Tennessee Williams on Tallulah Bankhead

“Tallulah has never hesitated to speak what she feels to be the truth, no matter about the possible hurt to herself, because when you speak the truth it is you, the speaker, who is most likely to be hurt. Tallulah is the strongest of all the hurt people I've ever known in my life. And of hurt people I've known a remarkable number, Including some I have hurt myself, and one of them is Tallulah. She has forgiven me for it, but I am not yet ready to forgive myself.”

“I heard someone calling out "Five minutes, Miss Bankhead." There was a response to the call, and this response was delivered in a voice that, having once heard, I would never stop hearing inside my head as I wrote lines for ladies that somehow resulted from the fantastic crossbreeding of a moth and a tiger. Here was the voice for which I had written the part of Myra Torrance in Battle of Angels, and written it for that voice without ever having heard it except in films. I went backstage after the play that night and she received me in her dressing room with that graciousness that has nothing to do with her Southern origin and genteel breeding but with her instinctive kindness to a person in whom she senses a vulnerability that is kin to her own. I suppose I simply mean that she saw or sensed immediately that I was meeting, for the first time in my life, a great star, and that I was more than just properly awed. I was virtually dumb-struck.”