ANGIE DICKINSON ON 'DRESSED TO KILL'
UPON FIRST READING SCRIPT, SAID, 'BRIAN...IN THE BACK OF A TAXI?'Angie Dickinson was the "super special guest star" at
The Catro Theatre's Noir City X festival this past Saturday in San Francisco, where they held a double feature of
The Killers and
Point Blank. De Palma a la Mod reader Chris was there, and tells us that Dickinson, looking strong at 80, "was introduced with a montage of famous and not-so-famous roles that featured the
Dressed To Kill elevator scene in surprising detail." Surprising in that Chris felt there was a spoiler involved (for those that had never seen the film), and also because it showed her hand getting sliced. The montage then wittily cut from the razor attack to Dickinson giving
Dean Martin a shave in a clip from
Rio Bravo, a film she said she regards very highly, according to Chris.
Here is Chris' account of the stage interview:
Interviewer Eddie Muller said he thought DRESSED TO KILL was her best role and that she should have gotten an Academy Award for it. “I had met BD at a (Canadian) film festival and some time later he sent me a script...I read it and I said Brian...in the back of a taxi..? We’ll use a double, he said...I said ok. The reason he had trouble getting an actress for that part was that she had to be someone the audience liked instinctively, since there wasn’t time to give her any backstory, and she had to die 25 minutes into the picture (and there was a third reason she gave: I believe it was due to the perceived explicitness of the scenes)
paraphrasing: “BD was great, had a vision of what he wanted and made everyone work hard to get it”: Michael Caine told her there were 27 takes of him coming down the stairs in Bellevue. She agreed that she deserved an Oscar for the role (as supporting actress); said that due to it being a Filmways production there was no big studio to give a push to get her nominated, and that doing such a thing oneself was extremely expensive and she thought it was too much of a longshot to be worth the gamble.
She said she thinks THE UNTOUCHABLES is BD’s best film, and advised everyone to see it. When Muller asked if she loved Sean Connery in it she said yes but then — in a way that made it clear where her interest lay, and got a big laugh — said , “and, um , Andy Garcia”
She says she loves movies, goes all the time and current faves are MY WEEK WITH MARILYN, HUGO (“they sold it as a film for kids...it’s a film with kids, for adults”), THE ARTIST (“love it...I’ve seen that many times”) and MIDNIGHT IN PARIS. She’s also a fan of runpee.com (which I’d never even heard of -- subject came up because interviewer mentioned that Angie doesn’t appear in POINT BLANK until about 30 minutes in, at which point she interjected “so if you need to pee, that’s when to go”).
Jonathan Farrell provides another account of the evening over at Digital Journal.
(Thanks to Chris!)