How about William Shatner vs. George Takei, Nichelle Nichols, and James Doohan?
I don’t think Vivian Vance and William Frawley were too fond of each other.
Also, Robert Reed pretty much hated The Brady Bunch (thought it was beneath him as an actor) and I don’t think he got along too well with the rest of the cast (or rather, they with him).
I also heard that Robert Reed didn’t much care for the Brady Bunch, however, I also heard that he had a good relationship with his cast mates. Even though he was considered difficult to work with, he was genuinely liked by them, and the child actors especially looked up to him.
I heard Bruce Willis couldn’t stand Richard Gere when they were filming The Jackal. Something to do with Gere’s buddhism
Sellers had scooped caviar with his bare hands. He wiped it off, but did not wash his hands. He shook hands with the producer who then put a canape in his mouth. He smells his hand then looks at his girlfriend, Claudine Longet, implying he suspected her personal hygiene.
Mentioned in post #5
the very first james bond movie (david niven in the starring role,) orson wells and peter sellers cannot be in the same room at the same time. filming them in one scene was difficult.
Well, Jon Lovitz (who worked with him on Newsradio) holds him responsible for getting Phil Hartman’s wife re-addicted to cocaine, indirectly leading to Phil’s murder.
That’s disappointing…any idea why? They both come off as pretty easy-going, friendly guys.
After I Love Lucy ended the network wanted to do a Fred & Ethel spinoff, but Vance declined (Frawley was all for it) because she didn’t want to work with him again (although she did return for The Luci-Desi Comedy Hour). According to one account she was in a bar when she first heard of his death. Her response was to order champagne for the entire room.
Part of the reason for their problems was that Frawley was 22 years older than Vance, one account said she thought he looked more like her father than her husband.
That’s not entirely true. Garrett had a career as a stage actor and appeared on Broadway six times. It is true however that he was hired as a writer and wasn’t expected to be seen onscreen.
Other SNL fueds:
Nora Dunn is most famous for refusing to perform the night that Andrew Dice Clay guest-hosted. Making matters worse, Dunn reportedly did not bother to inform anyone in the cast beforehand. She went straight to the news media, and most of the cast & crew only learned about her boycott when they read the papers. Afterwards, the cast took a vote on whether she should be allowed to remain on the show and the vote was unanimous to get rid of her. (It was apparently the last straw in a long string of incidents of Dunn being “difficult.”)
Jeanine Garafalo spent barely a year on the show. She quit the show in a huff because she felt the show was misogynistic and that the writers refused to write skits for the female cast members. But in a move similar to Dunn’s, Garafalo did not tell anyone associated with the show that she was leaving. Instead, she went running to every news outlet she could to chew out the show.
Daman Wayans likewise spent less than a year on the show, and felt slighted by the writing staff - he felt because he was black. Frustrated by his marginal roles, Wayans went on live TV and completely changed his character. He was supposed to play a tough cop, instead he acted like a flamboyant gay cop and stole the spotlight. He was immediately fired for sabotaging a live broadcast.
Source for all three stories - Live From New York: An Uncensored History of SNL.
More vaudeville and baseball, I don’t think think they made any films, but Nick Altrock and Al Schacht had a tempestuous career of about 15 years together. Both were former baseball pitchers (Altrock had been a hero of the 1906 “Hitless Wonders” White Sox that upset the more powerful Cubs) that ended up with the Washington Senators. Altrock as a coach had been doing comedy bits, imitating featherweight boxer Tommy Kilbane and knocking himself out to the crowd’s approval
in 1912. Schacht joined the team several years later, was known as a funny guy, and at the urging of teammates the two worked together. Neither liked the other much but in those days comedy dous were popular. Their styles complemented each other: Altrock was improvisational where Schacht was meticulously thought out with assorted props. They would imitate popular sporting events of the day such as the Dempsey-Tunney fight and Lenglen vs Willis tennis matches. In the offseason when they weren’t coaches with the Senators, they went on the vaudeville circuit.
They spent an inordinate amount of time with each other at work and hotel roommates with the Senators. Altrock wasn’t always reliable, he might show up drunk or miss an performance with Schacht didn’t care for. Eventually at at Boston train station in 1935 Schacht yelled at Altrock who retaliated by hitting him with a suitcase. The act was broken up, Schacht went to Boston and on his own in theaters and baseball parks. Being better organized, Schacht apparently was able to earn $50,000 a year. He ended up owning a restaurant in Manhattan while Altrock stayed as a coach with the Senators until 1954, retiring at age 77. Despite the efforts of Senators owner Clark Griffith, who liked both men, they never patched things up.
Lots of this comes from the 1990 Baseball Book by Bill James
Nitpick: Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte starred Olivia de Havilland, not Joan Crawford. But your point is well taken.
Which is a nice segue to the very real and bitter feud that has lasted for over 70 years, or perhaps for their entire lives, between the two sisters, Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland.
Both of whom, I was astonished to discover as I did a tiny bit of research about this, are still alive and in their 90’s! Death pool, anyone?
Roddy
My little sister loved “Gone With the Wind,” and one Halloween when she was 8 and I was 10, she dressed up as de Havilland’s character Melanie Hamilton Wilkes, who other characters in the movie called “Miss Mellie.”
So for the last 40 years, I have cracked myself up by calling my sister “Miss Smelly.”
Thought I’d share that.
Suzanne Somers and Joyce DeWitt have not spoken to this day. Somers claims she reconciled and spoke with John Ritter a couple of times before he died, but for many years after her departure from Three’s Company they detested her. They liked Priscilla Barnes better but Barnes, a stage and “serious” actress, hated the role and only went on because her agent had contractually obligated her; she has said in interviews she never made as much money as she did on that show but the happiest day of her life was the day it ended.
Eve mentioned Joe E. Ross; I was really surprised to learn some while ago the degree to which they all hated him. If the show had returned for another year he would not have because Gwynne, Al Lewis and most of the rest of the cast said they wouldn’t come back if he did because he was unprofessional, mean, dirty (both physically and in the profane sense), brought prostitutes onto the set- basically Andy Kaufman’s Tony Clifton. On a documentary made a few years ago- many years after his death- Charlotte Rae broke the rules about not trashing co-stars in general and dead ones in particular and called him “that dreadful little toad” or something similar.
Speaking of, Andy Kaufman was- completely understandably- hated by most of his Taxi co-stars.
Going back longer than most Dopers can remember, Charley Weaver (real name Cliff Arquette- grandfather of David and his siblings) wasn’t quite as unpopular on the set of Hollywood Squares but was very wild, including bringing prostitutes to his dressing room and partying up. Paul Lynde could be- especially when on a drinking binge- a uniquely unpleasant individual far worse than his on screen persona and with a side of weird.
Ian McShane and David Milch evidently despised each other while making Deadwood. McShane, in spite of the awards and career boost he got from the show, has said he has no interest in doing a reunion movie while Milch to this day still says he wishes Ed O’Neill had been available for the part instead. Both come across like they need a good “get the feck over yourself” slapping. McShane took some jabs (said jocularly but with a 'Many a truth is said in jest" sound) towards Timothy Olyphant as well for his lack of emoting and lack of rehearsing.
I think the Cindy Williams/Penny Marshall feud was exaggerated and the real truth was they just weren’t close. Both have said they became better friends long after the show was cancelled than they ever were while on it, and Williams has said that the nepotism on the show (Marshall’s brother was the producer and half their family worked on it in some capacity) made her feel excluded as did the pay differential. (Marshall was bigger at the time due to her Odd Couple credits and earned a lot more.)
There were many tabloid stories about major tension on the set of Mad About You after Helen Hunt eclipsed Paul Reiser by winning an Oscar. Because it was in his contract that he always earn $1 more than she did he ended up earning an obscene amount of money when they raised her to something close to $1 million per episode.
Even Jerry Lewis’s versions of his behavior during the Martin-Lewis years make you side with Dean. Everybody who knew Dean well said it was impossible to know Dean well- he basically came in, did his work, went home, preferred solitude, rarely got deep. Lewis was, and is, a whining self absorbed narcissistic jackwagon and by his own admission would fake heart attacks and other illnesses when Martin was getting more attention than he was. (He later had a real heart attack on the set of one of his movies and- like Redd Foxx when he had his fatal heart attack- many people laughed and applauded thinking it was fake.)
Erich von Stroheim and Billy Wilder did not get along on the set of Sunset Boulevard, and he had a not-all-positive history with Swanson as well. Wilder was particularly irked by von Stroheim’s continual suggestions and attempts to co-direct (though in fairness he had a bit of a rep as a good 'un) and the fact he neglected to mention he couldn’t drive until the day he was supposed to drive onscreen (a scene he knew was coming up) didn’t endear him either.
Jan Hooks and Victoria Jackson were another famous SNL rivalry. Hooks once screamed at her (by her own admission) “You’re not three, use your goddamned lower register!” in front of the studio audience (but off camera) during one of their fights. Hooks has gone onto a career in episodic guest appearances and some great single performances but not a stellar career, and Jackson is not only a Tea Partier but a particularly stupid and insipid and clownish one.
The set of Growing Pains was pretty miserable due to Tracey Gold’s mental problems and eating disorder and Kirk Cameron’s obnoxious fundamentalism (e.g. calling the network execs at home complaining they were trying to force him to do porn because of a scene where he was supposed to be in bed with a girl in a non-sexual context).
James Cagney seemed to like most of the people whom he worked with, even George Raft (whom many detested for running crooked card games, and hanging with criminal types) whom he identified with as a former hoofer (dancer). Well, S.Z. Sakall in “Yankee Doodle Dandy” he didn’t care for but he saw him as a harmless old ham whom director Michael Curtiz put in his place. But Cagney detested his “One, Two, Three” co-star Horst Buchholtz, saying if he kept up his scene-stealing, he would have knocked him on his ass and enjoyed doing so. At the time, Cagney was 62 and Buchholz 28.
I don’t know about Carvey, but Myers is said to take his work *way *too seriously.
My guess, and it’s only that, is that their heads were in really different places. Carvey, the father of two (then-) young sons (Both are now college age), wanted to make the kind of movies he was comfortable seeing with them. Hence, The Master of Disguise.
Myers, by contrast, had some fairly artistic ambitions, coupled with genuinely puerile comic sensibilities, and (until recently) no children. He was fine with the juxtaposition of Sartre references and “machine gun jubblies” of the various movies he made in the 90s and '00s, and kind of accidentally became a children’s entertainer via Shrek and The Cat in the Hat. He was really operating in a different league than Carvey, both professionally and artistically. His rankest failures are more watchable than Carvey’s proudest successes of late. (Honestly, which would you rather see: The Love Guru or Blank Slate? Let’s say a gun at your head was involved.) No one wants to see a Wayne’s World 3.
My hunch is that Myers loves Carvey like a brother. I’ve got a brother I can avoid seeing for 20 years at a stretch. I’m sure they’ll work together again at some future point, but it is not a relationship between equals and really never was.
Topher Grace was despised by That 70’s Show cast and crew by the end of the series. He considered himself a serious actor and wanted out of the sitcom. He didn’t attend the wrap party when the show ended.
Tina Louise was well known to consider herself above the rest of the cast on Gilligan’s Island, but she also disliked Dawn Wells who regularly received more fan mail.
On the Munsters, Yvonne DeCarlo was received coldly by the rest of the cast who assumed she would be a diva because of her film background. She turned out to be a warm and friendly person who never placed herself above the others.