Hmm, Wikipedia has him as Bolivian.
I got a chance to see and hear Charlese Theron in person yesterday. She would make a perfect Wyoh. Her new movie (Aeon Flux) highlights her ability to handle the role with aplomb. 
Has anybody mentioned Uma Thurman as Wyoh?
This is a good choice, Not old not young and very good looking. She can act and handle action. Uma I think is in the Category of a little old but not a bad choice.
Yikes. Uma is 35. Is that “a little old” these days?
I apologize, she is younger than I thought. I last saw her in Stay Cool and she was looking a little old in that one.
Who cares who plays the child Hazel Meade in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress?
The important thing is who would play the grandmother Hazel Meade Stone in The Rolling Stones! I would cast Maggie Smith.
Not quite; I just read this one. The pilots weren’t doing integral calculus in their heads; the computers were doing the integrals (though they had to be programmed in ones and zeroes). What the pilots were doing was thumbing through books of tables for the right figures to input. And Max’s special advantage was not math skill, but a perfect memory, with which he had memorized all the books of tables.
Personally, I’d love to see a good Heinlein movie, but if they’re not going to do it right, I’d rather they didn’t do it at all. And if past experience is any indicator, they’re not going to do it right. That said, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress could be done well, but not if they made Mike a supernatural spectral manifestation and built a Ferris-wheel catapult.
Manny should emphatically not be dumb, and should probably not be an action-hero type, but other than that, the role doesn’t strike me as particularly demanding. And I agree with Green Bean that there’s no compelling reason for the Prof to be male: One shouldn’t swap genders just for changes’ sake, but I don’t think competent actresses should be removed from the running. If we’re going to go that route, though, care should be taken that Prof is sufficiently older than Manny that there’s no question of romantic tension. And Hazel, if she showed up in a movie at all, would only be a nonspeaking character showing up in the background of a few scenes. Too many fanboys would not stand for her being cut entirely, but let’s face it, you have to make cuts for a movie, and hers is a very minor role. Just stick some ten year old redhead in as an extra, and we’ll figure it out.
In general on the casting, I think that specific physical appearances are almost insignificant for Mistress. It is essential that the Loonies be of a wide variety of ethnicities, physical types, and mixes of the above. It is not at all essential that one particular character be white or black or hispanic or eastern European, or be short or tall or fat or thin. In fact, I think that slavish accuracy to exactly who looks like what would represent a greater departure from the spirit of the book than totally color-blind casting.
Arg, you caught me. I was working from memory, and after I posted I went and pulled out my old copy of Starman. You’re right, they were looking up log tables and decimal->binary conversions; someone would input the figures in binary using switches, then read the answer off of lights in binary, then convert back to decimal. They could build a starship, but an Apple ][ was beyond their skill, I guess. 
I just started rereading “Moon is a Harsh Mistress”.
It reminded me of being a kid, a slipping on my most confortable PJs fresh out the dryer.
RAH was truly the master.