11 Actors That Authors Had In Mind To Play Their Famous Characters

In Winston Groom’s novel Forrest Gump, the title character is described as standing at 6 feet 6 inches tall and weighing 240 pounds – which is one reason why the author envisioned John Goodman as being the right actor to play the role in the film adaptation. But even though he felt that they removed many of the rough edges from the novel’s earthy and cheerfully profane character, Groom told The New York Times in 1994 that he didn’t really have a problem with how the filmmakers adapted his story or with Tom Hanks’s portrayal.

However, the author may not have been completely honest about his feelings about how the filmmakers treated his book, as Gump and Co., the follow-up novel which came out one year after the film’s release, opens with, “Take my word for it – don’t never let nobody make a movie about your life’s story. Whether they get it right or wrong, it don’t matter.”

John Travolta was reportedly the filmmakers’ first choice to play Forrest, but he passed  – a decision he admitted he regrets. Hanks, meanwhile, said that he agreed to take the part within an hour and a half after reading the script.

Regardless of Groom’s true feelings, the film adaptation of Forrest Gump was a huge box-office success and ended up winning five Academy Awards, including the ones for Best Picture and Best Actor (Hanks).

Roald Dahl’s 1964 children’s novel, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, is widely considered to be a classic. Among its many accolades, it was named one of the 100 Best Young Adult Books of All Time by Time magazine.

Although he had no real say in the casting choices, Dahl’s first choice to portray Wonka in the film adaptation of his novel was English comedian Spike Milligan. Dahl claimed Milligan was excited to take on the role, to the point of shaving off his beard to do a screen test, Donald Sturrock (author of Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl) told Yahoo! in 2016. But the film company passed on casting either Milligan or Dahl’s second choice, Peter Sellers – who reportedly called Dahl personally in a bid to land the part –  claiming that both men were too weird for the role.

Dahl was not happy when Gene Wilder landed the role. “I think he felt Wonka was a very British eccentric,” Sturrock told Yahoo! “Gene Wilder was rather too soft and didn’t have a sufficient edge. His voice is very light, and he’s got that rather cherubic, sweet face. I think [Dahl] felt there was something wrong with [Wonka’s] soul in the movie – it just wasn’t how he imagined the lines being spoken.”

Sturrock wrote in Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl that the author never liked the completed film – which he called “crummy” – and thought that Wilder’s performance was “pretentious” and “bouncy.” Critics didn’t seem to agree with the author, as the film received generally positive reviews, and Wilder received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor for his performance.

Of all the actors who have played the suave and charismatic spy onscreen, Sean Connery is widely regarded as being the best James Bond. But author Ian Fleming was less than impressed when the actor was chosen to be the first person to play Bond on film (in 1962’s Dr. No) – although he never said this to the actor’s face. Connery claimed that Fleming thought of him as “an overdeveloped stuntman.”

According to Richard Maibaum, who adapted several of Fleming’s Bond novels for the screen, the author would have preferred David Niven, who had the type of look and feel that Fleming envisioned in Bond, to play the role.

“Fleming thought David Niven would have made a great James Bond,” Maibaum told film historian Patrick McGilligan, “but David Niven wasn’t all that physical.” The actor himself turned down the chance to play the part, feeling that he was too old to do it justice. Strangely, Niven did end up playing Bond years later, in the 1967 film Casino Royale.

Fleming did end up appreciating Connery’s portrayal of Bond enough that in his later novels, he gave Bond a working-class Scottish heritage similar to Connery’s own. Neither Dr. No nor Connery’s performance as Bond was particularly well-received in the film’s initial reviews, although critical opinion has improved with time. Dr. No did do well at the box office, and Connery went on to play Bond six more times.

When the film adaptation of Breakfast at Tiffany’s was first released, some critics pointed out that the chic, waifish, European-born Audrey Hepburn was the wrong choice to play a young girl from the rural Midwest whose original name was Lula Mae Barnes, even if the girl had run away from her upbringing and reinvented herself as the outwardly sophisticated New Yorker, Holly Golightly.

Author Truman Capote was unhappy about Hepburn’s casting, as he had envisioned Marilyn Monroe in the part. Even though Monroe was from California – not Texas – there were many similarities between the actress’s life and that of Golightly: Just as the fictional character goes from uneducated farm girl to New York party girl, Monroe reinvented herself – once a teenaged bride named Norma Jeane Baker, she became a famous actress and sex symbol. The two women were both exploited by and helped by older men in their attempt to escape their lives. Eerily, Capote even seems to have predicted Monroe’s tragic passing (which occurred a few years after Breakfast at Tiffany’s was published). In the novella, the Hollywood agent who helps to transform Golightly describes her as “strictly a girl you’ll read where she ends up at the bottom of a bottle of Seconals.”

Monroe reportedly was eager to play the role, but her acting coach Paula Strasberg urged her not to play a part that Strasberg considered immoral. There was also a question about whether Monroe’s studio (20th Century Fox) would have lent her to Paramount Pictures for the film. When the studio decided to go with Hepburn in the role, Capote stated that “Paramount double-crossed me in every way and cast Audrey. She was just wrong for that part.”

The author hated the film as a whole, believing it had softened – or prettied up – the novella’s original plot. But despite his distaste for it, the film was a box-office success and earned five Academy Award nominations, including one for Hepburn as Best Actress (the award went to Sophia Loren for her performance in the film Two Women).

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Director Stanley Kubrick reached out to Stephen King about adapting the author’s novel into a film, but the author was not happy with either of the director’s final choices to play the lead roles. He envisioned the role of Wendy as a blond, former cheerleader type who had never had to deal with any sort of trouble in her life, while he thought Shelley Duvall was an emotionally vulnerable type who seemed like she had gone through a lot – in other words, the opposite of how he envisioned the character.

As for the role of Jack Torrance, King unsuccessfully attempted to talk Kubrick out of casting Jack Nicholson, instead suggesting Jon Voight or Michael Moriarty. The author felt that the storyline would have more dramatic punch if the audience saw a more “normal-looking” man descend into madness. And his opinion about Nicholson being the wrong choice for the role hasn’t changed. In 2016, he told Deadline:

The character of Jack Torrance has no arc in that movie. Absolutely no arc at all. When we first see Jack Nicholson, he’s in the office of Mr. Ullman, the manager of the hotel, and you know, then, he’s crazy as a s*** house rat. All he does is get crazier. In the book, he’s a guy who’s struggling with his sanity and finally loses it. To me, that’s a tragedy. In the movie, there’s no tragedy because there’s no real change.

King was not happy with the completed film as a whole. He thought it lacked substance, comparing it to “a fancy car without an engine.” The initial reviews seemed to agree, praising the visuals while finding fault with the story. Although The Shining was successful at the box office, it differed from each of Kubrick’s previous eight directorial efforts in that it failed to earn even a single Academy Award nomination.

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Richard Matheson’s 1954 post-apocalyptic horror novel, I Am Legend, has received three film adaptations to date: The Last Man on Earth (1964), The Omega Man (1971), and I Am Legend (2007). The first of these adaptations starred Vincent Price as Dr. Robert Morgan. (In the novel, the lead character is named Robert Neville and is a plant worker, not a scientist.) Matheson did not agree with casting Price in the lead.

“Vincent Price was a wonderful actor who did marvelous performances for the films I wrote for American-International. He was miscast in The Last Man on Earth, however,” the author said in an interview for the unreleased book, The Last Man on Film: Adaptations of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. Matheson added that, at the time The Last Man on Earth was being cast, he thought Jack Palance would have been a good choice to play the lead role.

Matheson was not happy with either The Last Man on Earth or The Omega Man. He thought the former was more faithful to his novel but called the finished project “inept.” He was so disappointed with the film that instead of his real name, he used the pen name Logan Swanson for his screenwriting credit.

In an interview that is included in the 1991 book, Science Fiction Stars and Horror Heroes: Interviews with Actors, Directors, Producers, and Writers of the 1940s Through 1960s, Matheson suggested that if George Miller were the director and Harrison Ford the star, his novel could be made into a wonderful film.

The author’s opinion of The Last Man on Earth had softened by 2007, although he still thought that Price had been miscast. “…It’s not as bad as I thought, I saw it recently again,” Matheson told Tor/Forge Blog shortly before the premiere of the version of I Am Legend that starred Will Smith. “But it certainly didn’t capture the book all that well.”

Matheson approved of the casting of Smith in the 2007 adaptation of his iconic novel. As for The Last Man on Earth, while it wasn’t considered a success upon its initial release in 1964, its reputation has improved with time, with some even considering it Price’s best film.

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