Alfred Hitchcock’s baffling opinion on actors getting married: “Many are stupid children”
Throughout moviemaking history, the relationship between directors and actors has always been vital. A good working relationship built on mutual respect leads to a shorthand, meaning ideas can be communicated much more efficiently. A bad working relationship, conversely, can grind an entire production to a halt and severely compromise the final product. Interestingly, though, while the ‘Master of Suspense’ Alfred Hitchcock‘s relationships with actors haven’t been so tenuous that they ruined his films, he did voice some highly controversial, and utterly baffling, opinions about his stars and their ilk.
When it comes to Hitchcock’s healthy distrust of actors, the most well-known example is his infamous “all actors are cattle” comment, which stuck to him like glue for decades afterwards. However, when the legendary helmer was interviewed by the equally legendary French auteur François Truffaut, he admitted that he couldn’t quite remember when he said these words. He also claimed he wasn’t sure if he meant them to be as cutting as they sounded, or whether he was making a dark joke.
Having said that, Hitchcock didn’t launch into an impassioned defence of actors, whom he would never view as cattle. Instead, he revealed that he had worked with enough “badly behaved” actors over the years that the many good ones he worked with “get tarred with the same brush” in his mind. He recounted an anecdote about his early days making films in England with actors performing in theatre productions at the same time.
“I know that when they had a matinee, they’d leave the set, I thought much too early for a matinee,” Hitchcock grumbled. “They’d give themselves time for a very leisurely lunch, so I would have to rush the scene through to let the actor set off for his matinee. I felt that if he were as devoted to his work as I was, he’d be contented with a sandwich.”
This quote is extremely illuminating because it points to Hitchcock’s beef with “bad” actors being based on his perception of a lack of commitment to the filmmaking cause. It may sound like an unfair generalisation, but at least there’s an understandable logic behind it. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for Hitchcock’s more preposterous assertion that all actors are “stupid children” and should never marry each other.
“There is no question that all actors are children,” Hitchcock once mused, “Some are good children; some are bad children; many are stupid children. Because of this childlike quality, actors and actresses should never get married.”
According to Hitchcock, the problem with actors marrying each other is that they inevitably start to blur the lines between reality and fiction, which he believes leads to silly decisions in real life. “An actress, for example, attains the blissful state of matrimony and almost immediately goes to work in a picture with a new leading man,” Hitchcock explained. “She plays a love scene with him so passionately that after three weeks on the picture, she comes home to her husband and says idiotically, ‘Darling, I want a divorce.'”
Why would a female star take such immediate leave of her senses just because a leading man made googly eyes at her while shooting a movie? Well, if Hitchcock is to be believed, it’s because the executives at the studio are also idiots, and they’ve told her the chemistry with this new beau is “real”. He scoffed, “Now she thinks it’s real, too. They are children who never mature emotionally. It’s a tragedy”.
Do any of Hitchcock’s perplexing assertions truly add up, though? Is there any evidence that all actors are so dimwitted that they can be dismissed as children who never mature emotionally? In truth, is it not more likely that this extremely random and absurd tirade points to Hitchcock himself failing to develop his own emotions in a mature way? I’d argue, notwithstanding the ups and downs of industry marriages and Hollywood divorce rates, yes. Yes, it does.
