Film Icons: Dennis Hopper / Isabella Rossellini
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Terry Gross. We're going to continue our series Classic Films and Movie Icons with interviews from our archive with Dennis Hopper and Isabella Rossellini, two stars of the groundbreaking 1986 film Blue Velvet. All right, we're giving our neighbor a joyride. Let's get on with it. Anyone want to go on a joyride with us? How about you?

That's Dennis Hopper in the film Blue Velvet, which was directed by David Lynch, who described Hopper as sort of the perfect American dangerous hero.

Blue Velvet was one of Hopper's comeback films. A few years before that, he'd been institutionalized, paranoid, and totally disoriented from years of drugs and alcohol. Early in his career, he was in two defining films about youth culture, Rebel Without a Cause, in which he had a small part, and Easy Rider, which he directed and starred in with Peter Fonda.

While Hopper was still using drugs, he played a drug-addled photojournalist in Apocalypse Now. Dennis Hopper died in 2010 of prostate cancer at the age of 74.

We're going to hear excerpts of two interviews with him, starting with the one we recorded in 1990. We began by talking about his role in Blue Velvet as Frank Booth, a crazy, dangerous, and weird character. Hopper said that when he read the script, he told director David Lynch, I am Frank. I really understood Frank. I didn't have a problem with Frank. I understood...

I just understood him. And I called David. I'd never met David, and he'd given me the part, and I called him. They'd begun filming. And I said, you don't have to worry about this. I am Frank. I really understand this role. So he got off the phone. He told Isabella and Kyle McLaughlin and Laura,

He said, my God, I just got off the phone with Dennis Hopper, and he said he was Frank. He said, that may be great for the movie, but how are we going to have lunch with him? But I really meant that I understood the role, and I do understand Frank. I've known Frank. I've known a lot of guys like Frank. Did you think that you were like Frank at some point in your life? Well, I understood his sexual obsession. Even though David wrote it as the stuff that he was sniffing as helium,

I had always thought of it as some sort of drug, you know, like an amyl nitrate or a nitric oxide. And I asked David if it would be all right to play it that way. He had helium on the set, and helium, all helium does, it doesn't disorient your mind. All it does is make you sound like Daffy Duck.

So I tried it and I said, "David, I'm really aware, I'm just hearing my voice, I'm not able to act." I said, "I want something, couldn't I try to use something that disoriented my mind?" And he said, "What?" And I said, "Well, watch this, like I do a sense memory of an amyl nitrate, nitric oxide or something." He said, "What are those things?" I said, "Just watch." So anyway, he liked what he saw. And I said, "If you want to dub that voice in the helium voice in later, we could do that." And he said, "No, I don't think it'll be necessary."

Anyway, we didn't dub it in later, and it did work. But, you know, since then, I started thinking how strange it would be if I had used that helium voice and not had it disorient my mind. What a strange character he had actually written, even more stranger than my portrayal of Frank.

Yeah, I see what you mean. You know, it would have just been this guy who does this mask and gets this weird voice and then does all those things and nothing else happens to him. It would be very bizarre. But anyway, because when I read it, I thought of it that way, of the drug-crazed guy and the sexual kind of strange appetite that he had. I could identify with those things. Do you like roles with the kind of intensity that your performance has in the character of Frank?

Well, like, you know, I think that probably of all the work that I've done, Frank is probably the flashiest role I ever had. I like it on that level. Your first movie role was in Rebel Without a Cause. You were, I think, 18 years old. Did the movie help give you a sense of teenagers being their own culture and their own misunderstood culture? Or were you already feeling that way?

I went on that picture. When I went on that picture, I saw James Dean for the first time act. And at that point, all I was concerned about was being an actor. I wasn't concerned about like, you know, whether people were juvenile delinquents or not. I had sort of come out of that, out of San Diego and T01 and that kind of area. But I...

I was interested in acting, and I saw James Dean act, and I basically threw Rubber Without a Cause. I was just trying to figure out what he was doing because I thought I was the best young actor at that time in the world, and I suddenly ran into this guy who was some years older than me, but he was doing work that was so far over my head I had to... I actually grabbed him on the chickie run and threw him into a car and said, What are you doing? You've got to teach me what you're doing. So what did he teach you? Uh...

He wanted to know what my motivation was for wanting to act. And he asked me if I'd had a problem with my parents, if I'd actually hated my parents, and that that was part of the drive that I had to want to become an actor. And I said that actually I had felt that.

He said, well, that's what he felt also, and that his mother died when he was very young, and he used to go to her grave and cry on her grave and say, Mother, why have you left me? Why have you left me? And that turned into, I'm going to show you, I'm going to show you, I'm going to be someone. And that was the drive that he had brought into his acting.

which I described the same sort of feelings that I was misunderstood by my parents and that I had that feeling when they came to the theater that I was going to show them. It was like, you know, I'm going to show you, I'm going to be something, I'm going to be an actor. So this drive, this confused kind of drive and wanting to put it into other people's other parts and other things and these feelings, to use them in some sort of imaginary given circumstance became the...

the key for acting. But anyway, he said you must learn how to not worry about the emotions, but you must learn how to do things and not show them. You must learn how to smoke a cigarette and just not act smoking a cigarette. You must learn how to drink a drink, not act drinking the drink. And if somebody knocks on the door, you go and answer the door. Then you see they have a gun in their hand. Then you react to the gun and so on. So basically it's like don't indicate, but do something and don't show it.

Moment to moment reality. Never anticipate what the next moment's going to hold. And so like, you know, he said, then, you know, you're a very good technical actor. So get rid of all that technique, though. Stop the line readings. Don't worry about how it's going to come out. Just let it come out. Work on a moment to moment reality level. Stop the line readings. What did you stop doing?

Well, I mean, like, you know, I was out of a classical theater background, so, I mean, there were ways of reading lines, you know? I mean, even, hello, how are you became a way of reading a line. So there's a lot of ways to say hello, how are you, besides one fixed way that you decide in your room somewhere that that's the way you're going to say hello, how are you. Was James Dean the first friend that you had who died? Like someone of around your age? Yeah, I mean, there had been...

Yeah. Did it scare you a lot to have someone who was close to you? Well, it was more than a friend. I think of him more as a teacher than as a friend. We did two films together, which took about a year of our lives. He only made three movies. We did Rail Without a Cause and then Giant. And then he died two weeks before we finished shooting Giant. I was like 19, he was 24.

It was more, we dealt with acting. We talked about acting. It wasn't like we went out and drank beers together and got high or like race cars or anything. When he died, it just destroyed me because I totally had this belief in destiny and how people are destined, you know, to be...

to fulfill their destiny, you know, and I just couldn't understand why James Dean had died so young. He went to direct movies. He had only been in three movies, and it just destroyed my whole concept of destiny, life, and that kind of thing for years. I mean, probably still to this day, it still bothers me. I miss him. I wish I'd have seen his work.

I have to ask you about Easy Rider, the 1969 film that you co-wrote, directed, and starred in. You had done some work with Roger Corman. Peter Fonda had done some biker-type movies and acid-trip movies with Corman. Did you see this as an exploitation film, or did you want it to be a movie in the spirit of the counterculture? You're talking about Easy Rider? Easy Rider, yeah. I wasn't really thinking about either one of those things.

I wanted to win the Cannes Film Festival. I wanted to be an art film. Right. The counterculture was becoming the culture at that time. So I thought I was making a film for everyone. What I did was I showed people smoking marijuana without going out and killing a bunch of nurses for the first time. And I used the music of the day as a time capsule kind of thing rather than writing a score for a movie. It was the first time individual songs had been used for a film.

The editing of the cemetery sequence was like a lot of experimental films that I'd seen of the day, Bruce Conner in particular. I'd used a lot of cutting that I'd seen on television for television commercials. Were you already doing a lot of drugs when you made Easy Rider? Was that out of control at all? There was a lot of smoking of grass.

on that picture. Grass made me paranoid and I didn't do it. I mean, I would do it, I did it like for the scene where Peter and Jack and I are all smoking marijuana and we see the space people or Jack talks about space people and so on. But most of the time I didn't smoke it only because it made me paranoid. But I drank. I was a drinker. I was a classic drinker and the great tradition of

of John Houston, Howard Hawks, John Ford, and Dennis Hopper. Now, I was an alcoholic, and I was never a great... I was never a big pot smoker, even though I smoked pot a great deal in my life. I didn't do it while I worked. So, like, you know, it was always the work. The work was the most important thing. And the drugs and the alcohol and all those things are secondary to it. And we never... And I always measured it out. And, uh...

You know, if I was getting too drunk, I'd do a little more cocaine, you know, and keep the work going. So like, you know, anyway, that wasn't it. So how did it get to the point where you did so much drugs that you ended up not working? Well, I mean, there comes a point where like, you know, if you're not the most popular guy in the world and in demand, suddenly people start looking at your behavior.

So at a certain point, my using and my drinking became who's coming out of the dressing room, which, what, Jekyll or Hyde? You know, what emotional roller coaster is he going to take us on now? So, you know, that's what, unfortunately, drugs and alcohol did for me in my life, and my personal life was a shambles. It never seemed to hurt what went on the screen, but it was the process to getting it on the screen.

Dennis Hopper recorded in 1990. He came back to Fresh Air for another interview in 1996. We'll hear an excerpt of that conversation after a short break. This is Fresh Air. This message comes from NPR sponsor Merrill. Whatever your financial goals are, you want a straightforward path there. But the real world doesn't usually work that way. Merrill understands that.

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Let's continue our classic films and movie icon series with the late actor and director Dennis Hopper. Hopper played a lot of crazed characters over his career, but when I recorded my second interview with him in 1996, he was playing against type in the film Carried Away. He starred as a schoolteacher in a small rural community living on a broken-down farm with his mother.

You grew up in Dodge City, Kansas, at least that's where you spent the early years of your life. Did any of the characters in the movie remind you of anyone you knew growing up? Oh yeah, well, my great-uncles. They wore bib overalls. They rotted off of them. They were wheat farmers. And I used to milk the cow before I went to school in the morning. Were there big-town scandals when you were growing up? Mm-hmm.

Well, I mean, Dodge City was, we're still trying to live up to the old days when Bat Masters and Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp were there, you know. I just remember it was a dry state, but if you're old enough to get your hand up on a bar, they'd put a drink in it. And fighting around the drive-ins seemed to be, and not the drive-in movies with the drive-in...

Hamburger joints seemed to be the big thing to do after football games. My mother managed a swimming pool in Dodge City, Kansas. I had an active swimming life as a child. My grandfather's a wheat farmer, so it was a good life. Was it fun to see movies about Dodge City living there? Well, I remember Errol Flynn came to Dodge City when I was about five years old. That was a big time for the premiere of Dodge.

I think it was called Dodge City. I think for Fort Dodge or whatever it was, it was a movie that Errol Flynn starred in with Olivia de Havilland. Was that the only connection you saw between the movie world and your own life? Well, I mean, I was raised at the end of the Dust Bowl, so I used to tell people the first light that I really saw was not from the sun, but it was from a movie projector.

My grandmother used to, she didn't drive a car, so she used to fill her apron. We lived about five miles outside of Dodge, and so my grandfather would go off to the farm in Garden City, which is 60 miles away. My grandmother would fill her eggs full of apron on Saturday mornings. Fill her apron full of eggs? Yeah, and we'd walk into town. She'd sell the eggs at the poultry place and get the money, and we'd go to see a matinee.

And I'd see the singing cowboys. Once in a while, we'd see an Errol Flynn movie or a sword fighting buckling, sword buckling movie. That's about it. I don't really remember what they were, but I knew I wanted to know where they were making these movies. And Kansas was a very flat place. So I wanted to know where the trains were going and what a mountain looked like, what a skyscraper looked like, what the ocean looked like. And

I think it's one of the reasons I became so interested in the visual aspects of things because that horizon line, when I finally saw the ocean when I was 13 years old, I saw my first mountain when I came to Colorado when I was 13 on the way to California. I was really disappointed. My mountains that I'd imagined were so much bigger.

And I got to California, and I saw the ocean. It was the same horizon line that I'd seen on the wheat field, and I thought, wow, this is not what I'd imagined, you know. I don't know what I thought. I thought you could see all the way to China or something, or it'd look different. It'd be a different angle. And I always thought that, like, my imagination was a little out of whack. You know, my buildings were bigger, my mountains were bigger, and the ocean was bigger in my imagination than in reality, so...

You've been collecting art for a long time. What was your first exposure to art? Was there any art around when you were growing up? Yeah, I don't know. You know, I drew when I was a kid, and I studied at the Nelson Art Gallery on weekends. They had an underprivileged children's art class. Were you an underprivileged child? Well, I got in there. I slipped in. So...

At that time, I was in drawing class, and I was doing a little watercolor like I'd learned in Dodge City. And this man came up to me, and he said, what are you doing? And I said, well, I'm painting this rock and river and so on. And he said, well, son, he said, I don't know how to tell you this, but someday you're going to have to get tight and paint loose. And this man was...

I'm trying to think of his name. God, I just slipped his name right out. But he was Jackson Pollock's teacher. God, this is going to drive me crazy. Oh, Thomas Hart Benton. Thomas Hart Benton, yeah. He taught me, taught Pollock. Anyway, I studied there, and I found that I would go into the theater and draw the actors. The movie theater or stage theater? Stage theater, where they were rehearsing plays. I'd sketch the actors. So that was sort of my beginning of my art career.

When I arrived in Los Angeles, I had worked at La Jolla Playhouse and my friend who was my boss there, he was an interior designer and he was working with Mary Price, Vincent Price's wife, who was an interior designer. They had a kiln where they did tile work at Vincent's house and I went up there and made some tiles.

And that's where I saw Vincent was an art collector. And that's where I saw my first friends, Klein, my first Jackson Pollocks, my first de Koonings and so on were at his house. I'd been painting abstractly, but I'd never really thought that anybody really painted abstractly until I saw these things.

And so I started doing work, and I started showing with the painters around at that time. Now, it must have been interesting to be exposed to your first abstract art through somebody's private collection as opposed to through a museum. Yeah. Did that, in a way, encourage you to later become a collector? I mean, because it was part of how you were first exposed to it. I know you collect a lot of art. Yeah. Well, Vincent gave me a painting, actually, when I was about...

I was 19 or 20. Vincent gave me a small painting. I don't even remember who it was by now. And I said, I know that you're probably going to be a collector, so let me start you off. Gee, how nice. And then when I got my first money, I did start collecting art. It's like a compulsion. I was thinking about it the other day. I think that, you know, I don't have a formula where I go to the right dealer and buy the right painting. I...

I've been very fortunate to seem to have an eye. I bought Andy Warhol's first soup can painting hand-painted for $70. I really want to thank you a lot for talking with us. It's always a pleasure. It's great listening to your show.

Dennis Hopper, recorded in 1996. He died in 2010. After a break, we'll hear my interview with Isabella Rossellini, who starred with Hopper in Blue Velvet. First, here's Hopper in a scene from Apocalypse Now. Hopper played a drug-addled photojournalist in Vietnam during the war. In this scene, he's talking to the Martin Sheen character, Lieutenant Willard, who's in a cage in the jungle, held captive by the renegade Colonel Sheen's character, was sent to find.

the character played by Marlon Brando. I'm Terry Gross, and this is Fresh Air. He likes you because you're still alive. He's got plans for you. Nana, I'm not going to help you. You're going to help him, man. You're going to help him.

I mean, what are they gonna say, man, when he's gone, huh? Because he dies when it dies, man. When it dies, he dies. What are they gonna say about him? What are they gonna say? He was a kind man? He was a wise man? He had plans? He had wisdom? Bulls**t, man! Am I gonna be the one that's gonna set him straight? Look at me, wrong!

This is the end, beautiful friend. This is the end, my only friend. The end.

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Make an impact on your child's learning. Get IXL now. And NPR listeners can get an exclusive 20% off IXL membership when they sign up today at ixl.com slash NPR. Next up on our classic films and movie icon series is an interview from our archive with Isabella Rossellini. She's the daughter of two film icons, actor Ingrid Bergman and the Italian neorealist director Roberto Rossellini.

She first became known as a fashion model. After starring in Blue Velvet with Dennis Hopper, she became known for her acting. The movie became a cult classic, and David Lynch was nominated for an Oscar for directing. I spoke with Isabella Rossellini in 1997.

I want to ask you about Blue Velvet. You were so wonderful in that film. You played a nightclub singer who's exotic and mesmerizing, but is in a weird and abusive relationship with a psycho played by Dennis Hopper. How did you get the part, and what interested you in this part? To me, it was the only time that I could portray...

battered woman and a Stockholm syndrome where it's very hard for a victim to recognize that they're a victim. Generally a victim feels guilty and does anything to please the person who's torturing them and it's an absolute strange twist that our mind gives us and it is a recognized syndrome of kidnapped people or raped victims and

And I thought it was quite interesting to play that part. And that's what appealed me for the role. It was a wonderful way to portray sexuality and the darkness of it. And I played a femme fatale that was...

was femme fatale just because she was kind of beautiful and she was singing and she had the features of somebody beautiful, but yet she was completely destroyed inside. And it was a pretty good role, you know. Most of the time the femme fatales are portrayed as women who know exactly what they want and completely... And sex is portrayed as something that you don't...

that you go out there and choose for yourself. Well, we know that the reality is often we, you know, we just have to, it just happens to us and then we don't know what to do with it, what to make of it.

And I thought that this woman, who had so many torments in her mind, became the victim of the abuse that she, because she was raped and beaten by the character of Dennis Hopper, so that when she did get the first blow, the first punch, she would see the star and her tormented thoughts could stop. And that's why she asked to be beaten.

Now, an interesting thing you say about making this movie in your memoir is that when you were rehearsing, you didn't have to wear the makeup, you didn't have to wear the clothes, but you had to have the red fingernail polish on. Otherwise, you just couldn't do the part. Why is that? Well, I think that because a lot of the scenes were nude and a lot of the scenes were rape and a lot of it was very...

It was easier for me to play Dorothy, to be someone else...

And so even when we rehearsed, since Dorothy used a lot of makeup, because I think Dorothy was covering herself up, she used makeup like a mask to mask the trouble inside, to make the lips perfectly red and the eye shadows perfectly blue. Everything was to mask the fact that she was completely destroyed. Right.

So I needed my red nail polish as my hands flew in front of me to give me that sense of cover-up that she was so desperately trying to give. And if I would see my hand not made up, it would be Isabella's hand, and I couldn't be Dorothy. Right. And what do you do when you're shooting the scenes with Dennis Hopper, say the scenes where he's inhaling this weird...

Yeah. And this weird gas that he inhales that turns him on. What do you do in a scene like that to break the tension? Well, Dennis was wonderful. You know, that was the first scene I have done in the film. I just came. The film had started, I think, a week or two ago.

And we came in and David said, you know, we're going to start with that scene because that scene otherwise will be, we'll always be thinking about it. We'll always be worrying about it. So we'll do it on the first day so we get it over with. And I couldn't believe that I had to be in front of Dennis Hopper naked and say all this weird thing. It was agonizing. And I asked, I left a little message to Dennis Hopper.

room saying, can I have breakfast with you? I've never met the man. Just to get to know him a little bit. And he came very annoyed. But, you know, what do you want? To become friends to do that? And he was right. You know, you're acting. You don't have to be friends. But then Dennis and David were so wonderfully protective of me and so wonderfully comical too that they really released attention and it was wonderful to work with them.

There's a scene in the movie where you're wandering around the street naked. Tell me about that scene and what you wanted your body to look at. It's not a vanity scene.

No, not at all. I mean, it's not at all. David Lynch told me that when he was a child coming back from school, he saw a naked woman walking in the street. And instead of getting aroused or excited at that sight, he started to cry, terrified him. And he wanted to convey the same terror. He wanted Dorothy to walk in the street of the

of Wilmington where we shot the film naked and convey the same sense of terror instead of the sense of sex appeal. And when he was talking to me, there was a photo of Nick Ott that I remembered. And it was a photo of a young girl in an apartment

in Vietnam. She has been a victim of Nepal attack and her clothes have been completely torn off the body and she has skin hanging and she's completely naked and she walks in the street with the arms outstretched and it's such a helpless gesture. And I couldn't think of anything else that is absolute helpless gesture and walking like that. If I would have walked

covering my breast or covering myself, it meant that Dorothy still had some sense of pride, still had something in her to protect her. That woman had to have lost everything. And so she had to walk completely exposed, just saying, help me. And that photo is the photo. I took the gesture from that photo and used it. And I hope that I conveyed the same sense of despair. That was the thing that I wanted to convey. How did you start modeling?

I started modeling by chance. I was 28, and I used to work for the Italian television. I'm Italian originally, but I lived in New York. And socially, I've met a wonderful photographer called Bruce Weber who wanted to photograph me. And I thought, oh, that'd be fun. So I can maybe buy the issue of that magazine all done up and save it to show it to my grandchildren. And I'll be an old bag and say, look, I looked pretty. I was photographed once.

But then from Bruce Photo, I really literally had an overnight success. And within a month, I was in Richard Avedon's studio working basically every day, having covers. And my life completely changed. And I became a model and learned to love it. You've been photographed by many great photographers already.

What are some of the different ways they get you to respond to the camera? Do you feel like you respond to the camera differently depending on who the photographer is? Oh, definitely. There is definitely a style of posing. I have seen a very, very beautiful girl who didn't have a great career and somebody else who maybe was a little bit... They're always beautiful. The common denominator among models is they are beautiful, but some of them are odd-looking or there is something strange, not classical beauty, and yet they have bigger careers...

Just because there is an art in modeling, there is a know-how. And the style of posing also slightly changes with a different photographer. It can be more emphatic and artificial, or it can be real, real and real acting. And you learn that as you go along and do it.

So are there things that photographers would actually tell you to do or tell you to think about that would help? Well, in my book, I give the example with Richard Avedon. He was the first one. See, I was terribly spoiled. My first experience was with Bruce Weber, followed by Richard Avedon, and they taught me. I think I couldn't have had a better school. I remember when I was posing, I thought I just had to be obedient and wear the clothes and make sure I wasn't going to...

wrinkle them up and mess them up and I sat there and just obediently just wait for every instruction, turn a little bit left, turn a little bit right, look up, look down and I just obeyed and Avedon would just look at me and say, can you think of something? And then when I thought of something he'd say, no, change your thought, I don't like what you're thinking. And I said, what is he saying? He doesn't know what I'm thinking. So I went back to a thought I had and

And he caught me immediately. He said, no, no, I told you, I don't like what you're thinking. Change your thought. And I think you could... If you concentrate, there is something that emanates through you. And that's what the great photographer photographs. The fact that you're...

You know, Diana Vreeland, I quote in my book saying, there is no beauty without emotion. And I think that that's what is the responsibility of a model. It isn't so much to look beautiful. That mostly is genetic. You know, you're born like that. But you have to show your emotions. And that's what makes a great photo. Now, is this something you think about when you're making movies, too?

Yes, it is. That's why I always say that it isn't, you know, people always differentiate between the two jobs as being so categorically different, modeling and acting. And instead, there's a lot of it in common. What you don't have in common is that you don't have a dialogue when you're a model. You don't have to react.

to another actor. Sometimes you react to the photographer in the same way an actor would respond to the partner in front. But there are a lot of similarities in terms of the feeling that rises from within and changes your expression in your face, in your eyes. That is exactly the same for modeling and acting. How much of an emphasis on acting have you wanted to have in your career?

I guess when I was a teenager, I wanted to do something different than acting because not only my mother was such a great established actress and adored, but everybody else in my family was very successful, including my father was a great filmmaker. And then when I became a model, I thought there must have been some similarities with acting and I became curious about acting. I kind of loved acting.

modeling unexpectedly because I thought like everybody else that it was a stupid job. I had this stereotype in my head. So then I tentatively started to take classes and then I got some parts and had the courage to do them, which isn't easy when you come from a family that has been so glorified in films. Yeah.

I like acting, but I think I like it somewhat less than my mother. My mother just adored it, lived for it. And I don't. I like it. I like it a lot, but I don't have the same... I think my mother liked acting most and above all. When you were growing up with your parents, Ingrid Bergman and the film director, Roberto Rossellini, did you love movies? Were movies a big part of your life? Uh...

Not very, no, not very much. Strangely enough, no, they weren't. I've always, my father and mother were very, very interested in other things, in films as well, but a lot of other things, especially my father. And I've always assumed that any director would be interested in politics, in religion, in any science, in any other subject where they would get inspiration to do their films.

It was only later in life that I discovered that often directors are just film buffs. They don't know anything else but films. That was very surprising to me. You write in your memoir that your mother came out of Hollywood and she had a Hollywood sense of entertainment. She liked entertainment. Whereas your father, the famous neorealist director, had a much more serious artistic approach to movies. Do you feel that you grew up and that he didn't care much about quality

quote, light entertainment. Do you feel that you grew up with an integrated sense of both film as a higher art and as an entertainment? I think so. I think I'm more indulgent to, you know, if I see a film that it's silly but I have enjoyed looking at it, I praise it. And as I praised film that make me think or make me cry. And yet, I still am convinced that when you are... See, my father was really...

a filmmaker that innovated cinema. He had to be completely... I think you need that energy of faith and absolute belief in your ideas. If you are like me, too democratic and too open, I don't think you can assert yourself or you can break grounds. You know, often...

Often I found out that the great RSDs, or the people that really are breaking grounds, they are pretty obsessive. Not all of them, but some of them. I want to thank you so much for talking with us. Thank you so much for having me. My interview with Isabella Rossellini was recorded in 1997. Our series Classic Films and Movie Icons continues through Labor Day.

Coming up, jazz historian Kevin Whitehead has an appreciation of singer Dinah Washington on the centennial of her birth.

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This message comes from Dell Technologies. This season, get premium tech that inspires joy. The XPS 16 from Dell Technologies with Intel Core Ultra processors help unlock AI possibilities. Shop now at dell.com slash deals. Jazz singer Dinah Washington was born 100 years ago today. She was born Ruth Jones in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and raised in Chicago.

Washington had a relatively short two-decade recording career, but she recorded a lot of music in a variety of styles. Dinah Washington boasted she could sing anything. Jazz historian Kevin Whitehead says her record labels made her prove it over and over. Yes, I thought you loved me, baby I guess I didn't know the score ♪

Dinah Washington at 21 with saxophonist Lucky Thompson in 1945.

She got her start singing in church before landing a gig with big band leader Lionel Hampton at 18. Before long, she was known as Queen of the Blues, like her predecessor Bessie Smith, whose songbook Dinah would raid more than once. At first, her records were narrowly pitched to black record buyers. The African-American press also called her Queen of the Jukebox.

Dinah Washington sang a bunch of bawdy songs that folks on bar stools could chuckle over if not relate to. ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶

Even the horns sound lewd on that one. Dinah Washington sang every word clearly and in tune, and she infused songs with feeling, wit, and the kind of confidence that can sound like attitude. Mostly she recorded whatever her producers handed her.

But when a 1951 session ran short, she had the band whip up a quick arrangement of a recent Hank Williams hit, long before Ray Charles covered Nashville. Country songwriters also know about barroom-ready subject matter. I've tried so hard, my dear, to show That you're my every dream Yet you're afraid each thing I do

is just some evil scheme. A memory from your lonesome past keeps our soul apart. Why free your doubtful mind and melt your cold, cold heart? Dinah Washington had a famously chaotic love life, marrying more husbands than she'd remember to divorce.

Listeners often read her troubles into lyrics she sang, and she might toss in a teasing personal reference to indulge her fans. Behind the microphone, she was in total command, silencing fools who talked during nightclub sets and recording tunes in one take. Producers told her what to sing, not how. Her bands were populated by jazz musicians, and she always had a free way with a melody that

But only in 1954 did her handlers pivot her toward a jazz audience with recorded jam sessions where she's one more swinging soloist. A foggy day in London town Had me low and it had me downing with much alarm

Trumpeter Clark Terry, a Dinah favorite.

Now she's cooking, adding jazz to the blues, hymns, movie themes, comic novelties, other singers' hits, and remakes of her oldies. Starting in the mid-1950s, she got help in the studio from a bright new arranger she promoted, Quincy Jones. Here they oil the wheels under a Jerome Kern tune from 1914. And when I told them...

how wonderful you are they didn't believe me no they didn't believe me your lips your eyes your curly hair then a class beyond compare you're the loveliest thing i've ever seen oh and when i tell them

♪ I'm certainly going to tell them ♪ ♪ That I'm the girl whose boy one day I hope you'll be ♪ ♪ They'll never believe me, no, they'll never believe me ♪ ♪ That from this great big girl you have chosen me ♪

In 1959, Dinah Washington broke through to a larger, whiter audience, cracking the Billboard Top 40 with What a Difference a Day Makes and Unforgettable, slow ones with strings, and maybe not the best of their kind. I'm fond of Dinah's last 1961 version of a song she'd sung at 15 to win a Chicago talent contest, a tune with a prophetic title that can't face the music without singing the blues. ♪ Breeze ♪

Stop moaning those weird melodies. My man has left me so I can't face the music without singing the blues. Dinah Washington at a world-weary 35. Just as she got really famous, she went into decline, worn down by endless work and all the prescription pills she popped, stimulants to wind her up and manage her weight, downs to let her sleep.

She died of an apparently accidental overdose at 39 in 1963. But in her last years, Dinah could still show off her old power and by now familiar tics, like making the last note in a line shoot up like a champagne cork. The list of singers she's influenced only begins with distinctive stylists Nancy Wilson, Aretha Franklin, and Dionne Warwick.

But nobody cut their way through so many popular styles with the ease and utter conviction of Dinah Washington. She's the queen. That is a tough act to follow. ♪ I take a trip in my rocket ship ♪ ♪ We'll have a lovely afternoon ♪ ♪ Kiss the world goodbye ♪ ♪ Way we'll fly, destination moon ♪ ♪ We'll travel fast as light till we're out of sight ♪ ♪ The earth will be like a toy balloon ♪

What a thrill you'll get riding my jet. A destination moon. We'll go up straight to the moon, we two. High in the starry blue. I'll be out of this world with you. So I will steal in my space mobile a supersonic honeymoon.

Leave your cares below. Pull the switch. Let's go. A destination moon.

Kevin Whitehead is the author of the books Play the Way You Feel, The Essential Guide to Jazz Stories on Film, and Why Jazz? His book New Dutch Swing has been published in a new edition. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Sam Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Anne-Marie Boldenato, Teresa Madden, Thea Chaloner,

Monique Nazareth, and Joe Wolfram. Our digital media producers are Molly C.V. Nesper and Sabrina Seaworth. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Susan Yakundi directed today's show. Our co-host is Tanya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross. We'll go up, up, straight to the moon we choose. We'll be high in the starry blue.

be out of this world with you. So I'll weigh real steel in my jet mobile, a supersonic honeymoon. Leave your cares below, pull that switch, let's go. Destination, we're flying high up in the sky. Destination, destination moon.

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This message comes from NPR sponsor Merrill. Whatever your financial goals are, you want a straightforward path there. But the real world doesn't usually work that way. Merrill understands that.

That's why, with a dedicated Merrill advisor, you get a personalized plan and a clear path forward. Go to ml.com slash bullish to learn more. Merrill, a Bank of America company. What would you like the power to do? Investing involves risk. Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Incorporated, registered broker-dealer, registered investment advisor, member SIPC.