- Margot Kidder, Superman, 1977.
- Jessica Lange, Frances, 1982. Howard Hawks said she always seemed to be shining. “More talent than anyone I ever worked with.” She and Vivien Leigh were beaten by Ingrid Bergman to For Whom The Bell Tolls, 1943 She’s the subject of various books, plays (viz Sally Clarke’s Saint Frances of Hollywood), pop and rock songs – French-Canadian singer Mylène Farmer even took her name. All actresses loved her talent and guts (when wrongfully committed to asylums by her parents) and wanted to play… Frances Farmer. From the sublime to the ridiculous: Meryl Streep, to Susan Dey of TV’s Partridge Family. Kim Basinger tested with Sam Shepard (Lange’s future husband). Undaunted, Susan Blakely made her own 1983 TVersion (from Farmer’s own book, Will There Really Be A Morning?). Next up? Anne Archer, Blythe Danner, Patty Duke, Mia Farrow, Sally Field, Jane Fonda, Goldie Hawn, Glenda Jackson, Diane Keaton, Liza Minnelli, Katharine Ross, Susan Sarandon, Cybill Shepherd, Sissy Spacek, Tuesday Weld, Natalie Wood. Plus Constance Money, who met with producer Mel Brooks and debuting director Graeme Clifford. They liked her. Not her CV. Seven porno films in three years. Even if they used her real name (Sue Jensen), someone would have blown an expensive whistle about her hardcore career.
- Diane Keaton, The Good Mother, 1988. Offers flowed in after Fatal Attraction.
- Sigourney Weaver, Working Girl, 1988. “But you have to make choices true to your heart.”
- Kathleen Turner, The Accidental Tourist, 1988. She did a commercial for a wine cooler, instead. “Paid well and got me home early.”
- Barbara Hershey, Beaches, 1988. Director Garry Marshall saw Anne Archer and Donna Mills for Bette Midler’s best friend in the semi-musical soap. But he actually tested the possible Hershey-Midler rapport on the set of Bette’s Big Business comedy in 1987.
- Jacqueline Bisset, Wild Orchid, l990. “A quite nice, large role in the script but they certainly didn’t shoot it that way,” she told me in Cannes. “My deal was contingent on them doing certain things [excising nudity]. Those things did not occur, so I left. They couldn’t sue me… but I could’ve sued them.”
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Various books and websites say that Archer was up for the sensuous Dolly Harshaw – finding sex in car more fun than eating cotton-candy barefoot – in Dennis Hopper’s The Hot Spot, 1989. Not true! Fiercely anti-nudty in her career, Archer had been due opposite Sam Shepard in a Mike Figgis heist film with the same title. When replacing the UK director, Hopper totally changed the gig – dropping the Figgis script for a noir Hot Spot, written in 1962 by Nona Tyson and the novel’s author Charles Williams for Robert Mitchum. In ’89, Don Johnson played the amoral drifter. His wife, Melanie Griffith, had refused Dolly, being pregnant with Dakota Johnson… the 2014-2017 star of the Fifty Shades of Grey franchise, decidedly far less steamy than what Hopper loved to call Last Tango in Texas.
Birth year: Death year: Other name: Casting Calls: 7