Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American actress Ali MacGraw.
Last updated on December 5, 2024.
Elizabeth Alice MacGraw is an American actress and activist. She gained attention with her role in the film Goodbye, Columbus (1969), for which she won the Golden Globe Award for Most Promising Newcomer. She gained an international profile for her role in the film Love Story (1970), for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress and won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama. In 1972, MacGraw was voted the top female box office star in the world and was honored with a hands and footprints ceremony at Grauman's Chinese Theatre after having been in just three films. Despite this, she would retain her leading woman status in only four films afterward. She went on to star in the popular action film The Getaway (1972). She played the female lead in Convoy (1978) and headlined the romantic sports drama Players (1979), the comedy Just Tell Me What You Want (1980), and appeared in the historical novel-based television miniseries The Winds of War (1983). In 1991, she published an autobiography, Moving Pictures.
I don't enjoy other people's dramas, and I don't enjoy mine.
People tell me that I am well-grounded. I am sane in the New England sense of the word.
In film, there's so many little things where not just the actor can blow his lines, but technically, it doesn't quite come off in the perfect way envisioned.
I have this amazing life.
When one stops working at the height of one's career, it's just stupid not to say, 'I want to make sure I have a house.'
I'm very touched on a deep level by cruelty to animals.
I think we live in a time where people are just insane on the subject of how they look.
You know, the fashion business is this legendary repository of young girls on their way to getting husbands. I really wanted to work.
There's so much craziness that comes along with being a movie star that you can get so confused. Unless you've spent your whole life waiting to be the centre of attention, it's pretty terrifying.
There are so many kinds of love, and they're all very intense for me.
If you're a baby about the media, as I was, you can't imagine what it's like when the great approval machine shines its beam on you, when every time you cross the street someone comes out of a manhole to talk about your haircut.
I want to be a person who makes a quiet difference.
I had no real experience studying acting; I came to it having done other things for a living for many, many years, and I have this gigantic respect for experience and technique.
It's not so much what do I want to be doing in 15 years, it's how I want to be in 15 years.
I think that I was lucky that I was 30 when I did 'Love Story', which came with this extravagant pop celebrity. I had already done 15 years of what I call 'real' work.' I was a waitress, chambermaid, and a photographer's assistant, so I knew that I was tremendously lucky as a novice actor to have that big hit.
I think something will soon have to be done to protect people from hacking and blogging and lying and spreading rumors and chasing you down the street. Lives are wrecked that way.
I'm a New Yorker, and working in New York was divine for me. I loved working there and going to work there, which I've been able to do three or four times in my career, and I just love it. It's my favorite.
If you want to be watched 24 hours a day in everything you do, you can't turn that around. You can't wake up three years later and say, 'Stop bothering me, I'm a serious actor,' if all you've done is wear certain clothes and show up half-loaded at clubs.
I'm much more famous than I am rich, but I'm able to scale back my lifestyle. I know a lot of people who were where I was who can't imagine living any simpler, but I haven't got a lot of expensive wants.
I fully expect to be doing yoga for the rest of my life.
Here's what I had: I had the arrogance of saying I'd like to be in a 'good' movie, so in fact, when I was hot, I turned down a lot of stuff because I didn't think I wanted to watch it.
I was really involved with other people's opinions of me, and it got heightened during my film career. I don't have any opinion, good or bad about it, it just was. It's not the way I feel now, and I think yoga has a lot to do with that.
I live in Santa Fe, New Mexico. And I travel a tremendous amount. I'm in New York and California a lot, but then also I like faraway places a lot.
I had a romantic, 'Aren't I a good girl?' take on divorce, but the truth is that was stupid.
It's been my experience that the longer I do yoga, the more I want to know, the more I am able to understand and the less judgmental I am.
I think it's tough when you're very young and you maybe fall for the celebrity and being the center of attention.
My ex-husband happens to be one of the most gifted moviemakers. And what is so bizarre about working with someone like that? I guess it is bizarre to be good friends with your ex-husband.
My parents made no money whatsoever, but they really knew how to see, as artists. So a big adventure might be, on a hot, dreadful day with no place to go, to go out and draw our chickens with pastels. My parents gave me a sense of wonder.
I'm in total awe of the technique of great film people. Because if you get your emotional life up to perfection by miracle on Take One, you better have a technique to keep doing it again and again and again.
Looking at beautiful things is what makes me the happiest.
I'm learning how to live in the present and be grateful for what's working rather than look for the 'what's not working' piece.
I can't remember when I wasn't an animal rights activist.
I've always loved animals and I always thought that they were, if not better, then the absolute equal of any two legged creature that God ever created.
The quality of my life has changed dramatically - not the events - but the way I handle them and my priorities and my sense of drama.
Modeling was so fleeting it doesn't count in my life scheme.
Every one of us gets to find our way, hopefully surrounded by love, but we still have to pick out our own way through the land mines of life. By accepting this and relinquishing control, there's just extraordinary beauty.
I have always felt that the way we treat animals is a pretty good indicator of the compassion we are capable of for the human race.
Am I going to be able to be the person I want to be in this relationship?