I cut and pasted this story from a list of Roger Ebert's past Oscar highlights. I think it's awesome:
Laurence Olivier won an honorary Oscar in 1979, and gave a speech so dramatic you could hear a pin drop. The camera cut to Jon Voight, in the audience, and you could read his lips: "Wow."
The next day, as it happened, I went to interview Michael Caine, who told me he had received a call that morning from Olivier: "He wanted to know what I thought of his speech. I said, 'Magnificent--but what did it mean?'
"Larry said: 'Exactly, dear boy! Utterly meaningless. I'm afraid I went up at the crucial moment and forgot everything I intended to say, so I just fell back on the old Shakespearean actors' tactic, where you mumble something about life and death and being off to Salisbury, and hope you can get close enough to the wings to hear the prompter.' "
So great an actor was Olivier, however, that he sold the speech convincingly, and his listeners, convinced they had heard something profound, demanded the transcript. Then they puzzled over it.