My literary heroes were mostly women writers and thinkers – Joy Williams, Joan Didion, Anne Sexton, June Jordan, Sarah Schulman, Audre Lorde, Cherrie Moraga, Christa Wolf – and much of this writing was political as well as literary.
As far as female vocalists, I love Heart, Joan Jett, Courtney Love, Laura Branigan, Linda Ronstadt, Barbra Streisand – or going back to when I was a child, Aileen Quinn, the original Annie.
The late, great Joan Rivers actually gave me so much advice, and she was so nice to me before she passed.
I would say I grew up listening a lot to Barbra Streisand and Judy Garland and Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell. I grew up listening to those because my parents were kind of into folk music.
Well, the teacher I studied with for nineteen and a half years was a man named Paul Gavert. He was a great lieder singer, so basically I’m a trained lieder singer because of that teacher. The teacher I currently study with – since 1995 – is Joan Lader, who also studied with Gavert.
That said, let me add that Joan and I never want him to be a child actor. We both feel that it takes away their childhood and puts untold pressure on children.
My husband says, ‘What Joan walk? You’ve always walked that way!’
Like a lot of people, I sold my first script in graduate school at UCLA, a ‘Joan of Arc’ for producer Joel Silver.
I’ve always thought – and I don’t even know if I’d be right for the part – that Jean Seberg would make a great biopic. She was in Jean-Luc Godard’s ‘Breathless,’ she played Joan of Arc. She had this eventful and traumatic adulthood, she thought the FBI was after her, and she became a darling of the French New Wave.
I’d love to have played Joan of Arc. That would have been amazing.
Joan of Arc was born 600 years ago. Six centuries is a long time to continue to mark the birth of a girl who, according to her family and friends, knew little more than spinning and watching over her father’s flocks.
Joan Rivers was my hero.
I would be so mad if I saw something called a memoir, and then it was Mike Birbiglia. It would be so infuriating. It’s like, ‘Who is this guy, and why does he have a memoir?’ David Letterman could write a memoir. Joan Rivers could. I’m just a nobody. I’m a comedian and a writer.
My mom always tells me, ‘Joan, you’re the brightest star. Embrace your strength and your power when you walk into a room.’ So I always have that in me to have that confidence.
I’d love to work with Joan Cusack again – I’m obsessed with Joan Cusack.
Aside from Joan Rivers and Roseanne, it’s hard for me to think of any female comedian who’s had kids and has a serious level of fame – like, the level where your mother has heard of them.
Joan organizes our social life, and on weekends I follow her around.
To be playing Joan Crawford is as good as it gets.
It’s weird, because American films in the 1930s and ’40s, particularly melodramas, were made for woman, from Bette Davis to Joan Crawford to Barbara Stanwyck to Katherine Hepburn, and for some reason we’ve taken a step backward in this sense.
‘Goldenheart’ is like a modern-day Joan of Arc. Think of it like medieval times-cum-2045 or Lancelot and Guinevere in 3025. It’s a new version of these battles – age-old stories for the now.
Because ‘Call The Midwife’ is a gentle drama, not a documentary, it’s not appropriate to portray Sister Monica Joan’s condition in all its brutal reality.
Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.
I always wanted to play Joan of Arc. I’ve always wanted to do that. Now I’m thinking, ‘Maybe there’s a story in Joan of Arc’s mother!’ If I don’t hurry up, her grandmother!
I, Joan Crawford, I believe in the dollar. Everything I earn, I spend.
To become a big movie star like Joan Crawford, you need to wear blinders and pay single-minded attention to your career. Nobody paid attention to me, including me.
It was really my grandmother who was the biggest influence because she’d talk back to the celebrities and politicians on TV. She was a combination of Joan Rivers, Elaine Stritch, Betty White, and Bea Arthur rolled into one.
I connected very much with all the work of Joan Crawford because she started as a flapper. She used to dance and sing and she was very cute. She had something that was so different from what she is at the end of her life and she started in the silent movies and then went into the talkies.
It turns out that the left temporal lobe, if there’s a lesion there, will create hyper-religiosity. People become super-religious. They see demons and spirits everywhere. We think Joan of Arc may have had it.
I think that the work that Bette Davis and Joan Crawford did was truly extraordinary, and that’s their legacy. Not the other petty stuff.
One of the things I find exciting about Joan of Arc is how clearly the story of her life reveals the creation of myth, a process in which every one of us is involved – every one of us who tells stories and all those who listen, each informing the other.
I had achieved the most important things in my life when I married Joan and had the sons. Given the choice between Joan and the boys, and being a writer, I world give up being a writer without a blink.
My mother loved films! She adored Ingrid Bergman, Joan Fontaine, Vivien Leigh. We couldn’t afford to go together to the cinema, but she was always watching their movies on TV.
The ‘Great Walk to Beijing’ was a fundraiser for my cancer center. It was a three-week trek with fellow cancer ‘thrivers,’ including celebrities ranging from Joan Rivers to Leeza Gibbons and Olympians.
I think Joan’s advice would be: always know more than anyone else, always be discreet as possible. And never cry at work.
I think we have responsibilities to be active in the things we believe in, regardless of what our job is. At least in my lifetime, there has been a tremendous combining of activism and music, that came up in the era of Pete Seeger and the Weavers and Joan Baez and Bob Dylan and Peter Paul & Mary.
Many years ago, I had the pleasure of editing a book by Joan Crawford, who, like Norma Desmond, was still a big star; it was just the movies that had gotten smaller.
In a way, all Scandinavian movies are descendants of the original Scandinavian Christian-metaphor movie, Danish director Carl Dreyer’s 1928 ‘The Passion of Joan of Arc,’ one of the seven or eight best films ever made and impossible to watch more than once.
The real fans do not just admire the star of their choice, they identify with him or her, while the star, unlike Joan Crawford, comes to need the fans’ love, admiration, and constant interest.
A young female essayist saying they’re influenced by Joan Didion is like a young female singer-songwriter saying they’re influenced by Joni Mitchell.
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