Roles that were NOT perfectly cast--and yet the actor still made it work

*Sorry, I meant "LESS than indomitable."

Missuh Moore!

"Esmiss Esmoor!"

Judy Garland as Dorothy Gale.

L. Frank Baum's Dorothy is supposed to be six years old., not sixteen. Shirley Temple, the first choice for the role, would have been much closer to the age the character was supposed to be. and yet Garland made it her greatest role.

Glenn Close in Dangerous Liaisons. She's not exactly a raving beauty but she was great in the role.

[quote] yet Garland made it her greatest role.

No that was Jenny Bowman in I Could Go On Singing.

I’d add Malkovich for Dangerous Liaisons, as well.

Jennifer Lawrence has made a career out of being miscast, thanks to David O. Russell thinking she could play forty year old housewives as a glamorous twenty-something starlet. But it never mattered that much, because she had such the perfect energy for a Russell movie.

Robert Redford in Out of Africa. Denys Finch-Hatton was an Englishman who looked like Rupert Everett, but if the movie works at all, it's because of Redford's charisma.

Jennifer Lawrence in Winter’s Bone was a more mind blowing experience, especially once you got to know her even more than her being an unknown. .

Shelly Winters in a Place in the Sun.

Maybe Sharon Tate in VOTD. She’s a little too small-breasted for the role to fully make sense. Raquel Welch, who turned it down, would’ve made more sense. But I’m not sure how she would’ve worked in Jennifer’s later scenes.

[quote] Glenn Close in Dangerous Liaisons. She's not exactly a raving beauty but she was great in the role.

Her not being a raving beauty suits the role. It goes towards explaining her desperation.

I don't think Glenn Close's role is supposed to be a great beauty in Dangerous Liaisons.

In all the Broadway productions they never cast beauties: Lindsay Duncan, Laura Linney, Janet McTeer.

Al Pacino as Michael in The Godfather. Nobody wanted him except Coppola. The studio thought he was ugly and too short. In the book Michael is a kind of college football type. But Pacino certainly made the role his own.

Sigourney Weaver in GALAXY QUEST. The role calls for a lightweight busty blonde (think Heather Locklear) but serious raven-haired Sigourney got cast against type and pulls it off hilariously.

What do you mean, OP? Are you saying that people like Judy Davis should NOT be cast in certain roles.

She did get 3 years training at the The National Institute of Dramatic Art. She's no bimbo off the street who got cast in movies due to her ravishing looks and 'the casting couch!

r16 It was genuinely considered in reviews that Davis was miscast in that film but made it work anyway. The character in the book is very naïve, shy and innocent. Davis has a sophistication and intelligence about her that she just can't hide. Plus she comes across as a strong woman which the character is not.

The film still worked overall but they should have cast someone like Meg Tilly in the role.

'A Passage To India' had a few problems —not least its rambling, unresolved plot— but that women you mention (who was born Margaret Chan) would have kept audiences away.

Well, there that whole Ben Kingsley thing and Ghandi, who ever thought that would work?

Oh, and not to mention Linda Hunt in The Year of Living Dangerously. It’s like how did she even think I’m going to show up and audition for a role as an Asian man?

I doubt Meg Tilly would have kept audiences away. She wasn't that well known and it wasn't really known she was half Asian. I didn't necessarily mean that she should have got the role just that she was the go to person for innocent unworldly characters (Agnes of God, The Big Chill) during those years. Someone with that sort of innocent demeanor should have been cast. (somebody British probably would have been best.)

Linda Hunt in The Year of Living Dangerously would be a scandal nowadays. She wore yellow makeup to her audition to look Asian. I realize Asian dwarf may be a hard role to cast but you'd think they could have found one somewhere.

Stephen King's "The Shining" described Wendy as a blonde knockout. Shelley Duvall had her own weird glamour (see Three Women), but Kubrick didn't let her bring that to the table and instead accentuated her oddities. It is one of the most memorable roles on screen as far as I'm concerned and Duvall's extraordinary physical fragility put across how much she is intimidated and possibly abused by her husband.

Until seeing her actually do it in "Paper Moon" I would never have envisioned Madeline Kahn as a sex bomb.

The greatest of all, (in my opinion): Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf is supposed to be a middle-aged, overweight, coarse, vulgar. alcoholic battle-ax. So who do they cast? A 32 yr old considered the most strikingly beautiful actress in Hollywood. What a horrible idea!

Then Elizabeth Taylor deservedly won her second Oscar, (after her undeserved first), in the greatest performance of her or anybody's career.

Mary Tyler Moore in Ordinary People

These three people were supposed to be brother and sisters. Ludicrous casting and it didn't work!

Taylor in WAOVW seems like an obvious choice.

I don’t like that performance though.

Olivia De Havilland in The Heiress.

She was far too beautiful for the role, and they downplayed that, but she really made it work by so powerfully conveying Catherine's excruciating awkwardness and lack of self-esteem. Even though there was nothing really wrong with her looks, you could see how even brief interactions at parties were so stilted and uneasy as to be unbearable.

What I love about that performance is that you could almost cut it out and put it in a modern film, and it would still work, because of its intensity. It isn't anywhere near as mannered as performances often were during that era.

R25 but interestingly that movie changed how we (the public) saw Elizabeth Taylor.

Instead of seeing her as a glamourous, most beautiful movie star in the world, we started seeing her as: middle aged, overweight, and crass. And younger people (well not really young anymore) still have a hard time remembering/imagining that, once upon a time, she was NOT that way.

So the movie really did help shape her image for the latter part of her career, just as Ordinary People reshaped MTMs (no one ever saw her as “cold” before that, but then you go back and watch those shows and...of course she was, how did we not see that?)

Humphrey Bogart as Linus Larrabee in [italic]Sabrina[/italic] - We're supposed to believe that Humphrey Bogart is so inexperienced with women that he has no idea how to court Sabrina, dressing up in his college gear from the 20s. Honey, please. But I love this movie and have watched it several times. He does his own thing, playing a man who's so obsessed with business he has never gotten around to having a private life until Sabrina.

R30 Absolute agreement. I had actually written an additional paragraph making the same point, but hit the wrong button and accidentally deleting it. You were far more articulate anyway.

Damage wasn't a great film and the casting was all wrong. Jeremy Irons (then 41) and Miranda Richardson (31) as a Tory MP and his aloof wife, with their handsome son Rupert Graves (26) and his enigmatic girlfriend Juliette Binoche (25) who ends up having brutal degrading sex with Irons.

Richardson was sensational.

R31 Humphrey Bogart was hopeless in Sabrina. The role was meant for Cary Grant.

Bogart always gives me the impression he's about to run off the set and vomit into a bucket.

Last night I watched "Casino Royale" and the lust came raging back as soon as Daniel Craig appeared onscreen. Je might not be classically hamdsome, but he's so sexy.

R33, it was extraordinary how Richardson was able to completely convince with her body language and expressions that she was of an age with Irons. It wasn't done through makeup or anything superficial, it was all her.

Juliette Binoche was so painfully miscast there. She did NOT make it work.

R17 Are you saying Meg Tilly is not intelligent?

Dustin Hoffman in Agatha. He was so much shorter than Vanessa Redgrave and supposed to be her protector. But I thought it worked well, anyway.

I love that film.

[quote] In all the Broadway productions they never cast beauties: Lindsay Duncan, Laura Linney, Janet McTeer.

Lindsay Duncan is a beauty.

no r37 I just meant she was good at conveying innocence and naivety .

I think Laura Linney is georgous/ageless.

I can't believe this hasn't been posted yet. Considering all her previous movie roles leading up, and what the part itself called for, Glenn Close was SO WRONG for Fatal Attraction. Then look what happened!

Watch the movie now, you can't imagine anybody else.

R42 oooh, good one. She definitely didn’t have the right look. And yet, she created an incredibly unique character and was the best part of the movie.

[quote]Dustin Hoffman in Agatha. He was so much shorter than Vanessa Redgrave and supposed to be her protector. But I thought it worked well, anyway.

Julie Christie was originally cast but broke her wrist rollerskating.

Absolutely R1! I’ve encountered Judy Davis a couple of times over the years and she is ABSOLUTELY TERRIFYING.

The story of Judy Davis realizing on the first day of shooting of "A Passage to India" that Sir David Lean was a horrible bully and then deciding to bully him right back is still one of my favorite backset stories. He had had a reputation for being one of the meanest directors working, and she was the first female actor in his career really to shove him right back on his feet.

I deeply respect her (she is truly one of the handful of greatest actors working in the English-speaking world), but I would NOT want her angry with me.

Jonathan Pryce was not complimentary about Davis on the aborted film they were making with River Phoenix when he died.

But then Martine McMunching was not complimentary about working with Pryce on My Fair Lady.

If we're adding theatre performances, I'd say Bernadette Peters as Rose in Gypsy. This was a role long associated with loud, strong, bossy broads who were usually physically intimidating to some degree. You wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of Merman, Lansbury, or Daly. With Peters, you had a Rose who was much more childlike and calculating. She used her sexuality to get what she wanted more than her loud mouth or aggressive force. It was a fascinating performance that made me feel like I was seeing the show in a totally new light. The production had some issues, but Peters was the least of their concerns.

There's a really awful bootleg going around from a preview performance and this probably hasn't helped the legacy of her performance at all.

R46 Judy Davis is a termagant.

She bad-mouths every direct she's had. She bad-mouths her husband.

R49 You go gurl with your Word A Day calendar!

r42 Yes that is a great one. On the DVD commentary tracks the producers say how Close's agent approached them and they struggled with how to reject her. They said they had enormous respect for her talent but didn't want to see her because they thought she was all wrong for it. They didn't want to have to decline her so I guess they relented and let her come in.

I guess she really impressed them because she got the role. There are early rehearsal or screen tests of her with Michael Douglas and she is almost as good there as she was in the finished product.

Adrian Lyne said she wanted the role so much that her enthusiasm appealed to him and he thought she'd work hard at the part.

David Lean was a typical white male of his day, I believe. He supposedly agreed to Rod Steiger assaulting Julie Christie to get a certain reaction from her in Dr. Zhivago. Not exactly a nice guy.

Tommy Lee Jones as Mooney Lynn in "Coal Miner's Daughter." Sissy Spacek as Loretta Lynn as well. Very little physical resemblance between the two couples. It helped that SS could actually sing like Loretta. Also, SS and TLJ had realistic chemistry with each other.