Missed Opportunity or Good Decision?
If you don’t want the job, someone else will
Gary Cooper won the Oscar for the 1952 movie High Noon, but he wasn’t the first choice for the lead role.
He wasn’t the second choice either. Or even the third or … let’s just say there’s a long list of leading men who chose not to lead for this particular film.
High Noon producer Stanley Kramer first offered the town marshal role of Will Kane to a guy named John Wayne (officially Marion Michael Morrison). Wayne turned down the job for political reasons that are barely understood anymore.
Then Kramer offered the marshal’s role to Gregory Peck. No thanks, said GP. After that Kramer extended offers to other actors you might have heard about. In no particular order, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift and Charlton Heston got the call and didn’t take the offer. And for all we know in the cheap seats, there may have been others.
Hello, didn’t anyone want the job? Well, there was one fellow. What was his name again? Cooper? Oh, yeah. Gary Cooper. Pretty good actor. And for his troubles he took home the Oscar. Not bad for being the producer’s sixth choice.
All those A-list actors had reasons for turning down the job. And some of them later had regrets, especially Wayne and Peck.
Did Wayne, Peck, Brando, Clift and Heston make bad decisions? Or was something else going on? Maybe they truly made the right decisions for themselves. Or maybe they wouldn’t have had the success that Cooper did and High Noon would have been just an average Western without him.
Or, some might say Cooper was destined for the role of Will Kane and that all these other luminaries had to get out of the way to give Kramer a chance to hire the right actor. It’s a possibility, but it doesn’t seem likely that anyone has proof.
Some say yes, some say no
Hollywood is rife with stories of actors who had grand success in roles after the first choices declined, so in that regard, High Noon has no special claim on that turn of events.
Rod Steiger, for instance, turned down the lead in Patton and The Godfather. Or maybe in some timeline of the Mandela effect, Steiger did take those roles and win high honors. Of course, in the timeline I know about, Steiger won an Oscar for In the Heat of the Night (1967).
Then there’s Julia Roberts. She appeared to be well on her way to movie fame after Mystic Pizza (1988) and Steel Magnolias (1989) when she took a role as Hollywood hooker Vivian Ward.
You guessed it. Roberts got the job after several other top actresses had turned it down.
The movie? Pretty Woman (1990). Her co-star? Richard Gere. The actresses who didn’t say yes include Meg Ryan, Molly Ringwald, Michelle Pfeiffer, Karen Allen, Daryl Hannah and Jennifer Jason Leigh.
For every movie, TV show and big-time play, there are probably similar casting decisions, and we’ll never hear about most of them. It’s just the way things work. And who’s to say what the right answer is.