Friend Annie,
Boo Radley does not speak at all in that movie. Robert Duvall nails the part without speaking a line of dialog.
In a perfect world I’d be asking you who the hell Jar Jar Binks is.
I think Boo Radley says that line in the book, though.
Friend pravnik,
I don’t remember if he does say it in the book. I will look tonight.
How about “Juicy Fruit” by Chief in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest?
After which he and McMurphy have about 12 pages of dialogue.
“Mongo only pawn in game of life”
does he have any other lines?
Excellent! I have been racking my brain to locate the movie where somebody says something like “Surprise!” after being silent all the way through, and I keep having visions of Nicholson sticking his head through the door in The Shining so my crazy synapses must not have wanted to jump over to Will Sampson for some reason.
Now I’m hoping the synapse trail will lead to at least one other performance where the character is assumed to be mute until he says something like, “I just didn’t have anything to say.”
Sure does. Among other joke lines, he’s the one who clues Bart in on Hedley Lamarr’s plan for the railroad.
Teller has several lines, all of them longer than that.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HlHSZlS4Js (major spoilers, as if the title isn’t enough)
Oh fudge, I forgot they talked after that first line.
Louise Schumacher: Get out, go anywhere you want, go to a hotel, go live with her, and don’t come back. Because, after 25 years of building a home and raising a family and all the senseless pain that we have inflicted on each other, I’m damned if I’m going to stand here and have you tell me you’re in love with somebody else. Because this isn’t a convention weekend with your secretary, is it? Or - or some broad that you picked up after three belts of booze. This is your great winter romance, isn’t it? Your last roar of passion before you settle into your emeritus years. Is that what’s left for me? Is that my share? She gets the winter passion, and I get the dotage? What am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to sit at home knitting and purling while you slink back like some penitent drunk? I’m your wife, damn it. And, if you can’t work up a winter passion for me, the least I require is respect and allegiance. I hurt. Don’t you understand that? I hurt badly.
IMDB: “Beatrice Straight is only on screen for five minutes and forty seconds, making hers the briefest performance ever to win an Oscar.”
Not quite within the bounds of the OP - she has more than one line. On the plus side for the OP, she is in an earlier scene in the movie, but she has no lines then. Still, the actress really hit that speech out of the park.
The Tommy Award for being deaf-dumb-and-blind goes to everybody who read this thread and didn’t immediately think of The Miracle Worker: Helen Keller: WAH-WAH
“Oh, this makes me so happy!”
-Basil Hoffman, My Favourite Year
Jim: Uh-oh, Bart. I think Mongo here’s taken a liking to you.
Mongo: Huh-huh, naw, Mongo straight.
Mongo also has a bunch of lines in the extra scenes in the clean version.
In “Birdy,” starring Matthew Modine and Nicholas Cage, Birdy doesn’t say anything until the very end of the movie. Nicholas Cage is yelling frantically after him, and he turns around and says, “What?”
Might be thinking of something like that.
(What does it say about me that I saw the movie once, 21 years ago, and I remember that?)
How about when the quiet stoner chick comes out of the couch in Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and goes crazy firing the brain gun? I can’t remember if she even said anything, but it was very memorable because I never saw it coming.
Kurt Russell is the star and in almost every scene of Soldier and has about 10 words of dialogue throughout the entire movie. I really want to see it again now.
Another obvious choice nobody has mentioned: Suzanne Somers as the blonde in the convertible in American Grafitti.
I love you.
Carrie Fisher didn’t speak in The Blues Brothers until her final scene.
I remember seeing The Man Who Came to Dinner years ago, in which there is a nurse who I believe only has one line. Near the end of the play, she says something to the effect of:
I became a nurse in order to help hurting people, but after one week of taking care of you I’m going to quit nursing and get a job at a munitions factory.
RR