A Quote by Sheila Hancock

When I started in the business there were no women in executive positions, no women producers or directors and certainly no camerawomen and we were destined to do very archetypal roles, very cliched things, so I was a dizzy blonde for years.
When I was making films [early in my career] there were very, very few female directors, and there were certainly no women on set, which made taking one's clothes off all the more difficult.
I love directors who aren't going back to the stereotypes, who are helping write and create roles for women that are not in the typical Hollywood box. I'm very, very interested in films that are going outside of stereotypical roles for women.
When I started my first film, there were three women directors in France. Their films were OK, but I was different. It's like when you start to jump and you put the pole very high - you have to jump very high. I thought, I have to use cinema as a language.
I had very supportive parents that made the way for me, even at a time when there were very few women - no women, really; maybe two or three women - and very few, fewer than that, African-American women heading in this direction, so there were very few people to look up to. You just had to have faith.
Women must be very gentle with men as they, as well as women, seek to regain the lost wholeness for which they were destined.
In the beginning, I found myself dealing with a show business dictated by male white supremacists and chauvinists. As a black female, I had to learn how to tap dance around the situation. I had to ... find a way to present my point of view without being pushy or aggressive. In the old days, the only women I saw in this business were in makeup, hairdressing, and wardrobe departments. Now I'm surrounded by women executives, writers, directors, producers, and even women stagehands.
When I grew up, it was a time when women were just supposed to be cute and not have many opinions. My mother and her friends were quite different. They were all the most beautiful women you've ever seen ... and they were very strong women.
My mother and my two grandmothers, I was lucky to have three women around me growing up that were very special, very elegant women, very beautiful women. They were my first step into the beauty world, let's say, and then the fashion world, of course.
We had a moment in the '40s and '50s, where female characters were very strong in film, where these incredible roles were written for women like Joan Crawford, like Bette Davis. But then there was a space of time where - I don't know why - it wasn't like that. It became difficult for women to find certain roles after a certain age.
It's significant that four out of the five nominated comedies were run by women. That's not by accident. Women are storytellers, too. What's particularly exciting is that when it started to change, it changed very quickly, which I think indicates that women have been waiting in the wings for a long time and were ready to take storyteller center stage.
It's tougher for women than men in Hollywood, period, if you ask me. As with most professions, women have generally not found equality with men when it comes to income and influence. There aren't as many female directors, producers, and writers, which translates to fewer complex roles for women.
I certainly hope that we will get more women in power, when it comes to executives and producers and directors, because the problem is not a shortage of females who are qualified to do the job. It's just that women are not favoured or chosen.
There were so many women who had worked throughout the war in every possible job. They were told, "Now leave, so the men can come in" and there was this whole feminizing of women: You have to be very, very retiring and submissive and whatever.
It was 1981. I was working on a novel. And I put that novel aside one day after I read a newspaper article. The story said there were 19 women still on the pension payroll who were Confederate war widows. They were women who very early in their lives had married very old men.
When I was growing up, there was no one. There were very few black women in tech; there were very few black women in the fashion game. We didn't have our Grace Jones - Grace Jones was before my time. We didn't really have a lot of black women in electronic and punk who were celebrated in the same levels as, say, your big mega-superstars.
You didn't have to read 'Playboy,' visit the mansion, wear pajamas, or even be straight: The effects of its ideas about women on the American psyche were totalizing. Women were inferior to men because, for 'Playboy,' they were scenery - pretty, passive, usually white, often blonde, there.
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