Angie DIckinson gives rare interview

She looks good for 91.

Did she alter her appearance for an important role?

I always liked her. She seems content and able to roll with the punches and accept mortality. Her only daughter killed herself years ago and even though she and Bacharach broke up years ago, I’m sure losing him was difficult.

She always comes across as an old soul, even when young.

Police Woman - Sgt Pepper Anderson along with Sgt Crowley, Detective Royster and Detective Styles (badass name)... I remember when I first heard of Sgt Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band, I thought it had something to do with Police Woman😄

She is a broad, in the best sense. By that I mean....she can hang with guys (the rat pack) and they genuinely like her. Of course....she's gorgeous, which didn't hurt. She seems very real and down to earth.

I couldn’t watch it. The interviewer seemed very uncomfortable. It was off putting.

Did she talk about fucking JFK?

Her scenes in Dressed to Kill are as iconic as Janet Leigh’s in Psycho.

She did confess that Frank Sinatra was love of her life. And now has Siri play his music for her all day, every day. She's very sharp for 91. She could rise up out of the chair unassisted. I'd like to see the full interview.

Have always liked her.

I wanted to be her in "Jessica", looking glamorous, zipping around Sicily on a scooter, flirting with hot Italian men.

She's not exactly reclusive. She had an interview with horsehung news nerd Mo Rocca a few years back.

Only in America: almost 2 minutes in and the kiss-arse is still going on. And she's anything about 'authentic'. The BBC interview with Parkinson at the link, made after To Die For came out, puts paid to that. Two genuine people, Billy Connelly and the famed dog trainer Barbara Woodhouse appear before she rocks up, and proceeds to play the vaporous gushy 'movie star' : only when Connelly casually says to Parkinson that he'd once been as popular "as a far in a spacesuit" does she suddenly drop the facade, because things like that were still unsaid on TV in America. This was still when she trying to maintain the premise that the body in the shower had been hers, rather than a young body double, hence her fluttering over 'nudity'.

[quote] "as a far in a spacesuit"

??

FART

She's sharp as a tack at 91 to remember these kind of details:

Dickinson made a hell of a splash returning to film in this controversial Brian De Palma classic. She stars as Kate Miller, a sexually frustrated housewife who is brutally murdered in a New York City elevator following a chance sexual encounter. The film, including Kate's murder, is widely considered De Palma's homage to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Dickinson cites De Palma as one of the more intimidating directors she's worked with. "It was scary because he's a man of few words," she says. "That's always difficult." Dickinson remembers a conflict between her and costume designer Ann Roth. Roth wanted Kate Miller to wear a gray suit in reference to Kim Novak in Vertigo, but Dickinson wanted to wear white. "I said, 'If I have a white coat, they're not going to expect blood to go on a white coat,' which was exactly right," she recalls.

She won the argument, but that did prove complicated while shooting the explicit murder scene. "You have to match what you did in the master," she explains. "So you do a master shot, you do the whole scene, and then you break it down and do that close up and closer up and closer up. You do it many times now from different angles. And so, I was afraid to get blood on my white coat [for continuity]. But Brian said, 'I don't care about the white coat! Do it well!'"

One of her last major projects was this 1995 remake of classic Billy Wilder romance Sabrina, starring Harrison Ford in the Humphrey Bogart role and Greg Kinnear in the William Holden part. Dickinson has a supporting part as the mother of the woman Kinnear's David is engaged to marry. But because so many thought the classic shouldn't be touched, she says it made for a less than stellar time. "It was not a pleasant set," she says. "I don't know why. The whole idea of remaking it was not very good. It didn't feel quite right. It just didn't work. And Harrison Ford was lovely, but he's not fun. He's a businessman, doing his job."

It's MISS Angie Dickinson, you Philistine!!!!

So wise not to make an effort for the audience, Angie. Your bed hair looks hot!

R13 Your post has so many typos and errors and a strange syntax. "Far in a Spacesuit?" You blew his joke. The film = "Dressed to Kill," not "To Die For."

Dickinson seems the same as any other actor else doing publicity for a movie that just opened. As far as her nude scene, she was completely nude and displayed her ass and side of her breast while she was dressing after the hook-up but yes, body double during the fantasy-shower sequence. Parkinson did not mention the shower scene nor did Dickinson, merely "nudity."

She was just another silly luvvie, who brought nothing special that any other decent actress couldn't have done well or better. But it's amusing reading the simpering of a 'fan'.

She does have some sort of vibe that is unique.

OP, you forgot the "Miss".

R23 = R18

[quote]She does have some sort of vibe that is unique.

Mother used to call it 'brassy'.

Was R13 written by one of those new ChatBOTS?

Chatbots write much better than that.

Angie was very beautiful and seemed “classy” despite also being “one of the boys”, which is a very specific and difficult vibe for a woman to pull off. I like that she’s discrete.

[quote] "This was still when she trying to maintain the premise that the body in the shower had been hers, rather than a young body double, hence her fluttering over 'nudity'."

Much, MUCH younger, R13. And twice as pert and petite!

So, how old was she when she made Dressed To Kill?

R13 Connelly is vulgar.

r30 49ish

Baldies shouldn’t be casting aspersions on their superior’s hair, Joan at [R19].

Ange oughta go all Neely O’Hara on your ass.

She looks younger than Calvin Klein!

Wow she looks fantastic - what a smart and fun person. That interviewer guy was crap. I liked that interview with Mo Rocca at R12 much better, though.

Does she mention how the Dressed to Kill role was originally offered to Lucille Ball, who would not need a body double for the shower scene because to quote Brian DePalma, 'She had a really banging bod for a chick her age'.

Are posters here really not aware of Josh Mankiewicz? If he appears nervous as an interviewer I think it's only because he's kind of overwhelmed by Angie's starry aura and fragility. It was a little awkward there when she didn't seem to remember she was just talking about chess a minute earlier when it came up again.

R7 that’s Ben and you’re an idiot

R37 is Ben not Josh

Oh dear.

[quote] She is a broad, in the best sense.

Enough with the broad shit. You use that all the time and sound retarded.

Remember the This Is Your Life incident? It’s on YouTube. Set goes black and she whispers that she’s not doing it and walks off.

R37 What does Josh Mankiewicz have to do with anything?

Why do you suppose Angie was so dead set against doing This Is Your Life? There must have been a roster of old friends and work colleagues lined up just off camera to pay tribute and reminisce with her.

She did a lot of TV roles early on, when her hair was not blond.

I'm not sure when the blond showed up.

One of the first big film roles was as the lady gambler nicknamed "Feathers" in Howard Hawks' "Rio Bravo" which was in 1959 and she had brown hair.

R44 She explains it well here

"I hadn't even combed the back of my hair."

Ever.

R44, I worked on the This is Your Life remake as a PA. Yes, there were lots of celebrities there. Burt Reynolds (who had flown in from FL,) her pal Jackie Collins, Earl Holliman of course, and Bob Hope, who was on his way in a limo going over Laurel Canyon from having dinner with the Reagans when she said no; we had to call the limo to send it (and Hope) back to Chasen’s.

There were three reasons I think she said no. Maybe four. Yes, she was concerned about the way her hair looked, but that was minor.

She felt utterly betrayed that they used DePalma as a ruse to get her to come to NBC, because she was so proud of that movie. You can see it on the YouTube clip, during the section with only sound after someone sensibly turned the cameras off. When she said, “Is Brian DePalma coming?” And Ralph Edwards (who was in his dotage) replies (“I honest to goodness don’t know.”) followed by Sajak (a total prick, by the way) says, “I can answer that. No, he’s not.), it was game over. You could see her close the iron door and that was it.

Some other tidbits not seen on the YouTube clip. In the 13 minutes between the end of the audio and Sajak coming out to talk to the studio audience, someone told her that her daughter Nikki was set to appear, and that cemented her resolve to NOT do the show, because she was very protective of Nikki, who had Asperger’s, was legally blind, and that night, had a crew cut and was wearing a blue satin tuxedo.

I remember after Angie had left NBC (and I snuck out to see her being driven to her limo down the hallways on a golf cart to her limo, looking bewildered and a little lonely,) Jay Leno (who taped down the hall) came over to Ann Elder (from Laugh-In, who later became a successful comedy writer for people like Lily Tomlin) and said, “What the hell is going on over here?”, because when Angie left (she refused to see ANYONE, and they had to clear the corridors at NBC like it was a presidential motorcade.)

I had to go to Burt’s dressing room and tell him that he’d flown in from FL for nothing. He was getting his toupee glued down, and he looked at me through the mirror and all he could muster was, “Wow. This is pretty fucked up, kid!” Was VERY nice about it all, in retrospect.

(Continued.)

And I think the third reason she said no was a silly one; I think she was afraid something unsavory about her past was going to be brought up. I still have a copy of the script, and it was a love letter to her. Friends from H.S. were there, Burt, Jackie, Holliman, (Bob Hope was basically a surprise cameo) and at the end, they were going to announce that they had had three distant planets renamed for Angie and her two sisters (who were both dead, at least one from Alzheimer’s), because Angie is an astronomy fan. There was no mention of Sinatra, no mention of JFK, no mention of Burt Bacharach (although Angie brought him up on the set.)

She fired her agent Merritt Blake because of this fiasco (he’s one of the sheepish people they trot out to try to convince her.) And according to the limo driver, who was hired by the production, the first thing she did when she was on her way home was to get out her Filofax, call Brian DePalma, and rip him a new one for making her look like a fool.

I got a bad feeling about the whole thing early on when Merritt gave the producers a list of people that Angie would be “thrilled” to see, and on the list was Suzanne Pleshette, (they had done Rome Adventure together thirty years earlier). I was in the room when they called Suzanne and she said (in that trademark voice,) “Really? Hang on… (pause) Yeah, I’m free that night. A little confused, though. Angie’s a great gal, but you know, I haven’t seen her in twenty years…”

We should’ve known then and there that Blake was out of his depth as far as knowing his own client.

Anyway, we had a week to find a new honoree (the Roy Scheider tribute that was the other half of the special went off without a hitch.) The next day, the writers and producers reconvened in the Ralph Edwards offices in a building on Hollywood and Highland (now demolished to make way for the Kodak, now the Dolby.) They had to come up with someone who would NEVER say no to free publicity. Suddenly, one of the writers, Bruce Kaplan (best known as the cartoonist “BEK” in the New Yorker, said, “Wait. Didn’t Kathie Lee Gifford used to work for Ralph as the “La La” girl on “Name That Tune?” Call Frank Gifford!

We had an entire dossier FedExed to us the next morning, and the whole staff got a free trip to NY!

Great memories, but at the time, a total nightmare.

[quote] horsehung news nerd Mo Rocca

Wait back up have we seen what Mo is working with? I want in

Ben Mankiewicz is the worst. Truly embarrassing. After Robert Osborne this was the best they could do? Any movie fan on DL knows twice as much as he does and probably has twice as much personality.

Fantastic posts, r48!! Thank you so much for sharing. Hearing all of it, one can hardly blame Angie for backing out.

[quote]because Angie is an astronomy fan.

You mean she's a star fucker.

She looks fucking fantastic—she could easily pass for being in her 70s. Come to think of it, I've seen people in their sixties who look far worse.

She looks like Louie Anderson.

Burt Bacharach while a musical genius, was apparently a shit heel of a human being when married to Angie and then Carole Bayer Sager.

I think Carole said Burt would have her watch porn movies to look and act more like the women who turned him on.

Angie and Burt B lived a few doors down from my aunt & uncle in Snowmass/Aspen in the mid-late 70s. Burt was infamous for hitting golf balls for hours straight off the ridge and into the woods below, to practice his swing. When we visited, my brother and I had a few enjoyable hours playing with their daughter Nikki, who was very sweet but we knew had some kind of unexplained issue. My recall of Angie is that she was very sweet, always smiling.

Angie Dickinson | Catherine Deneuve | Candace Bergen

Could you telll them apart in a dark alley?

She seems like a truly good egg. I read Burt Bacharach’s autobio and Carole Bayer Sager’s (which is absolutely delicious and should be required DL reading), both spoke very highly of her. She was devoted to her daughter who had major mental/physical health issues. Before she married Bacharach, she was a game gal who dated everyone and no one had a bad word to say about her.

Her beauty is unique--her features are just totally unlike any of the other ice blondes of her era--and as others have mentioned, she seems totally without guile or pretense.

Police Woman is my favorite. She was also fabulous in a 70s movie whose name I can't recall, but she played the young widow of a man who blows his brains out in the first scene. She can't collect insurance because it was a suicide, so the movie is all about her struggle to survive as a single mother of a young son. She was truly remarkable in it--I first saw it when I was about 9 or 10 years old, very impressionable, and it was part of the reason I decided never to be without a job or dependent on a man. Served me well in life. Thank you, Ms. Dickinson.

Okay, got it. It was this movie. She was absolutely perfect in it.

Love you, Angie Dickinson!

Ice blondes were actresses like Grace Kelly. Cool blondes were more approachable but a little elusive. Dickinson outlasted the other cool blondes. I wonder if she got along with Shirley Maclaine, who also hung out with the Rat Packs, but struck me as someone unwilling to share the attention.

Angie was and is a (bleached) blonde but I would never have classified her as a "cool" blonde. She always exuded warmth and earthiness. Unless you mean cool as in hip.

R18 It's pronounced "Anjuh." Miss Anjuh Dickinson.

I saw her in person once on Hollywood Blvd attending someone else's star reveal as one of the respected guests. Man, her face was so pulled back old school the freakishness is still singed in my brain. From the front she look good but when she turned her head it was the most bizarre thing I have ever seen. This was many, many years ago, now she's hardly recognizable.

She looks fabulous. She looks like Martha Stewart's slightly older sister.

Not that rare an interview, she was on CBS Sunday Morning within the last few years.

R13 I love Parky but he was always super gross about female nudity.