This list would not be complete without the all-purpose, all-ethnic Rita Moreno. While most of the time her nationality is just “exotic” it looks like she can plausibly claim to have played:
Malayan
Tahitian
Mexican
Native Canadian
Egyptian
Brazilian
Native American
Siamese
French
Indian
Israeli
Puerto Rican
Philipino
Italian
They talked about his tendency to be cast as “ambiguous ethnic guy” with him on Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me. The kicker was that at school, as the darkest kid there, he actually got cast as the lead in Othello. :smack:
I’m pretty sure John Leguizamo has a lengthy list of ethnic roles, although looking at his Wiki page it’s not surprising:
Omar Sharif is way up there as well. No time to do all the research right now, but a quick look at the characters on his IMDB page indicates:
Egyptian
Russian
Greek
Italian
German
French
Argentinian
Indian
Chinese (?)
Various flavors of Arab
American
Probably a bunch more - guessing there is some Syrian & Turkish in there.
Sean Connery of course played a Russian sub commander and an Irish-American cop with the same accent he used as Juan Sanchez Villa-Lobos Ramirez, because (a) he doesn’t give a crap, and, (b) honestly, he doesn’t need to: whether he’s playing an Arab diplomat or a Greek king, you’re always thinking holy crap, this dude was 007 back when that meant dressing up as a Japanese fisherman!
Rob Schneider:
Generic white
Asian/Chinese
Indian
Italian
Russian
Hawaiian(?)
Martian
Animal
Woman
Stapler
Carrot
Da Derp Dee Derp Da Teetley Derpee Derpee Dumb
And within one movie there is American actor Robert Downey Jr. playing Australian actor Kirk Lazarus playing African American Sergeant Lincoln Osiris playing a SE Asian “Lead Farmer.”
She was also in the movie version of “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea” with him. It was on TV at a local bar a few weeks ago.
We got a big laugh at the final scene where the Seaview is on the surface and the main characters go out and stand on the deck, and here comes Barbara Eden in some pointy spiked high heels, and is walking, on the top of a submarine, in the middle of the ocean.
Cesar Romero was always up for playing Lucky Luciano, or Sheikh Hameel Habib, or Esteban de la Cruz, or Peter Stavros, or Rama Singh, or Willie Wetzchahofsky, or Marquis Andre de Lage, or Count Dracula, or – Steve McQuinn.
Wow, Wallach is 98. I don’t know most of the movies in his imdb listing, but we can start with some of the easy ones:
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Mexican (Tuco)
Genghis Khan Persian? (The Shah of Khwarezm)
The Adventures of Gerard Corsican/French (Napoleon)
Crazy Joe Sicilian
He played a lot of Italians and rabbis.
From a quick look at IMDB, Fernando Lamas played D’Artagnan, and El Greco, and Salim Ibn Hydari, and Ramon de Vega, and Friedrich ‘Fritz’ Bhaer, and Antonio Franco, and Conrad Stillman, and Nico Patrai.
Even John Wayne played a number of ethnicities, always in his same voice.
American - The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
Irish - The Quiet Man (he was supposed to have been born in Ireland, to have grown up in the USA, and to have returned)
Mongolian - The Conqueror
German - The Sea Chase
Roman - The Greatest Story Ever Told
Well, since someone mentioned Meryl Streep…
English inThe Iron Lady
Danish in Out of Africa
Polish in*** Sophie’s Choice***
Australian in Cry in the Dark (Dingos ate my baby!)
Irish in Dancing at Lughnasa
Italian in Bridges of Madison County
American in Silkwood
Daniel Day-Lewis has played British, American, Irish, Italian, Czech, Scottish, and probably more I can’t think of at the moment.
Alec Guinness
English - Bridge on the River Kwai
Indian in A Passage to India
Czech - Kafka
Russian in Dr. Zhivago
Frenchman - The Scapegoat
Austrian Jew in*** Lovesick*** (Sigmund Freud)
Austrian Gentile - Hitler: The Last 10 Days (Hitler)
Italian - ***Brother Sun, Sister Moon *** (Pope Innocent III)
German - ***Situation Hopeless, But Not Serious ***
Roman - Fall of the Roman Empire (Marcus Aurelius)
Scotsman - Cromwell (King Charles I)
Arab - Lawrence of Arabia
Japanese -*** A Majority of One***
While he’s British, his ancestry is Indian. He was born in England but both of his parents are from Kerala, India. From IMDB:
and
.
StG
Brings to mind Olivier, who after playing Othello on the big screen was Neil Diamond’s father the rabbi (“It’s not toff enoff, beink a Choo?”), and the Mahdi in Khartoum, and Douglas MacArthur in Inchon, and Piotr Ilyich Kamenev in The Shoes Of The Fisherman, and a Nazi war criminal in Marathon Man, and an Italian haberdasher in Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and a Dutch physician in A Bridge Too Far, which is pretty terrific for the guy who played – well, (a) the Carpathian prince in The Prince And The Showgirl, and (b) a whole lot of Brits.
Olivier and Guinness would be good examples of classical stage training which valued an ability to Do Accents. They come from a time in which ethnically-sensitive casting was a completely unknown concept.
Notice that Streep, from a later generation, plays only Europeans. You would never seen her essaying an Asian role, for instance. When Katharine Hepburn and Marlon Brando and Ingrid Bergman did it, it was considered to be Oscar-nomination-worthy. But, no more. Such an effort would be considered by moviegoers (and possibly by Streep herself) to be gaucherie of a high order.
Possibly Mickey Rooney killed off that particular avenue for the demonstration of thespian versatility.
Unless you count some comic roles like Peter Sellers in Murder By Death.
Or Alec Guinness as an Indian in the Oscar-nominated **A Passage to India.
**And there WAS a Seventies or Eighties Charlie Chan movie starring Peter Ustinov. It bombed at the box office and disappeared quickly, but not before getting Chinese Americans very angry.
I think the LAST nail in the coffin came after Jonathan Pryce was cast as The Engineer in the Broadway production of*** Miss Saigon.*** By all accounts, Pryce gave a very good performance, but he caused such an uproar that I don’t think anyone would dare give a white guy an Asian role again.
But it still seems to be standard practice to give American Indian roles to “white” actors.
True enough. I bet there was grumbling about Guinness, but he was sort of an institution by that time. Above (most) reproach.
Yeah. “Iron Eyes Cody” aka Espera DeCorti (of 100% Sicilian ancestry) became the archetypal “look” of an American Indian–possibly because there had been so many Italian-background actors playing them for so many years.
Of course there’s a huge amount of genetic variation among the first-comers to the Americas. There’s no one “look.”
eta: in my previous post I typed “essaying” when I should have typed “assaying”…
David Suchet is probably best known for playing a Belgian, but somehow managed to pull off Chinese when he got a rare break from playing everyone from Sigmund Freud to William Shakespeare to Dino Grandi to Mohamed Karaman to Louis B. Mayer.