20 Iconic Movie Roles That Almost Went To Someone Else

When MGM purchased the rights to L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz in early 1938, MGM studio chief Louis B. Mayer suggested that they borrow 20th Century Fox’s premier child actress, Shirley Temple, to portray Dorothy. Mayer’s producers, Mervyn LeRoy and Arthur Freed, championed Judy Garland instead, a young, singing teenager already signed to MGM. MGM’s vocal coach, Roger Edens, also felt Temple’s high voice was too light for the songs. Garland got the role, and the role became legendary.

Actress Paulette Goddard, who was living with Charlie Chaplin, gave the best screen test for the lead role in David O. Selznick’s film version of Gone With the Wind. But there was no legal proof that she and Chaplin were married, and Selznick feared the ensuing publicity would be a disaster. British actress Vivien Leigh came in late but got the role and eventually the Best Actress Oscar.

In about 1957, MGM wanted to cast star Burt Lancaster as Judah Ben-Hur, the Jewish prince at the heart of William Wyler’s big-budget Roman epic. As a devout atheist, he balked at the film’s Christian agenda. According to one source, he told Wyler: “Why do you want to do this piece of crap?” He rejected the $1 million offer. The part went to Charlton Heston, who won the Best Actor Oscar as the movie scooped up 11 Academy Awards.

In 1953, producer Sam Spiegel hired singer Frank Sinatra to portray dockworker Terry Malloy in Elia Kazan’s labor union film On the Waterfront. In fact, Sinatra was already doing his wardrobe fitting in Hoboken, New Jersey. Kazan wanted Marlon Brando, though, and Spiegel understood that hiring Brando would more than double the value of Columbia’s distribution deal, from about $400,000 to nearly $900,000. He dropped Sinatra, who then sued for breach of contract. Brando played the part and earned an Academy Award for Best Actor.

Hal Wallis, Warner Bros.’ leading producer, had wanted Austrian actress Hedy Lamarr, under exclusive contract to rival studio MGM, to play Ilsa Lund opposite Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine in Casablanca, but MGM chief Louis B. Mayer wouldn’t loan her to a competitor. Instead, Wallis borrowed Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman from producer David O. Selznick, and one of the great romances in film history was born.

In about 1930, Universal Studios head Carl Laemmle Jr. purchased the film rights to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with Lon Chaney Sr., the studio’s biggest horror star, in mind. Chaney died in August of that year, aged 47, after a throat hemorrhage caused by lung cancer. He never had the chance to start shooting. The movie’s director, Tod Browning, decided to turn to Hungarian stage actor Bela Lugosi instead, who had recently played the role on Broadway. It was Lugosi who established the image of the vampire on the silver screen.

Merian C. Cooper, the producer-director who wrote the female lead in King Kong, Ann Darrow, wanted MGM’s platinum-blonde star Jean Harlow for the part. MGM chief Louis B. Mayer refused to loan his top star to his rival at RKO. Cooper brought in Fay Wray, reportedly telling her that she was going to play opposite “the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood.” She thought he meant a man, and certainly not a 50-foot-tall stop-motion gorilla. This would make her the definitive scream queen of the cinema.

Following Dracula, Universal Pictures’ biggest horror star Bela Lugosi shot a screen test for the monster, a silent and horribly deformed character, in Frankenstein, directed by James Whale. Upset that he had no lines to speak and couldn’t be recognized beneath the heavy prosthetics, Lugosi was said to have rejected the role of “a halfwit extra” and left. Whale turned to an obscure British actor, Boris Karloff, whose touching portrayal of the monster turned Karloff into an international movie star, surpassing the fame of Lugosi himself.

In 1938, producer David O. Selznick tried to get star Gary Cooper to play Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind. Cooper refused, citing the lackluster box office performance of Civil War pictures. Decades later, biographer Hector Arce wrote that Cooper confided he expected the film would “be the biggest flop in Hollywood history.” He was happy that it would not be him “falling flat on his nose.” Instead, it was Clark Gable who would take the part, and turn it into legend.

In approximately 1948, the movie producer/director Billy Wilder offered comedian Mae West the lead role of Norma Desmond, an aging silent-screen actress, in Sunset Boulevard. Offended by the suggestion that she should play an aging has-been, she countered that she was just hitting her stride, and Wilder would have to rework the story into a love affair. Wilder refused and eventually gave the part to another old-time silent star, Gloria Swanson. Swanson was nominated for an Academy Award for the role.

When producer Walter Wanger finally agreed to finance director John Ford’s Western, Stagecoach, he insisted on having Gary Cooper as the Ringo Kid, the lead. Ford refused and said the part should go to John Wayne, a B-movie actor who had been starring in cheap Westerns for 10 years. Ford said he’d abandon the picture altogether if Wanger insisted on Cooper. Wanger backed down. Wayne made a striking entrance in the film and instantly became an A-list star.

Oscar-winner Claudette Colbert was already cast as Broadway starlet Margo Channing in All About Eve when she sustained a herniated disc in her back while working on another film and was told to stay in bed for the rest of the shoot. With filming about to start, producer Darryl F. Zanuck approached Bette Davis with the part at only 10 days’ notice, and Davis’s subsequent Oscar nomination turned around her career.

Gale Sondergaard, an Oscar-winning actress, was the first witch selected for The Wizard of Oz when producer Mervyn LeRoy thought that she would make a handsome and seductive villain, even having her photographed in sequined black dresses. Then, when the team decided the character needed to be an ugly, traditional crone instead, Sondergaard refused the makeup and left. Character actress Margaret Hamilton replaced her and became one of cinema’s best villains.

In 1951, George Stevens, making the Western Shane about a lone drifter, wanted the young and promising Montgomery Clift to play the lead. Clift refused, feeling that he didn’t want to be identified with Westerns and was looking for parts in modern films. Stevens cast Alan Ladd, who became the quintessential archetype of the American Western with his stoic portrayal.

RKO Pictures purchased the rights to the story behind It’s a Wonderful Life in 1943 as a vehicle for star Cary Grant, but its writers could not fashion it for his debonair image. In 1945, Frank Capra formed a production company, bought the rights from RKO, and cast James Stewart, drawn to his homespun warmth. Stewart gave the performance of his life as George Bailey.

In 1950, director Elia Kazan gave the part of fragile Southern belle Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire to Oscar winner Olivia de Havilland. De Havilland turned it down. She’d just had a son, Benjamin, in 1949, and needed some time with him. Warner Bros. also had failed to reach a salary agreement with her. Kazan cast Vivien Leigh instead. Leigh had previously played Blanche on the London stage and won her second Best Actress Oscar for it.

Don Lockwood, the protagonist in the 1952 movie Singin’ in the Rain, was conceived around 1950 by producer Arthur Freed and his writing staff as a singing cowboy for MGM baritone Howard Keel. But when the scenario changed to that of a former silent-film star who now performs as a vaudeville song-and-dance man, the part required a professional dancer. That’s where the idea to have Gene Kelly star and co-direct came from, and it became one of the best-known movies ever made.

In 1951, the producer Stanley Kramer offered the role of Marshal Will Kane in High Noon to established dramatic actor Gregory Peck. However, Peck rejected the offer because he feared repeating his recent portrayal of an aging, lonely, and unsuccessful gunslinger in The Gunfighter. Gary Cooper was cast in the role instead and won the Academy Award for Best Actor. Years later, Peck stated that not doing High Noon was the greatest regret of his career.

Director Billy Wilder signed Montgomery Clift, then 28 and a hot up-and-coming star, to play Joe Gillis, a young screenwriter living off an aging silent star, in Sunset Boulevard, two weeks before shooting began in 1949. But Clift broke the contract. An older former Broadway actress was his secret lover, and friends warned Clift that the movie mirrored his own life too closely. Wilder quickly recast the part, bringing in William Holden, who gave one of his greatest performances.

Warner Bros. contract star George Raft, famous for his gangster pictures, declined the lead in 1941’s The Maltese Falcon. He cited a contract clause against remakes of a story that had already flopped twice on screen, and he was reluctant to risk his career with first-time director John Huston. Humphrey Bogart took the part and became one of the biggest stars of all time. Two years later, Raft said he would take the lead in director Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity only if it was rewritten as a cop role. Wilder said no, and Fred MacMurray took it.

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