of bashed Keanu too...saying Keanu was attractive ( it was an insult).

Truman was a little shithead who was full of himself. If he could look back he probably would be embarrassed.

Dorothy Parker on Katherine Hepburn:

“She runs the gamut of emotions from A to B.”

Jennifer Lopez is a conceited cunt who can't sing OR act.

I like composer-on-composer hash-slinging, like Tchaikovsky calling Brahms an "artless bastard." You go, girl-ovich!

R3 Harris was the greatest bastard ever. Pretentious bollix.

Michael Caine is not fat

Except R22's contribution is NOT "actor-on-actor" criticism.

I can't picture Cary Grant saying "God awful James Dean".

Ken Wahl had a lot of bad things to say about working with Bette Midler on the move Jinxed!, but this was the most brutal:

"The only way I could force myself into kissing (Bette) Midler oncamera was to pretend that I was kissing my dog."

R22, a little background. Parker is usually assumed to have written that in a review of Hepburn. But Parker scholars have never been able to find it after decades of searching. What they have found is reasonably convincing anecdotal evidence that she said it verbally at the intermission of a Hepburn performance to the group she was with in the late 1920s.

Darwin Porter is the most fanciful biographer on the planet.