- Fredric March, One Foot In Heaven, 1940. Raymond Massey was always the novelist Hartzell Spence’s choice to play his own Methodist preacher father. So Massey was tested. So was Alexander Knox. March didn’t need to. Cake walk!
- Walter Pidgeon, How Green Was My Valley, 1940. After paying $300,000 for Richard Llewellyn’s Welsh Germinal, head Fox Darryl Zanuck wanted Knox as the mining village’s pastor Gruffyd, courting the daughter of the Morgans in the Welsh mining village But he only played him in the fifst director Wlliam Wyler’s screentest of “Master” Roddy McDowall as Huw Morgan. Next Gruffyd choice – Laurence Olivier. For what New York Times critic Bosley Crowther hailed as “a stunning masterpiece.” It went on to beat Citizen Kane to Best Film and became the third (of four) unequalled directing Oscars for John Ford.
- Bobby Watson, The Hitler Gang, 1943. Rains, Alexander Knox (US President Woodrow Wilson in 1945) and even Orson Welles were bizarre ideas for the Führer in one of eight Hitler-titled US movies during WWII. This was Paramount’s offering, Pohl;enz repla ingh down by New York Times critic Bosley Crowther for being “cut very much to the pattern of some of our early and better gangster films” which meant “that the grave responsibility of the German citizens for what they have allowed has been neatly tossed onto the shoulders of a few ruffians, Army officers and industrialists.” was Watson’s sixth of nine screen portrayals of Hitler.
- Herbert Marshall, The Razor’s Edge, 1946. As producers kept changing, there was also a switch of who should portray the novel’s author, W Somerset Maugham – from Knox to Marshall. Final casting was delayed until Tyrone Power’s return from WWII – chasing aftder “meatier roles, please!”
Birth year: 1907Death year: 1995Other name: Casting Calls: 4