- I'm one of the lucky actors in television. I don't make a lot of big waves, but there's constant activity, and that's the way I prefer to live my life.
- [asked if he would write his autobiography] No. I lead a normal life and I don't assume there is anything I can impart to people. The only reason to write a book would be to make money, and I don't want to do that. To write a book would be going against how I've lived.
- [in 2000] I miss regular television. I miss the work ethic of those five-day-a-week things. So, eventually, I'd like to get back to that.
- With a new house, you can pick everything. It's the ability to create what you have in your mind as the perfect house.
- [on being born on St. Patrick's Day] Good luck happens to people who work hard for it. Sometimes people just fall into the honey pot, but I've consistently [striven] to create whatever good fortune I can get in my life--and consistently strive just as hard not to screw it up once I have it! It's great to be able to do shows like Falling in Love with the Girl Next Door (2006), which I think is entirely too long a title.
- [on his on- and off-screen relationship with Larry Hagman] I think it literally changed when [he] walked into the first scene he was in. He had whatever it was that JR needed to be the instigator in a show that was sorely, sorely missing that. I don't know when we realized it but I know that's when it happened. You couldn't take your eyes off Hagman in any scene he was in. Someone like Leonard Katzman, who had been in the business as long as he had, recognized that stroke of fortune and luck. It's like having Henry Winkler as the Fonz; it was never intended that [he] was going to be the keystone of Happy Days (1974), it was going to be Ron Howard--the boy next door. Our show would never have gone beyond three or four years if it had been just a love story of Bobby and Pam. That's why Larry Hagman is the dearest friend I have in the world for the past 30 years. Because I have nothing but 100% appreciation and love for not only him as a person but for what he did that created the rest of my life.
- [on Larry Hagman] Larry was the ringleader, who started the family feeling in the cast from the very first day of the reading. It was sort of like, "Follow the Pied Piper". Follow the corks! But it was that kind of thing. We'd all gather after every shot in Larry's little converted bread van and have this best time and it never ended for 13 years.
- [on Barbara Bel Geddes] When Barbara joined the cast of Dallas (1978), as Miss Ellie, I considered her to be like Helen Hayes, Katharine Cornell and Ethel Barrymore--a real "name" in American theater. But you'd never have known it. She exhibited no large ego because of her history. She'd schlepp in and drop your jaw with every performance--whether it was drinking a cup of coffee, having a mastectomy, or losing Jock Ewing. It was remarkable, her ordinariness despite that pedigree. We called Barbara "BBG" on the set. She was the mama figure. Larry Hagman was obviously the prow of the boat, but he couldn't have functioned without a strong mother, and I don't think there's been a mother like her on dramatic television since then. People related to her because she was the epitome of compassion despite her own pain. Off-screen, she was a pistol. She cussed like a muleskinner, and she really liked to have her drinks. But she also had an endless capacity to include everybody that she loved, and that was the entire cast.
- [on his on- and off-screen chemistry with Barbara Bel Geddes] Oh, the best. First of all, I have a great history with Barbara by virtue of my wife. My wife's father worked with Barbara's father. He was a very famous American architect, Norman Bel Geddes, in New York. My wife saw Barbara . . . in her first Broadway play, when she played in "The Moon is Blue", which was a sin: S.I.N.sational play because the word "virgin" was used for the first time on stage which, you know, caused a fury in this country. So by the time I got on the sound stage for the first time with Barbara, I had all this common ground that we could discuss and she's the great American film star. She's right up there with Julie Harris and people like that. She added a weight to the show, an anchor that essentially everything pivoted around. It was a patriarchal show that we all tried to please Daddy, but in terms of Daddy trying to please Mama. So, if you look at it, it was Barbara's show and working with her all those years was brilliant.
- [on the death of Barbara Bel Geddes] On Dallas (1978) she made "Mama" more than just a character phrase.
- [about the painting he owns of Jim Davis and Barbara Bel Geddes, his deceased co-stars on Dallas (1978)] That painting is actually alive and gives me a nice feeling that they're always there. Through the whole first season, I don't think an episode goes by that Mama is not mentioned in reference to Southfork and the land.
- [about Dallas (2012) and its having to go on without Barbara Bel Geddes, who died in 2005] Barbara is a big piece of our history, and it's important to me to honor her. To come back with Linda Gray as Sue Ellen and Larry [Larry Hagman] in his J.R. hat, and then see the words "Ellie Southworth Ewing Farlow" on the gravestone made me think, "Oh, that's right--she's gone". It was hard to get through the dialogue.
- [on the death of Larry Hagman] These two [Hagman and Linda Gray] are two of my closest friends, and I actually knew somewhere in my heart that we would never work together again because the three of us couldn't come into a scene without everybody saying, "Oh, there's J.R., Sue Ellen and Bobby". And that hurt me. I really wanted to work with them again. So this is the best thing that could happen in my career life.
- [in 2014 on Larry Hagman and the revival series] His character was such a larger-than-life-being that we still reference him on the show. And a lot of the plot devices that we're dealing with, we attribute to the character of J.R.: "Oh, my God! If it hadn't been for that, then this thing wouldn't have happened. Damn him!". But there he is. He's omnipresent and that's good.
- [in 2016, on Hotel Dallas (2016)] For years Larry Hagman would tell me how he took personal credit for defeating communism [in Romania]. I used to take that with a grain of salt, but over the years I had the strangest series of coincidences. I was at the Washington correspondents' dinner, and the Romanian ambassador ran over to shake my hand and tell me how important Dallas (1978) was to defeating the communist regime. Then, just last June, I was in Monte Carlo with my wife and the same thing happened: The Romanian ambassador there came over, his eyes welled up with tears, and he took his pin--of the Romanian flag--and pinned it on my jacket . . . I admit, at first I didn't understand it [the "Hotel Dallas" project]. It wasn't the kind of movie I'm used to seeing. So I showed it to my sons, who said, "This is brilliant, you have to get involved".
- [About his family meeting Barbara Bel Geddes, for the 1st time]: My wife was a childhood actress; she was the age of (like 14) and became a dancer. But, one of the 1st plays that her father took her to see, when she was about 10 years old, was a play on Broadway called 'The Moon is Blue,' and 'That Moon Was Blue,' was played by Barbara Bel Geddes, in knowledge in new, and it was banned in Boston, because they said the word, 'Virgin,' and my father-in-law was embarrassed to tears that he took his 10 year old daughter to a play; and they used the word, 'Virgin.' That was Carl and my wife's 1st introduction to Barbara Bel Geddes; the 2nd was right after that, my father went to work for Barbara Bel Geddes's father; Norman Bel Geddes was a world famous architect in New York; and he was the guy (before television) would draw the pictures in Life Magazine of The Battles of World War II @ Sea (with the boats and things). Norman was the artist who drew out those big fold-out things that he would get, and so the history that the coincidental serendipitous history; the Bel Geddes and the Rossers, which was my wife's name and for me, to turn around, all those years later and play her son on the show, 'Dallas,' and she knew the story and everything. It's just one of those things that it's so rarely happens, but when it happens, over and over again, you're living with fairy dust sprinkled over you all the time.
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