It’s been over sixty years since Angie Dickinson worked with the legendary Hollywood star John Wayne on the 1959 classic western Rio Bravo, but it’s an experience that she’s never forgotten. In a new interview, Dickinson is opening up about what it was really like to work with The Duke himself.
Dickinson Gushes Over Wayne
Dickinson, 91, appeared at the 2023 TCM Classic Film Festival last week for a special gala presentation of Rio Bravo, and she opened up to the crowd about working with Wayne.
“It was heaven,” she recalled, according to Entertainment Weekly. “He was so respectful of my freshness. He was an enormous star and this was as big as it gets in production, and it was a great honor to have been chosen. He was very helpful by being patient with me.”
“Once, we sat and talked for about 10 minutes about a scene. That’s unheard of. You don’t waste a second,” she continued. “But he was trying to relax me. I got in a few binds because you can tell when a scene’s not working. He leaned on his rifle and waited, and then, I finally got the scene right.”
Another highlight of working on Rio Bravo was the costumes.
“I liked them because they were not the normal Western duds,” Dickinson explained. “I did a lot of westerns for TV and B-movies, and they were not fun. They either had hoops or something else. This was the first Western where I was able to relax because the clothes were not traditional.”
“Though, I hated the hat that I’m introduced in,” she added. “It looked bad on me or I looked bad in it. I hated it, but I didn’t win. They put it on. But once I was able to take that goddamn hat off, I relaxed a lot.”
Related: Angie Dickinson, 91, Reveals What Working With John Wayne Was Really Like – ‘He Was So Generous’
Dickinson Recalls Working With Frank Sinatra
In this same interview, Dickinson talked about working with Frank Sinatra in the 1960 movie Ocean’s 11. In the film, Dickinson played Beatrice Ocean, the wife of Sinatra’s character Danny Ocean.
“We just liked each other,” she said of Sinatra. “I was crazy about him. He was fabulous. He was absolutely the love of my life. Though I would not have wanted to be married to him. He went to bed at 6 a.m.”
Dickinson was honored to be the only woman featured on the movie’s poster, despite only having a minor role in the film.
“I was thrilled to say the least,” she admitted. “I was always bitching about something, like ‘I don’t have much to do. I’ve got such a small part.'”
Related: John Wayne Honored By Kirk Douglas And Frank Sinatra Days Before His Death
Sinatra ‘Was The Boss’
Dickinson traveled to Las Vegas for a publicity photoshoot with Sinatra and her other male co-stars, and she remembers them all having a lot of fun on set.
“They were always monkeying around,” she stated, adding that Sinatra “was the boss, so he could get away with it. He loved to pull tricks. They were kids at play.”
Wayne passed away in 1979, and Sinatra died in 1998, but they will always live on through the incredible work that they did on-screen. Thank goodness we still have someone like Dickinson around to tell the rest of us what they were like behind the scenes!
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