One day during one of his early films, Gary Cooper played a location scene so well that the director was able to shoot it in a single take. That night, however, Cooper visited the director's tent to ask whether the scene could be done again in the morning. "I seem to remember," the actor explained, "at one point I picked my nose I was so nervous." "Listen," the director replied, "you were so damn nervous you were great. You keep acting that way and you can pick your nose into a fortune!"
[Years later, after he had stopped trying to make such "serious" films as Saratoga Trunk (1945), Cooper told his old director, "Guess I'll have to go back to my nose."]
Sources
Hedda Hopper, The Whole Truth and Nothing But, p. 109
