Jane Fonda

Posted on by Tony CrawleyCategories:Actors

 

  1. Jean Seberg, Saint Joan, 1957.
    In Marshalltown, Iowa, Seberg was the baby-sitter for Mary Beth Hurt, who grew up to play Seberg(in voice-over) in the documentary,From the Journals of Jean Seberg, 1995. The script had her revealing that bothJane and Vanessa Redgrave auditioned for producer-director-ogre Otto Preminger. He also considered Ursula Andress, Julie Andrews, Anne Bancroft, Claire Bloom, Carol Burnett, Joan Collins, Sophia Loren, Shirley MacLaine, Mary Tyler Moore, Kim Novak (from Otto’s Man With The Golden Arm, 1955),Debbie Reynolds, Maggie Smith, Liz Taylor.  And… Mamie Van Doren!

  2. Sandra Dee, A Summer Place, 1959.     The family name was no help when she tested with Michael Callan – eventually her fella in Cat Ballou, 1965. “I never wanted to be an actor,” she told The Hollywood Reporter in 2015. “My dad was an actor, and he never brought joy home, so I didn’t view it as something that I would want to do. But I got fired as a secretary, and then I started studying, and Lee Strasberg said I was talented, so I started doing it just to earn money… I probably would have become a landscape architect.”
  3. Diane Jergens. The FBI Story, 1959.     Jane’s debut was almost as James Stewart’s daughter. Years later, she was on the FBI’s black list . Her secret, she said, was resilience. “You’re either born with it or you’re not.  And this is a business as a performer. It’s so hard.  You will get so much rejection.  My first movie, Tall Story, the director told me I should break my jaw and have my molars taken out, so that my face would be more shapely.  Jack Warner told me I had to wear falsies.  I mean, every insult that could be thrown at my physical self… Plus bad reviews.  And you know, it’s just really, really hard on the heart and the nerves.  It’s good for the heart actually; it’s bad for the nerves.  So you have to be resilient.”
  4. Leslie Caron, Fanny, 1960.    Jane can talk the talk, but not walk the walk of the Marseilles teenager in the Marcel Pagnol stage,  screen, even musical classic.  Her audition  proved that. Pity, she was a better age at 23 than Caron’s 30. 
  5. Connie Stevens, Parrish, 1961.     She tested with Warren Beatty.   (Troy Donahue got the job).   “We didn’t know each other,” said Beatty. “We were thrown together like lions in a cage and told to kiss. Oh my God! We kissed until we’d practically eaten each other’s head off!”
  6. Natalie Wood, Splendour in the Grass, 1960.      How to fail  a movie break… Fonda tested as Deanie in 1959. Director Elia Kazan asked Jane if she was ambitious. “No,” she lied. (“Good girls aren’t supposed to be ambitious.”) She kept quiet at her next audition and won her debut later that year in Tall Story with Anthony Perkins. Thanks to Josh Logan, the Broadway and Hollywood director and family friend… who first pushed her into acting opposite her father in the 1954 Omaha Community Theatre production of The Country Girl.
  7. Natalie Wood, West Side Story, 1961.     Daft idea.
  8. Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast At Tiffany’s, 1961.     Dafter! Shirley MacLaine andMarilyn Monroe were also sought for Holly Golightly.
  9. Leslie Caron, Fanny, 1961.  Daftest…! Brigitte Bardot was another possibility- both actresses married the French movie-maker Roger Vadim. Leslie had attended the same dance schoolas BB in Paris. In fact, Vadim told me he was the one who suggested Leslie to Gene Kelly for An American In Paris, 1951. Kelly’s then wife, Besty Blair,said it wasanother American in Paris: Eddie Constantine.
  10. Claire Bloom, The Chapman Report, 1963.        Determined to play the nympho, she went to see director George Cukor “all   nymphoed up: very padded chest, very high-up, curled my hair and dreamt up a great nymphomaniac dress.   He laughed me right out of the office… and made me the frigid widow.   That taught me a lesson.” The Havard Lampoon electedher the year’s worst actress.

  11. Diane Baker, Marnie, 1963.     According to her autobiography, Fonda wanted to play Lil  (who had been a fella in one draft).  Alfred  Hitchcock  did not agree.
  12. Natalie Wood, The Great Race, 1964.   Directot Blake Edwards’ first choice was shooting a better comedy, Cat Ballou. Second notion, Lee Remick, was committed to Broadway. Wood accepted the suffragette Maggie DuBois – as long as head Brother Jack Warner agreed to give her Inside Daisy Clover. Director Blake Edwards wished Warner had refused… Blake wanted Patty Duke or Elizabeth Hartman and did not take kindly to the diva-ish Wood. He got his revenge during the largest ever custard pie scene (4,000 pies over five days), hurling them with relish in her face!
  13. Elizabeth Ashley, Ship of Fools, 1964. Not the comedy implied by the tile (all the more so if Cary Grant had accepted  a proferred role)  but a Grand Hotel At Sea  of 30s’ stereotypes  on  a cruise liner going the wrong way – from Mexico to the newly Nazi Germany. Fonda passed the flapper to Ashley, lively lover of  painter James MacArthur.  Author Katherine Anne Porter hated the film making  her novel vulgar and shallow.  That’s Hollywood!
  14. Michelé Merrier, Angélique, Marquise des Anges, France, 1964.      Paris producer Francis Cosne wanted Vadim to direct. Until a Hollywood cable saying:  “Jane Fonda not interested in a costume drama. She also asks me to tell you she will nevermake a film with Roger Vadim.”   Recounted, with relish, by Vadim who not only made films with her, but bedded and wedded her… even though proving impotent at the first try.  (Also in the frame: Virna Lisi, Monica Vitti – and Vadim’s  other wives or lovers: Brigitte Bardot, Catherine Deneuve, Annette Stroyberg).
  15. Carol Lynley, Bunny Lake Is Missing, 1964.     The Columbia suits wanted Fonda and Ryan O’Neal.Producer-director-ogre Otto Preminger did not. He wasn’t keen on Ann-Margret, either.
  16. Julie Christie, Doctor Zhivago, 1965.      “Ever turned down a film and regretted it?  You’d better believe it. Zhivago!” And why? Depends on thed witness… Jane: “Vadim didn’t really want me to go to Spain for that long.”  Vadim:  “Although dying to work with David Lean, she didn’t want to spend seven months  in Spain away from me.” The truth is that Lean fretted over her American accent and asked her agent if she’d agree to be dubbed. Whoops!  Idem for Yvette Mimieux, Jean Seberg) – and Deborah Kerr was too old. Producer Carlo Ponti first bought the rights for his wife, Sophia Loren, to play Lara.   “Too tall,” said Lean!  Like all of us, he  fell for Julie in Billy Liar, 1962 (which toplined his Pasha, Tom Courtenay) and John Ford praised her to him after making Young Cassidy with her the year before.
  17. Julie Christie, Fahrenheit, 1966.  When shooting was slated for the summer of ’64, fireman Montag’s women were French favourites Fonda (or Tippi Hedren) and Jean Seberg as his wife, Linda, and lhis over, Clarisse. Two years later, the French nouvelle vague icon François Truffaut decided against Mia Farrow,  Jane Fonda, or Florence Henderson an selected  Christie – en route to her  Darling  Oscar and Doctor Zhivago – should play both sides of Ray Bradbury’s coin. Precisely the reason why a jealous Terence Stamp quit and his ditto replacement, Oskar Werner, loathed the film. Just not quite as much as Truffaut loathed Werner!
  18. Faye Dunaway, Bonnie and Clyde, 1966.
  19. Katharine Ross, The Graduate, 1967.       
  20. Carol White, Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting, 1968. A smitten (if non-consumating) Frank Sinatra decided to introduce Carolwhite (as he called her) to Hollywood by arranging screenings of Poor Cow, even Cathy Come Home. (The very idea of Old Blue Eyes setting up Ken Loach screenings is beyond belief). (But true). For LA, she was a cheaper Julie Christie, which is why she beat Fonda, Candice Bergen and Marlo Thomas here to… total miscasting! As Chicago critic Roger Ebert pointed out, White was too healthy, too blonde, too fetchingly plump, too simple, too secure, to remotely approach the stature of the haunted heroine. “What was needed was a hyperthyroid brunette with restless eyes.”

  21. Natalie Wood, Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, 1968.     Carol. (Jane Fonda also refused). Having learned her lesson from West Side Story, 1961, Natalie took points in lieu of her usual $750,000 salary and collected  $3m).
  22. Mia Farrow, Rosemary’s Baby, 1968.         “I’ve never been a I’ve made lots of mistakes. I’ve never played it safe. But I’m lucky.” So was Mia. The director, Roman Polanski, took her without a test.
  23. Senta Berger, Les Etrangeres, France-Italy-Spain-West Germany, 1968.  To follow ttheir Classe tous risques(almost obliterated by the Belmondo explosion, A bout de souffle – I saw them both on the same day on my first trip to Paris), scenarist Pascal Jardin wanted Lino Ventura is a film of  the French crime novel, L’Oraison de plus fort.  Ventura even worked on the scenario but despite lofty plans of such co-stars as Jane Fonda, Terence Stamp and Rjchard Boone, Ventura quit and Michel Constantin, fast becoming his stand-in (though lacking his charisma), took over.
  24. Stella Garcia, The Last Movie, 1969.    In the late 60s, when deciding to succeed the late Montgomery Clift as Kansas, director Dennis Hopper  assembled a cast including Fonda, Jennifer Jones, Jason Robards. And then decided not to risk Phil Spector’s promised $1.2m budget. Based on Hopper’s experiences while shooting The Sons of Katie Elder in Mexico (when indigenous natives aped the movie-making), the film  won the Critics’ Prize at Venice but The Last Movie was damn nearly The Last Hopper. Well, he shot it in  Peru – coke capital of the world.  No way of knowing if  their sex scene would have ended up for real like the naked Hoppy and Garcia embrace under a waterfall.  “She was wet,”  he told me in Cannes in 1976, “and  it just slipped in.”
  25. Ann-Margret, Carnal Knowledge, 1970.    When Jules Feiffer sent his new play to Mike Nichols, the  stage and screen director immediately knew three things. 1. It was a film. 2. For Jack Nicholson. 3. But not his Easy Rider co-star, Karen Black. (They mutuallyagreed she that she didn’t have the right figure). Feiffer didn’t think Jack matched his “young Jewish misogynist.” “Trust me,” said Nichols, “he’s going to be our most important actor since Brando.” That’s when Jules realised he “:an write ‘em, but can’t cast ‘em.”  Nichols took his time, seeing Ellen Burstyn, Dyan Cannon, Joan Collins, Jane Fonda, Raquel Welch, Natalie Wood – before  remembering Ann-Margret in Kitten With A Whip, 1964.
  26. Marcia Rodd, Little Murders, 1970.      Determined to film the Jules Fieffer play which he had flopped in on Broadway in 1967,  Elliott Gould wanted Fonda as his girlfriend. However, when they met,  he felt so intimidated he could not say a word… Enter: Rodd from the 1969 stage revival (also directed by Alan Arkin), in her film debut. Donald Sutherland’s hippy priest stole the entire enchilada. French screen icon Jean Renoir told Arkin: “This film will never be forgotten.” (Really?  The one I saw, or a different cut?) 
  27. Diana Rigg, The Hospital, 1971. For the first time in his (eventuall) 30 screen- writing gigs, Paddy Chayefsky has total control of his work.  He was the writer, producer and, indeed, the opening narrator for a blistering take on  not merely the US medical services but the divided nation of the 60s.  UA wanted Bergen, Jane Fonda or Ali MacGraw as The Girl. Paddy did not. He signed Mrs Emma Peel/Mrs James Bond…  As we shall see, he  also banned  “the anti-Israel” Fonda from Network in 1976.

  28. Liza Minnelli, Cabaret, 1971.  
    Confirming the fact that director Bob Fosse was here to stay (alas not for long enough), Cabaret stems from the Weimar Berlin stories by Christopher Isherwood who based his main character (he is the other one!) Sally Bowles on the British often naked teenage libertine flapper-actress-singer-writer Jean Ross – later Communist, Spanish civil war correspondent and lover of jazz pianist (later actor) Peter van Eyck.   On her father’s advice, Minnelli (rejected for the Broadway production!) channeled Louise  Brooks as Sally. Isherwood said Liza was too talented  such a “medicore” singer.  Never said what he thought of her ten rivals: Ursula Andress, Julie Andrews, Ann-Margret, Faye Dunaway, Jane Fonda, Jill Ireland (!), Glenda Jackson, Shirley MacLaine, Barbra Streisand, Brenda Vaccaro,  Natalie Wood. Plus Julie Christie… with Warren Beatty as her gay pal Brian!

  29. Vanessa Redgrave, Mary, Queen of Scots, 1971.  The Scottish queen was always  intended by producer Hal B Wallis for Genevieve Bujold.  She was not keen on another executed 16th Century royal, having already been beheaded as Henry VIII’s second wife, Ann Boleyn, in A Thousand Days.  Wallis next looked over  Fonda, Mia Farrow, Sophia Loren, Maggie Smith.  Redgrave (first booked for Elizabeth I) was sixth choice.
  30. Dyan Cannon, Le casse (UK,US: The Burglars), France-Italy, 1971. François Trtuffaut told Helen Scott (his translator during his famous Hitchcock inbterviews) that he’d sent a copy of the David Goodis book. The Burglar (singular), to Fonda. To be opposite Jean-Paul Belmondo.  Paul Wendkos directed the 1955 film of the book (not released until ‘57), the first of his 115 cinema and TV gigs,  with  Dan Duryea and Jayne Mansfield.  Finalement, Henri Verneuil directed the French version with, yes, Belmondo, and Dyan Cannon.

  31. Jill St John, Diamonds Are Forever, 1971.
  32. Ellen Burstyn, The Exorcist, 1973.
  33. Marsha Mason, Cinderella Liberty, 1973.      Director Mark Rydell fought hard for Marsha after seeing her in The Doll’s House on-stage in San Francisco. Fox preferred a name… Fonda! But she had already trawled the streets as Klute.

  34. Faye Dunaway, Chinatown, l973.  
    Producer Robert Evans had given a script to Jane for safety while dealing with “my best friend,” superagent Sue Mengers. She wanted $250,000 for Faye… “and an answer tonight or she’s going to do Night Moves with Arthur Penn,”.” Evans said: $75,000.. Sue said: “I’m going with Arthur Penn.” Evans: “I’m going with Jane Fonda.” One hour later; Mengers called him back: “Honey, I spoke to Faye…  we’ll take the $75,000.”    Later, Mengers gleefully phoned him: “Honeee, guess what? There was no picture with Arthur Penn. I made it up!” Said Evans: “Guess what? Jane Fonda turned us down.”

  35. Florinda Bolkan, Una breva vacanza (US: A Brief Vacation), Italy-Spain, 1973.      Not like Vittorio De Sica to reject La Loren but… According to his producer Arthur Cohn, Jane , Sophia and Liz Taylor were all fighting to be Clara Mataro.
  36. Mireille Darc, Les seins de glace, France, 1974.     When planned earlier by realisateur Jean-Pierre Mocky, with two Janes in mind. Birkin or Fonda.
  37. Louise Fletcher, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, 1974.
  38. Katharine Ross, The Stepford Wives, 1975.      Jane turned down the Bryan Forbes film because “the backing came from a big corporate company.” But, honey, all studios were by now owned by corporate companies. Where ya gonna go?
  39. Faye Dunaway, Network, 1976.    Having worked with the world’s “greatest English-speaking actress” on Murder on the Orient Express in 1974, director Sidney Lumet wanted Vanessa as Diana Christensen, “the ratings-hungry programming executive who is prepared to do anything for better numbers,” as critic Roger Ebert put it. But the Jewish scenarist Paddy Chayefsky refused her, due to her sympathies with the PLO:, Palestine Liberation Organisation.  “Paddy, that’s blacklisting,” said Lumet, also Jewish. “Not when a Jew does it to a Gentile,” retorted Paddy. Also in the Diana mix: Candice Bergen, Ellen Burstyn, Jill Clayburgh, Jane Fonda (her father refused the unhinged news anchor thinking the script  was too hysterical!), Kay Lenz (stuck on TV’s Rich Man, Poor Man), Marsha Mason and Natalie Wood. Faye won one of the four Oscars won by the “satire” which became reality when the fictional UBS network became a fact. Fox.  The following year, Vanessa won a support  Oscar for Julia,  despite what she called intimidation (picketing and burning her effigy) outside the event by “Zionist hoodlums”.
  40. Susan Sarandon, Pretty Baby, 1977.    The plot sickens… A prostitute allows her 12-year-old  daughter’s virginity to be auctioned off in a brothel in the red-light Storyville district of  New Orleans, circa 1917. Elegant French director Louis Malle saw 29possible pretty Violets – and another 19 actresses for her mother: Candice Bergen, Cher, Julie Christie, Glenn Close (passed), Faye Dunaway, Mia Farrow, Farrah Fawcett (passed), Jane Fonda (with Jodie Foster as her daughter), Goldie Hawn (preferred FoulPlay), Anjelica Huston, Diane Keaton, Sylvia Kristel (Emmanuelle, herself), Liza Minnelli, Cybil Shepherd, Sissy Spacek, Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver. Plus Joan Collins, who suggested Jasmine Maimone,  her screen daughter in that year’s Magnum Cop,  would  make a fine Violet. Louis  Malle and Sarandon became lovers and also made Atlantic City, 1980… the year he married Bergen until his 1995 death.

  41. Mary Steenburgen, Goin’ South, 1978.      In April 1977, Jack Nicholson signed to direct the Western tale of conman Henry Lloyd Moon (no kin to his never achieved pet oater, Moontrap). As early as 1970, he’d wanted Jane to save him from hanging – by marrying him. (Paramount was voting George Segal and Candice Bergen). Anne Bancroft also passed, handing a screen debut to Mary – discovered by Warren Beatty and Nicholson doing time as a waitress. They both fought to use her first. Jack won. His backers were furious but Nicholson (also directing) argued: “What is stardom for if you don’t take chances. In a way, I wanted someone who would teach me something about the job.”
  42. Meryl Streep, Kramer v Kramer, 1979.      Jane could never have re-written the famous courtroom declaration as magnificently as Meryl.
  43. Sally Field, Norma Rae, l979.      Refused! Odd for such a famous left-winger. The ex-Flying Nun flew to Cannes, picked up Best Actress and nine months later, the Oscar, for her trade union fighter.  No wonder Sally made two more Martin Ritt movies: Back Road,1980, and Murphy’s Romance, 1984. Plus, he didn’t hit on her like Bob Rafaelson did during Stay Hungry, in 1975.
  44. Romy Schneider, La mort en direct (UK/US: Death Watch), France-West Germany-UK, 1979.    Lyons realisateur Bertrand Tavernier unwisely  insisted on Romy and Harvey Keitel. The producers wanted US names: Fonda (totally uninterested), Jill Clayburgh, Diane Keaton opposite Robert De Niro or Richard Gere. 
  45. Mary Tyler Moore, Ordinary People, 1979.  Robert Redford’s directing debt was a toughie – the Judith Guest’s anatomy of a family more in pain than love “We had to cast Beth right,” said Redford. He refused Paramount’s suggestion of Remick and Pollack voting Fonda. Despite worries about her TV image destroying believability, Redford stuck to his MTM idea.  He’d loved her TV show (the only sitcom he watched) and had always wondered about her darki side… “If Redford can go the final mile, I can handle it,” she declared. Result: ”An intelligent, perceptive, and deeply moving film,” said Chicago critic Roger Ebert. Plus Oscars for Best Picture, Adapted Script, Supporting Actor (Timothy Hutton as the son)  – and Director Redford!  Yet, unbelievably, nadafor MTM.
  46. Isabelle Huppert, Heaven’s Gate, 1980.    Everyone preferred her to the French import. Everyone except stubborn director Michael Cimino. On the ego trip of his life. And career death.

  47. Barbara Hershey, The Entity, 1980.  Fonda, Jill Clayburgh, Sally Field and Bette Midler (!) were listed for poor Clara, pursued by the titular being.. “The film you have just seen,” said the credits, “ is a fictionalized account of a true incident which took place in Los Angeles, California, in October 1976. It is considered by psychic researchers to be one of the most extraordinary cases in the history of parapsychology. The real Carla Moran is today living in Texas with her children. The attacks, though decreased in both frequency and intensity… continue.”  Bollywood copied it (plus The Shining and Poltergeist) as Hawa, in 2003.

  48. Jill Clayburgh, First Monday In October, 1981.      Far too conservative, this account of the first woman judge appointed to the US Supreme Court. All her energies were devoted to On Golden Pond – and aerobics.

  49. 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 23 wanted to be… 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 husband). Undaunted Susan Blakely made her own 1983 TVersion (from Farmer’s book, Will There Really Be A Morning?). Plus Anne Archer, Ann-Margret, Blythe Danner, Patty Duke, Mia Farrow, Sally Field, Jane Fonda, Goldie Hawn, Glenda Jackson, Diane Keaton, Liza Minnelli, Michelle Phillips, 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.

  50. Meryl Streep, Silkwood, 1983.       Jane’s version (or, interest) turned into The China Syndrome, 1979. Streep had a small role in Jane’s Julia, and she wanted her as The Other Woman in Coming Home.
 “Oh, get her to play anything,” she told Hollywood Reporter’s Stephen Galloway in 2015. “I thought, it’s a really weird name, but there’s something very special going on here.  Anyway, [studio executive] Sherry Lansing was at Columbia. I was developing the Karen Silkwood story at Columbia. I couldn’t make it get it right, and Sherry said to Michael Douglas – because he had a script called The China Syndrome [with] Jack Lemmon, Richard Dreyfuss (Dreyfuss dropped out) – and she said, “You and Fonda should team up here.”  He had the script, it was already done, it was going to be a very small movie.  And me and my partner Bruce said, “No. Let’s make it a bigger movie, let’s get Jim Bridges to, rewrite the script and make a gender change, and I’ll be transgender, and I’ll do the Richard Dreyfuss part…” 
  51. Jacqueline Bisset, Under The Volcano, 1984.      Exiled US director Joseph Losey wanted her for his aborted version. They later made A Doll’s House together, 1973.
  52. Goldie Hawn, Swing Shift, 1984.      Kay Walsh (also the name of a London  actress) was written by Nancy Dowd with Fonda in mind.   Her agent turned it down. It is not known if Fonda ever saw the script, later  re-spun (on Hawn’s orders to make her role more likeable) by Bo Goldman and Ron Nyswaner (the final credit is:  Rob Morton).  In a 2017 Sight and Sound article, Steve Vineberg called  Jonathan  Demme’s unreleased cut “one of the best movies made by an American in the 80s”. 
  53. Faye Dunaway, Supergirl, 1984. When Fonda, Melanie Griffith, Goldie Hawn passed, Dolly Parton was offered $7m Salkind producers to play the power-hungry villainess, Selena, in the, alas, flop film about Superman’s cousin, Kara Zor-El. Alas because the producera, Salkind pere et fils, then sold their Super-rights to Cannon (hence the excremental Superman IV in 1986) and poor Kara was not seen on-screen again until the TV series… 31 years later!

  54. Cher, Mask, 1984. 
    “They came to me with this picture called Mask,” recalled director Peter Bogdanovich  in 2015. “Not a very good script but it surely was an interesting story because it was a true story. And then I remembered how Dorothy  [his murdered lover, Dorothy Stratten] felt about The Elephant Man on Broadway… very moved by it. After she was killed I figured it out…  because her beauty was as much of a source of alienation as his ugliness.  and I thought, “Well, I’ll make it for her.”  For Rusty, mother of the disfigured Eric Stojlz, Peter  obviously thought of Leachman and Ellen Burstyn from his 1970 Last Picture Show, Plus  Jane Fonda.  “Anybody with a name!” He then noticed Cher in the suits’ suggestions. “Interesting. I can see her [playing] a druggie and riding a motorcycle, and I can’t see Jane Fonda doing it. She’s too sophisticated. Cher and I didn’t get along that well… She he had such a negative attitude. But she’s very good in the picture. I don’t think I’ve ever shot more close-ups – she’s very good in close-ups and not that good in playing the whole scene through, because she loses the thread of it. So I shot it that way, and she should have won an Oscar.” She did win on Best Actress at Cannes… and nd Bogdanovich never got over it.   “I’m sick of her mouthing off about me. I worked hard on that performance with her and she knows it… She’s excellent in it. But the studio didn’t want her, they wanted Jane Fonda. I fought for her. No one thought of Cher for the part except me.” Not so. Scenarist Anna Hamilton Phelan had  pinned a photo of the chanteuse  to the script  she handed to Bogdanovich.

  55. Tina Turner, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, 1985.      Casual suggestion by Australian director George Miller. He kept calling Bartertown ruler Aunty Entity a Tina Turner character, so he went for the original… still awaiting a third film.
  56. Barbra Sukowa, Rosa Luxemburg, West Germany-Czechoslovakia, 1985.  German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder made the big announcement at the Cannes festival.  Fonda would star in his 1983 biopic of the revolutionary German politico. Immediately the financial floodgates burst open… “Never had so much foreign money been bet on a German film,” reported my German film expert Gerhard Midding. Then, Fassbinder died in 1982. Three years later, auteur Margarethe von Trotta later made her version with Sukowa – who shared the 1986 Cannes festival Best Actress award with Fernande Torres in Brazil’s Eu Sei Que Vou Te Amar (Love Me Forever or Never).

  57. Glenn Close, Jagged Edge, 1985.   
    Or How The Movie Star Got Canned…  over a script! Jane disliked the Joe Eszterhas scenario because she thought the studio disliked it. She listed her changes – “a totally different movie,” complained  Joe.  “The stupid cunt!” is how producer  Marty Ransohoff phrased it. “What does she know?” Jane’s (and Joe’s) attorney, Barry Hirsch, felt no brand new studio head would dare fire one of the world’s biggest stars.  Guy McElwaine (Joe’s ex-agent) did exactly that. Ransohoff was no happier or polite about Close. He called her ugly.  “I wouldn’t want to fuck her.” Three years later, when  she had an idea  for them – re-setting All About Evein Film City  – Jane told Joe: “I should have done it, I made a mistake.”  He mentioned another idea he had before becoming LA’s highest paid scenarist…

  58. Elisabeth Shue, Adventures in Babysitting, 1986.      Back in the 60s, teenage babysitter Chris Parker was set for Jane Fonda. By the 80s, her logical heir, her niece Bridget, was not interested. Julia Louis-Dreyfus was signed, followed by Jodie Foster, then it became a battle between Kathleen Turner (the fourth #1 choice), Justine Bateman (her series, Family Ties, cancelled that idea), Valerie Bertinelli, Judy Davis, Jodie Foster, Melanie Griffith, Andie MacDowell, Kelly McGillis (spurned by director Christopher Columbus), Tatum O’Neal (who simply fled), Michelle Pfeiffer (she preferred The Witches of Eastwick.. until she made it!), Brooke Shields and Sharon Stone.
  59. Jessica Lange, Music Box, 1989.   And that next Joe Eszterhas idea was… was the exact same premise as in Jagged Edge, 1985, and Betrayed, 1987: a woman disbelieving that her favourite man is guilty of horrendous crimes. Knowing of his friendship with Fonda (since being sent to meet-greet her at the airport – “moved and intimidated” – on arrival for her first film in France, indeed her first French film, Rene Clement’s Les felines), scenarist Joe Eszterhas and UA boss Irwin Winkler  talked to Fonda, who,  embarrassingly at 52,  still  fancied herself and her roles as girls. She tested “young” but Costa said (never to her face) that she was too oldand she was paid $1.25m to “go away.” (Kiss of death to a movie career, noted Eszterhas). Costa had always preferred Lange. After the film came out, the father of Eszterhas admitted war crimes in Hungary (printing anti-Semitic editorials, organising a book burning, etc).Joe condemned and disowned him and refused all access to his children.

  60. Lena Olin, Havana, 1990.    The 1978 plan was Birth year: Death year: Other name: Casting Calls:  68