Richard Basehart

 

  1. Cesar Romero, Love That Brute, 1949.     Or Turned Up Toes when being shot… Head Fox Darryl Z Zanuck suggested Basehart as Pretty Willie.   Romero was a nostalgic choice. He’d had trhe ldad, Chicago the racketeer Big Ed Hanley, in the 1940 version, Tall, Dark and Handsome, when Willie was Sheldon Leonard, eventual exec producer of The Dick Van Dyke Show, TV, 1961-1966.

  2. James Dean, Giant, 1955.

  3. Gregory Peck, Beloved Infidel, 1958.     When she voted Basehart, director Henry King should have heeded the advice of Hollywood columnist Sheila Graham. After all, this was her story, from her autobiography and F Scott Fitzgerald was her lover, not King’s. Basehart could not have been worse than Peck who called his own performance disastrous. And then some.
  4. Robert Stack, John Paul Jones,  1958.   Warner Bros bought a Jones bio, Clear for Action, for Cagney in 1939.  WWII delayed everything until 1946 when it sank again. Producer Samuel Bronston then agreed to swop his rights to a Charles Lindbergh story for the Jones property and William Dieterle was due to direct with either Hollywood’s Basehart or the UK’s Richard Todd (the most recent Robin Hood) as the American Revolutionary War naval hero. (The Lindbergh film, The Spirit of St Louis, starring James Stewart, was shot first in 1955).
  5. Karlheinz Boehm, Rififi à Tokyo, France, 1962. Realisateur Jacques Deray wanted the American for his French thriller but MGM preferred Böehm because of his Sissi breakthrough. During the film, Böehm met his third wife, Barbara Lass,  then Mrs Roman Polanski.  
  6. Richard Burton, Cleopatra, 1962.
  7. Macdonald Carey, End of the World, 1977.   Newly installed in Hollywood at suggestion of Billy Wilder and Richard Widmarkk, Lee aimed to avoid horror vehicles and was “conned’ in to this Z sf number, on the promise of co-starring with vets like Basehart, John Carradine, José Ferrer, Arthur Kennedy. “That’s all right by me. But it turned out it was a complete lie.”  

 Birth year: 1914Death year: 1984Other name: Casting Calls:  7