Following is a transcript of LE's interview on the DVD. I tried to get everything he said but some was hard to understand. The words in < > will be approximate to what I think he said.
Louis Edmonds: Set 6, disc 3
"I played Roger Collins. He was my anchor so to speak. What was he like? He was fun to play because he wasn't a happy man. He'd gone through his part of the inheritance and that made him sort of a chip off the old block. All of that stuff is crisp of the mill, you see, to play that. His sister, Roger's sister, was Joan Bennett, Elizabeth Stoddard Collins. We adored each other off set and on set too. It was great fun to have raging fights and battles with her because we'd be looking at each other with nothing but pure love in our eyes. And then when it was over we'd laugh.
"When I heard that Joan was going to be our star and that I was going to be her younger brother, I was thrilled. But I think I played it kind of cool. Because I didn't ... I don't know .. I don't know how to defend that decision but any rate we got alone beautifully. We became friends off stage. She'd come out to my house in Long Island and I'd go to her house in <??>. And we were really like brother and sister off set.
"I'm from the south and we sound, some of us, a type of southern speech is English. Not the repeative with which the English people speak but it's a first cousin to my ear. Most of my training at school and college was in the classics and you can't speak with a southern accent if you're going to play Shaw or Shakespeare or Chekhov. Many people thought all my life I had <a York type English> and it worked for me and against me. But I can't change that now. Although I do have an ear for it. Wherever I am, I sort of pick it up.
"Luckily for me I was not a quick study but I was a middle way study and I did my homework especially when I had some good scenes the following day. My routine would be to leave the studio, then go to my health club and get completely relaxed in the steam room, swim and then come up and go to the bar and have a martini and then probably undo all the good my health club was there for doing. Then I would go home and go to sleep quit early and then wake up with guilt ridden conscience, then study my lines and get them under my belt; then go back to sleep and then wake up and get on my bike. I was one of the first cyclists really in the city, not like the paid messager boys. I would cycle through the park and get to the studio; then we'd start running our scenes. Before you knew it dress rehearsal and taping. We'd be through it at 4:30 in the afternoon and then it would start all over again.
"It's hard work and I could have kicked myself for all those martinis and waking up in the middle of the night but I established that sort of pattern for a while at any rate. It's hard work and you have to conserve your energy and I didn't know a thing about that in those days. I was young enough to take that sort of thing for granted like you all are doing this moment. But you learn what you have to do to get the best out of yourself and when you see that red eye go on, it's you and it.
![[laugh]](http://www.dsboards.com/SMF/Smileys/classic/laugh.gif "Laugh")
And it's up to you to satisfy what you set out to do.
"Jonathan will agree with me that he was terrified his first year and he is not quit as quick a study as I was. That worried him a lot but he got use to his own capabilities and limitations and what he could do extra hours as I had found out I could do. And he got on to the routine of it and it worked for him. <laugh> He is so funny. I have to tell you a funny story. He was at Yale doing a season Cleopatra. He was famous for missing lines. But he didn't mean to be funny. They were having a dress rehearsal and as Caesar, he comes out on stage and sees Cleopatra caught in the Sphinx. He says "Hail Caesar..." [pause] "line". [laughs] And so it went that night. "Hail Sphinx", I think he should have said, that's it. He was Caesar. See how I am, it's the end of the day, folks."
THE END.
