Bette Midler: “She (the ‘Divine Miss M’) never went anywhere. She’s just a character. That’s the only character that I ever made up by myself … I was in New York, I saw these people, I looked at these movies, I said, ‘This is what I want to be.’ And that’s what I became … But then I didn’t want to get stuck in it, like … John Belushi … I didn’t want the character to run my life. I wanted to be able to go somewhere quiet, be by myself and have a life … I never exactly put it in those words, but I really wanted to be who I always was. I mean, I didn’t think that anybody would buy what I had to say whan I was just myself, because really I’m kind of a bore. But that character, there was nothing boring about her. She was lively, she had red hair, she wore dresses cut down to there, everybody loves that. Who wouldn’t want to be that? But that wasn’t what I was … Not for a second. But I put it out and people were charmed by it.” — (Midler to Movieline, c. December 1991.)
