"She was a wonderful person—loving and giving and generous to everyone she knew."

- Brenda Vaccaro

"Sandy was the great peacemaker of the group when we were doing Come Back to the Five and Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. She was the solid one with her feet on the ground, which was interesting to me at the time, because she had such an ethereal quality as an actress. I also remember her wonderful sense of humor and her gorgeous hair. I think she was still seeing Eric Roberts at the time and we were all very jealous."

- Kathy Bates

"Sandy was a marvelous actress. She was so gifted she made every part look easy...and she didn’t choose easy parts. It was a great pleasure to work with her."

- Gena Rowland

"Sandy was the most amazing actress: spellbinding. The audience would hang on her every pause. And as we all acknowledge, her characterizations were miraculous; no one can say then nor now from where her profound inspirations came. But there they were, for herself and for all of the world, forever. I will never forget her."

- Karen Black

"Sandy was an terribly giving person—you could never repay her generous kindness."

- Penny Cosgrave

“From Sandy's performance in Virginia Wolfe to The Out-of-Towners, who comes to mind with more range? Nobody I can think of. And she was a very nice lady."

- Eric Roberts

"Working with Sandy Dennis was an interesting experience, to say the least. She was surely one of the most un-star-like stars in films. She spoke her mind, refused to make herself glamorous (or the efforts of others to make her so); she worked from the inside, often perplexing her partners. To have been teamed with Tony Newly as her co- star seemed a particularly poor combination. Tony was a stickler for accuracy where Sandy was not. He refused to see that Sandy's freewheeling line readings and interpretations also gave rise to some very interesting, even inspired, moments. He was merely irritated by them. And by Sandy's down-"

- Theodore Bikel

“Sandy Dennis never met an unpredictable instinct she didn’t like. She was an actress and woman with beautiful idiosyncrasies and gentleness. There’s never been anyone like her. And me and movies miss her a lot. I directed the movie that turned out to be her last, The Indian Runner, which we shot in and around Omaha, Nebraska. I was honored to work with her and I’m pleased to know that she’s being honored by her own.”

- Sean Penn

"A Touch of Love was based on The Millstone, the novel by Margaret Drabble, with whom I had acted in under-graduate productions at Cambridge. I had rather assumed she might want to play her own heroine in the film, as on leaving university she had briefly acted professionally for the Royal Shakespeare Company. After all, the director Waris Hussein had directed us both, again at Cambridge. But no— commercial considerations cast a star, an actor who on the face of it could not have been less appropriate to play Rosamund, a quintessential middle-class English gal who defies convention by willfully starting a one-parent family. Sandy Dennis as Rosamund started with a hefty disadvantage—her accent—and confounded us all by delivering the lines in a perfectly credible voice that fitted the character exactly. She hummed and hah-ed and stuttered her way through each scene with that characteristic self-deprecating laugh with which she coloured all her performances. On this occasion, the director and editor cut out so many of her hesitations that her acting was transformed and Sandy’s innate strengths were revealed perhaps more clearly than in any other of her films. She soaked herself in the part, as I suspect she always did, but in A Touch of Love her own mannerisms weren’t allowed to distract from the characterization. The film is still available on video, and there she is as fresh and original as ever. To work with she was a joy. It was my first time in front of a movie camera, and Sandy would have had every right to be appalled that she had been saddled with an incompetent actor to support her in her major scenes. Perhaps she took comfort from the sturdy professionalism of the rest of the very experienced cast but equally perhaps she was just a very kind woman. Off-camera, we joked together, and she told me about her menagerie of animals and her hubby back home in the States. She never played the star and seemed to enjoy being one of the team with whom she was popular. Had she lived, by now she would have been a veteran actor of formidable powers or perhaps, eschewing work, she would simply be an animal-lover at home, smiling indulgently at the craziness of the world around her."

- Sir Ian McKellen