Gloria Swanson

Actress Gloria Swanson in a production still from the 1920 film Why Change Your Wife?.

Gloria Josephine May Swanson (March 27, 1899 - April 4, 1983) was an American actress, producer and businesswoman. She first received notice acting in many silent films in the 1920s and was nominated three times for an Academy Award as Best Actress. She is best remembered for her role in Billy Wilder's film Sunset Boulevard (1950), which also earned her a Golden Globe Award.

Quotes

• Think what you've just said. All foods should be healthy. We ate meat without any of the things they inject in cows and chickens these days. Bread tasted like bread. Now everything is refined, teens are fat, people have heart attacks at 39. Does that make me nuts? [...] In the thirties I was told I had a tumor down there. I met with a surgeon who was puffy faced and sweating and his hands trembled. He said he wanted to cut through my rectum to get at the growth. I stood and shouted, "Physician, heal thyself!" and I simply fled. A pure bean sprouts diet cured me in months and the tumor shrank and disappeared. I rest my case.
  • On her longstanding health food advocacy, from 1974 interview with James Bawden; as quoted in Conversations with Classic Film Stars (2016) by Bawden, pp. 17–18

• I'll be eighty this month. Age, if nothing else, entitles me to set the record straight before I dissolve. I've given my memoirs far more thought than any of my marriages. You can't divorce a book.
  • At the contract signing for her 1980 memoir, Swanson on Swanson; as quoted in "Notes on People" by Clyde Haberman, Alvin Krebs, The New York Times (March 10, 1979), p. 12; and Bill Adler, Funny Ladies: The Best Humor from America's Funniest Women (2001) p. 52 [1]