Sometimes they get the people who starred on stage to reprise their roles in the film version – I think the entire cast of the stage version of 1776 played their roles in the movie. Paul Scofield played Sir Thomas More in a Man for All Seasons on stage and screen.
Sometimes it’s only one or two who don’t return. Walter Matthau was Oscar Madison on stage and screen in The Odd Couple, but Art Carney played Felix Unger on stage, while Jack Lemmon did on screen.
But sometimes they exchanged a perfect lead for someone not obviously right. Sometimes it’s because they don’t think the stage star was a big enough “draw”, but sometimes you gotta wonder. My Fair Lady – why exchange Audrey Hepburn (not the great singer, although she apparently tried, before they used Marni Nixon to dub her) for Julie Andrews? I know she wasn’t quite a household name yet, but – why?
West Side Story – People know Natalie Wood, even if Marni Nixon had to do her role, but what was wrong with Carol Lawrence?
Man of la Mancha – reportedly authors Dale Wasserman and Mitch Leigh wanted the stars of the stage version to reprise their parts – Richard Kiley and Joan Diener. Certainly they came back more than once to do it on stage. But the production was a mess, and when the film finally got made they used two stars who couldn’t sing – Peter O’Toole and Sophia Loren.
Lenny – Cliff Gorman killed in the lead, but they figured they needed a big star. Al Pacino turned it down, and Dustin Hoffman got the part. At least Gorman got to sorta play Lenny in the film All That Jazz
The Wiz – This film suffered from White People doing the casting, bring aboard names they figured white people would know. I don’t think any of the stage cast made it. We got Nipsey Russell and Michael Jackson and – in the worst idea of all – Stephanie Mills (who could at least pass for a younger teenager) was replaced by 34 year old Diana Ross.
Fiddler on the Roof – why replace Zero Mostel? I thought Topol did a good job, but Mostel was still playing the part (I saw him doing it on stage years after the film came out), and he originated the role.
I always thought it was a shame that Jessica Tandy didn’t get to do the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire. I like Vivien Leigh, but I don’t think Streetcar was her greatest work, and I have seen pictures of Jessica Tandy. She looks so perfect in the stills. I wish, I wish I could see her in the role. Her missing performance feels like a lost film-- like those silent films that disappeared, and we’ll never see.
Kathy Bates was replaced in Frankie and Johnny by Michelle Pfeiffer. The play was written specifically for Bates. She was robbed. I don’t know quite how to put this, but the character she plays is supposed to be insecure about her looks. Trying to “dowdy-up” Michelle Pfeiffer didn’t work. Kathy Bates is not howling at the moon, but she is Hollywood ugly, and she is overweight. Bad makeup and plastic barrettes in her hair didn’t turn Michelle Pfeiffer into the woman who had been the actual inspiration for the play.
There is a YouTube video of Audrey Hepburn doing the actual voice for “All I Want is a Room Somewhere.” She isn’t that bad. The Marni Nixon substitute was to make her sound more like Julie Andrews, which then has you wondering… Not to mention that whatever you have to say about Audrey Hepburn (and I’m as big a fan as anyone), she was too old for that role. She never manages to communicate the kind of desperate life Eliza is living. Watch the non-musical film (Pygmalion)-- Dame Wendy Hiller makes you cry for her at the beginning.
One counter-example: the producer of the film The Music Man didn’t want Robert Preston, because he wasn’t well-known enough. He wanted Cary Grant (who probably would have been good, but not as good as Preston). Grant told him “If you use anyone but Robert Preston, you’re crazy.” And Preston got the role.
Oh, and The Wiz was so unbelievably bad. I never thought about it being because of white people, but you are probably right. I barely made it to the end.
For the most part, it’s right there in the OP – to get someone with more star power. Classic Hollywood musicals were the biggest of big budget productions, and studios and backers wanted bankable stars.
Carol Lawrence and Julie Andrews were virtual unknowns outside of Broadway, certainly compared to Wood and Hepburn.
Art Carney was in his mid-40s by the time Odd Couple was made into a movie. Jack Lemmon looked much younger and more vigorous on a movie screen.
Zero Mostel was notoriously difficult to work with, often treating the script as just a suggestion. Norman Jewison, who produced Fiddler, wanted someone who would “act” Tevye, not “perform” him.
1776 is on TCM tonight. In the introduction, William Daniels said that Jack Warner loved the Broadway show and tried to bring it as intact as possible to the screen. Even so, Blythe Danner replaced Betty Buckley. I wonder if it might have been because Buckleylooked too much like Virginia Vestoff and someone wanted more contrast in the only two female parts.
A few years later, Jewison hired Zero’s son Josh Mostel to play King Herod in “Jesus Christ Superstar.” Allegedly, Zero screamed at Josh, “Tell that son of a bitch to hire TOPOL’S son!!!”
Grant supposedly was offered Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady; Grant said he wouldn’t go see the picture unless Rex Harrison was in it.* Which indirectly led to Audrey Hepburn being cast: Harrison was not a big enough star so they had to have a big name for Liza. Andrews was not a big name (yet).
Gwen Verdon was another Broadway star who was passed over when musicals were made of her shows, notably Sweet Charity.
*The similarities in the stories leads me to believe either the two movies were conflated, or they are myths. Though I do remember the My Fair Lady anecdote in Grant’s biography.
Odd, I never heard the* My Fair Lady* story, but remember The Music Man version being told numerous times by numerous sources. Maybe it was just Cary Grant’s stock response when he didn’t want to play a role originated by someone else.
I think the most bizarre example is the casting of Raymond Massey in Arsenic and Old Lace. The whole point of the character of Jonathan was that he looked like Boris Karloff. In the Broadway play, they achieved this by casting Boris Karloff in the role.
But Karloff was still appearing on stage when the movie version was filmed so they cast Massey in the role of somebody who looked like Karloff. And then the studio put the movie on the shelf for three years before releasing it.
I think Jewison simply didn’t consider Zero, with his broad, stagey style, the right fit for his more restrained, lower-key version of Fiddler.
After all, sometimes being too close to a stage version can hinder a film version of a musical, since stage acting (where you have to project to the back of the house) is a different animal than film acting (where you can take advantages of close-ups and such). While we’re on the subject of recasts of Zero Mostel roles…I love the 2005 movie musical version of The Producers, but one of the criticisms leveled at it was that Lane, Broderick, and the other actors from the stage version played it as if they still WERE onstage, in that same broad style, not taking advantage of the intimacy film offered. I gotta admit that those critics did have a point, although I can see where the makers of the movie were coming from–they wanted to replicate the stage version as much as possible for people who wouldn’t have been able to see the original cast onstage.
Then there’s the movie version of Rent, which cast many of the original stage actors–despite the fact that they were nine years older and far less able to pass for callow twentysomethings.
She’s not that good, either. Also, you can hear her actual singing in the movie. Her real voice is at the beginning and the end of “Just You Wait, 'Enry 'Iggins”. Marni sings the middle section, starting with “One day I’ll be famous”. Then Audrey resumes with “Then they’ll march you, 'Enry 'Iggins, to the wall”.
Julie Andrews did not have any film experience prior to My Fair Lady, but she went on to star in Mary Poppins that same year for which she won both the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for Best Actress. So I doubt she regretted not being cast as Eliza Doolittle.
Seeing as Topol didn’t speak a word of English at the time of filming, and had to learn his lines phonetically, I supposed the level of improvisation was kept at a minimum
You sure about that? Topol had played an English-speaking character in an earlier film, Cast a Giant Shadow, and had been playing Tevye on stage in London as early as 1967. Zero Mostel had been playing the character since the play opened in 1964 on Broadway, so I guess he had a better “claim” to the film role, but Topol had by then played Tevye on stage hundreds of times, in English, so he was hardly some second-banana fill-in.
Phantom of the Opera starring Gerard Butler. Really? With all the stage actors who performed the role, Joel Schumacher went with Butler, who had NO singing experience.
No wonder the film tanked. When someone gave me the DVD, I regifted it
James Cagney said in his autobiography that he was approached to play Alfred P Doolittle in the film version of “My Fair Lady”. Cagney had retired after “One, Two, Three” and would remain retired for 20 years (turning down a chance to be in “Godfather II”). So he told them to keep Stanley Holloway, who played the role on stage. Which they did and Holloway got an Oscar nomination for supporting actor.
A number of years ago I saw a still picture of Andrews in the role, sitting in a way that a very young woman of that social class might have been sitting, and I said “Wow–that’s what the movie’s missing.” Physically, I imagine Audrey Hepburn could not have gotten into that position. In general she looked too old, moved too old, and acted too old. I think she was about 35, and she just doesn’t come across as much younger than that.
It wasn;t that she was bad in the role, at least if you credit her with Nixon’s voice–she wasn’t, she did a fine job. But playing Liza as someone well past her teenage years loses something. Part of it is the “desperate life” mentioned by RivkahChaya above. And part of it is the touching hopefulness of Liza–she genuinely believes that Higgins will give her lessons and that she will learn to speak like a proper lady. That rings true for an impetuous 18-year-old–for a woman at least 10 years older, not so much.
Oh well. Seeing that picture made me wish I’d seen Andrews in the role. It wasn’t going to happen, as I was not yet alive at the time…still!
OTOH, it makes it easier for the audience to believe there could ultimately be something between her and Higgins, other than a student/secretary–teacher relationship, as the end of the movie (and I presume the stage version of MFL) implies.
I was quite surprised to see the ultimate scene from MFL was also used in Howard and Hiller’s Pygmalion, even though Shaw was adamantly against it.
That AWFUL ending has a long pedigree…Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree changed it when he staged Pygmalion, saying that the public wanted a happy ending. Shaw hated it, though, and for good reason. It’s even worse in MFL because it comes not ten whole minutes after the single best “fuck you and the horse you rode in on” song in musical theater, “Without You”.
I’ll bet she did! She created that role and made it what it was, and not just with her singing.
One memory I will always have is of her accepting her Golden Globe for Mary Poppins and saying how she wanted to thank the one man who had made this all possible: Jack Warner.
By the way, I thought the movie Mary Poppins was a horrible saccharine mess and she was nothing much to write home about in it. I think she only won those awards because she was passed over for My Fair Lady, and any of the other four Oscar nominees that year were more deserving on the merits. This is not a knock on Julie Andrews, there wasn’t much more she could have done with the role, it’s just a crap role in a kids movie.
