"I was drawn to acting because it gave me the opportunity to tell stories and transport people to another time and place"
About this Quote
Acting, for Laraine Day, isn’t framed as fame, attention, or even self-expression. It’s framed as logistics: a job that lets you move an audience from here to somewhere else. That phrasing - “tell stories and transport people” - is classic studio-era vocabulary, the kind that treats cinema as a machine built to deliver escape with professional efficiency. Day came up in Hollywood when the star system prized polish and reliability; you were hired not to bare your soul but to hit marks, speak cleanly, and make the fantasy hold.
The intent is modest on the surface, almost disarmingly service-oriented. Subtextually, it’s a claim for legitimacy. By emphasizing story and transport, she positions acting as craft with a public function, not vanity. It also sidesteps the era’s gendered traps. A young actress in the 1940s could be reduced to looks, scandal, or “personality.” Day’s line quietly refuses that reduction: she’s in it for narrative power, for the alchemy of shared attention.
“Another time and place” does double duty. It nods to cinema’s literal capacities - sets, costumes, historical melodramas - while acknowledging why audiences needed it. Day’s peak years overlapped with Depression aftershocks and wartime anxiety, when movies operated like mass-administered relief. The comment flatters the viewer, too: you aren’t watching to kill time; you’re participating in a collective act of imaginative travel. It’s a gentle philosophy of entertainment as public service, delivered in the clean, unshowy cadence of someone who understood that the illusion matters more than the illusionist.
The intent is modest on the surface, almost disarmingly service-oriented. Subtextually, it’s a claim for legitimacy. By emphasizing story and transport, she positions acting as craft with a public function, not vanity. It also sidesteps the era’s gendered traps. A young actress in the 1940s could be reduced to looks, scandal, or “personality.” Day’s line quietly refuses that reduction: she’s in it for narrative power, for the alchemy of shared attention.
“Another time and place” does double duty. It nods to cinema’s literal capacities - sets, costumes, historical melodramas - while acknowledging why audiences needed it. Day’s peak years overlapped with Depression aftershocks and wartime anxiety, when movies operated like mass-administered relief. The comment flatters the viewer, too: you aren’t watching to kill time; you’re participating in a collective act of imaginative travel. It’s a gentle philosophy of entertainment as public service, delivered in the clean, unshowy cadence of someone who understood that the illusion matters more than the illusionist.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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