Lucille Ball is a comedy icon but she was horrendously miscast in at least two movies.
Yours, Mine and Ours- was based on the true story of an enormous blended family. Ala Streep and cronies in Mamma Mia as mentioned above, Ball was just way too old to be believable as Helen Beardsley, a mother of 8 (several of them pre-school age) who becomes pregnant soon after marrying Frank (Henry Fonda), a widowed naval officer with 10 children. For perspective, Ball was 18 years older than the real life Helen Beardsley, 20+ years older than Helen Beardsley was at the time of the events portrayed, she did not seem younger than her years and though she had two children in real life she was one of the least maternal seeming women ever on the small or large screen. Mame- Rosalind Russell had already nailed this character on stage and on screen and Angela Lansbury was super popular in the stage musical. Much of the comedy of Mame is that she’s a popular hostess, sophisticated bon vivant and an intellectual who’s also hard living and capable of “wacky hijinks”. Ball brought the wacky hijinks but there was no real surprise in this since that was her career; what she couldn’t bring was believability as a sophisticated intellectual.
And a surprise that nobody’s mentioned it yet, but:
Leslie Howard as Ashley Wilkes in Gone With the Wind. He was believable as a handsome and sophisticated inbred aristocrat, but NOT as a young man who a girl would swoon over as a teenager and carry a torch for from then on. He looked the same age as Frank Kennedy- in fact Howard was 8 years older than the actor who played Kennedy- and Kennedy’s age was a major issue in the movie as in the book.
If I were casting the role today I’d go with someone like James Franco or Orlando Bloom- somebody both pretty and handsome, delicate seeming and perpetually vulnerable and out-of-place-outside-a-mansion and a great contrast to the middle aged “old maid in britches” Kennedy. I think much of the reason for the movie’s success was that it had some of the greatest casting ever done on screen and I’ve always wondered why they went with Howard over a younger and more “delicately beautiful” actor.
It’s a credit to Howard, who didn’t want the role, that he gave it his all performance wise.
WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION. No, not the version with Tyrone Power and Marlene Dietrich; the version with Beau Bridges and Diana Rigg.
[spoiler]First off, maybe four separate plot points involve just how damned attractive women find the guy; that’s no problem for the darkly handsome leading man Hollywood kept tapping for “dashing swashbuckler” roles, and I’m sure Jeff Bridges could’ve swung it just fine, but the doughier Beau? Really?
Second, the big twist in the '50s version requires Dietrich to fake out the audience by eventually concealing her famous German accent when passing as a Brit. In the '80s version, Diana Rigg of course spends much of the film doing a fake German accent – which she merely drops to briefly pass as a Brit, since, y’know, she’s got a famous British accent. :smack:[/spoiler]
He was slammed on IMDB boards for being black. We were getting 2-3 threads a day either blatantly racist (a black actor shouldn’t play Neville) or a little more subtle racism (who would be a better actor to play Neville?)
I’d guess that it was about 10:1 against having a black actor play Neville.
I’m going obscure. Ingrid Pitt in Vampire Lovers. Seriously beautiful (and gravity defying) woman, and I love her performance in the film, but she was simply too old to play an ingenue.
Hugh Jackman as Wolverine. Great actor, but simply wrong for the part. It needed more of a Russell Crow, Oliver Reed, Jimmy Cagney type.
Looking back though, Robin Givens was the hottie. At that time, she was probably one of the most attractive actresses on the planet plus she married Mike Tyson. At that time, it was perfectly logical to put Givens in the hottie role and Berry in the plain Jane role.
I always had a theory about when they cast “Hollywood Ugly”, like Michelle Pfeiffer in Frankie and Johnny, and even Sue Lyon in Lolita (who is described as being plain to ugly in the book and described by her mother as plain in the film). It’s a visual shortcut. We, the audience, are supposed to understand why the protagonist falls in love with the character so rather than take the time to show us character reasons (in F&J, he walks in already in love with her), it is easier to just make the character attractive and tell us they are ugly, or just make them superficially ugly (no makeup or plain hair) so we see them through the protagonist’s eyes. Sue Lyon in Lolita, for instance, is very pretty and looks older than her character’s age. Her character, however, is a manipulative childish brat but we are supposed to be seeing her through Humbert’s eyes, and he can’t see (or refuses to see) what we the audience can see (revealed through her acting).
Going back to F&J, on stage it is more abstract so it’s not as important. You can cast anyone on stage and it is much easier to suspend disbelief, as it were. For instance, I saw Richard Harris, Topol and Ted Neeley on stage well into their 60s playing King Arthur, Tevye, and Jesus respectively, and it didn’t matter. In a movie, they would have been far too old.
Topher Grace as Eddie Brock/ Venom in Spiderman 3. Eddie Brock has always been shown as a large, powerful man in all incarnations. His physical prescence is an integral part of his character. He is a mal-adjusted insecure man with serious body issues who delved hard into body building,(and in some versions abused steroids), even before the Venom symbiote got to him and put him on rocket fuel. He is an intelligent, insane, psychotic monster of a human, and should have been played by someone we could buy physically as such. I’ve long held that the current crop of pro wrestlers is being poorly served by casting directors in this regard. There are many talented actors among them; considering that “heavy” villains don’t usually get a million emotionally delicate lines anyway, they should be able to handle the parts adequately. Playing the “intimidating jerk” Is what they do!
There’s a scene near the start of the recent Robin Hood film (the scene where Crowe is presenting what I think was a crown to some prince). There’s a woman standing in the background that’s clearly had about 9 rounds of plastic surgery done to her face.
Kevin Costner as Robin Hood.
I’ve never seen all of “Oklahoma” because musicals aren’t my thing and I have horrible memories of it being on television 40 years ago which CBS insisted on padding with scenes of “Family Affair” Sebastian Cabot with the two kids watching and talking about the movie (Brian Keith must have been smart enough to avoid this). But after watching “The Big Heat” the other day, Gloria Grahame (memorable as the girl whose face is scalded with hot coffee by Lee Marvin)was apparently miscast in “Oklahoma” as an ignorant country girl. It didn’t do her career any good and she had physical problems. As well as being caught in bed with her husband’s 13 year old son ( eventually they did get married but that didn’t work either.
Gene Kelly playing the H L Mencken character in “Inherit the Wind”. Gene Kelly???
When “A Bridge Too Far” came out in the late 1970s, there was a lot of criticism of casting Gene Hackman as a Polish colonel.
Can you give a cite for this? It seems plausible, but nothing on the internet I’ve yet found supports it. And i was a big reader of Cinefantastique at the time this came out, and they didn’t say a word about it.
Incidentally, this was the film that drove Erland van Lidthe de Jude out of movies for a time. He’d played a Big Bald Geek in The Wanderers and Stir Crazy, and they wanted him to play a Big Bald Geek here, too. He was tired of it. Having seen Erland almost naked in the dressing room, I can swear that his head is about the only place that he had hair, and everyone kept wanting him to shave it off. I can’t blame him. So he didn’t appear in this film, and they found another Big Bald Guy.
Not having watched Spiderman 3 and not being familiar with the name, I googled it. Seconded and then some… Brock looks like a character who would have been fine in the early parts of Schwarzenegger’s resume.
Jodie Foster as Madeleine White in Inside Man. She’s normally a great actress but she just couldn’t pull off that role. She acted it like a kid who is told to act “important and powerful”- and, ACTION!