10 stories from Frank Langella about his famous friends

In his new memoir Dropped Names, Frank Langella recalls meetings and friendships with bold-face names.

2. Laurence Olivier

By Carl Van Vechten

Langella worked with Olivier on the 1979 film "Dracula," in which Langella played the title role and Olivier played Van Helsing. According to Langella, Olivier was friendly but looked after himself first. Langella remembers hearing Olivier practice his lines over and over in his room. "'I did not hear you come in, Count,' he would say over and over again, with the 'Count' slightly extended and broken into two syllables," Langella writes. "And finally, when I entered the scene in which he was to say the line, on camera, months later, he turned to me an said it exactly the way I'd heard it dozens of times coming from his room. He could have been playing the scene opposite the March Hare for all he noticed me, and he was gone the moment his on-camera lines were finished."

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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