sic ] Gabor, Lois Andrews, Myrna Dell, Angela Lansbury, Pat Knight, Cleo Moore, Ellie Marshall, Marilyn Monroe, Dolores Moran, Marian Marshall, Randy Stuart, Marjorie Reynolds, Arleen Whelan, Angela Greene, and Rowena Rollins.
At every studio, such lists amounted to little. They were devised when the casting director and his associates, thinking out loud, jotted a quick roster of possibilities. In this instance, at Fox, the casting office soon received a skeleton list from Zanuck and Mankiewicz. Later the casting director winnowed these starlet names. It’s impossible to determine how Zsa Zsa made it that far, though it’s likely that George Sanders mentioned her to Mankiewicz. Life at home no doubt became sweeter with the announcement, “I’ve submitted your name.” But Zsa Zsa wasn’t yet blonde, nor had she launched her Hollywood career. Soon she and all the others were out of the running.
Instead, Marilyn Monroe played Miss Caswell, and of the actors who appeared in All About Eve she is the only one whose career was to ascend. For others in the cast—Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, Gary Merrill, Celeste Holm, Hugh Marlowe, George Sanders, Thelma Ritter, and for Mankiewicz himself— All About Eve was the climax. Never did a single one of them surpass, or even equal, what he or she did so brilliantly, with such verve and wit, in this film. For all of them the picture was a watershed that separates what they hoped to accomplish in the movies from the actual roles that life, or Hollywood, dealt from its unmarked deck.
Marilyn Monroe went up, and up, and up, but for the others a long descent began the day All About Eve was in the can. If not for this movie, half the cast would be forgotten.
----
The Casting Couch
Nancy Davis Reagan didn’t know in 1950 that she was under consideration for the role for Karen Richards. When I queried her in 1998, she said she had never heard that her name was on the casting director’s list. Nor was she aware that the man she would marry two years later, in 1952, was also in the running for a part in All About Eve . And yet there is the name Ronald Reagan, along with twenty-four other contenders, jotted down for the character of Bill Sampson. If Reagan, and not Gary Merrill, had gotten the part, it would have been his second movie with Bette Davis. It might also have changed the course of history.
Consider how Hollywood history might have been different if the casting director had prevailed in his various recommendations. The following lists are not complete; rather, they are selections of the most intriguing possibilities.
KAREN RICHARDS
Nancy Davis
Alexis Smith
Ann Sothern
Shirley Booth
Patricia Neal
Margaret Sullavan
Ruth Warrick
Jessica Tandy
Barbara Bel Geddes
Arlene Dahl
Joan Fontaine
BILL SAMPSON
Robert Cummings
William Holden
Edmond O’Brien
Zachary Scott
Glenn Ford
Ronald Reagan
Montgomery Clift
Robert Young
ADDISON DEWITT
José Ferrer
Clifton Webb
Claude Rains
Basil Rathbone
Charles Laughton
Vincent Price
Adolphe Menjou
EVE HARRINGTON
Jeanne Crain
Ann Blyth
Elizabeth Taylor
June Allyson
Olivia de Havilland
Donna Reed
Mona Freeman
MARGO CHANNING
Katharine Hepburn
Ginger Rogers
Greer Garson
Joan Fontaine
Joan Crawford
Paulette Goddard
Rosalind Russell
Hedy Lamarr
Gloria Swanson
Norma Shearer
MAX FABIAN
Everett Sloane
Walter Slezak
Fred Clark
George Jessel
Zero Mostel
----
Chapter 2
When Was It? How Long?
Our story actually begins several years before Joe Mankiewicz began filming All About Eve . During the 1943–44 Broadway season, at the Booth Theatre on Forty-fifth Street in New York, the Austrian actress Elisabeth Bergner (1897–1986) was appearing in a stage thriller called The Two Mrs. Carrolls . In the play, Bergner had the role of a devoted and unsuspecting wife who is slowly being poisoned by her husband.
The play is creaky by today’s standards. It was creaky in the forties, but without the competition of
At every studio, such lists amounted to little. They were devised when the casting director and his associates, thinking out loud, jotted a quick roster of possibilities. In this instance, at Fox, the casting office soon received a skeleton list from Zanuck and Mankiewicz. Later the casting director winnowed these starlet names. It’s impossible to determine how Zsa Zsa made it that far, though it’s likely that George Sanders mentioned her to Mankiewicz. Life at home no doubt became sweeter with the announcement, “I’ve submitted your name.” But Zsa Zsa wasn’t yet blonde, nor had she launched her Hollywood career. Soon she and all the others were out of the running.
Instead, Marilyn Monroe played Miss Caswell, and of the actors who appeared in All About Eve she is the only one whose career was to ascend. For others in the cast—Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, Gary Merrill, Celeste Holm, Hugh Marlowe, George Sanders, Thelma Ritter, and for Mankiewicz himself— All About Eve was the climax. Never did a single one of them surpass, or even equal, what he or she did so brilliantly, with such verve and wit, in this film. For all of them the picture was a watershed that separates what they hoped to accomplish in the movies from the actual roles that life, or Hollywood, dealt from its unmarked deck.
Marilyn Monroe went up, and up, and up, but for the others a long descent began the day All About Eve was in the can. If not for this movie, half the cast would be forgotten.
----
The Casting Couch
Nancy Davis Reagan didn’t know in 1950 that she was under consideration for the role for Karen Richards. When I queried her in 1998, she said she had never heard that her name was on the casting director’s list. Nor was she aware that the man she would marry two years later, in 1952, was also in the running for a part in All About Eve . And yet there is the name Ronald Reagan, along with twenty-four other contenders, jotted down for the character of Bill Sampson. If Reagan, and not Gary Merrill, had gotten the part, it would have been his second movie with Bette Davis. It might also have changed the course of history.
Consider how Hollywood history might have been different if the casting director had prevailed in his various recommendations. The following lists are not complete; rather, they are selections of the most intriguing possibilities.
KAREN RICHARDS
Nancy Davis
Alexis Smith
Ann Sothern
Shirley Booth
Patricia Neal
Margaret Sullavan
Ruth Warrick
Jessica Tandy
Barbara Bel Geddes
Arlene Dahl
Joan Fontaine
BILL SAMPSON
Robert Cummings
William Holden
Edmond O’Brien
Zachary Scott
Glenn Ford
Ronald Reagan
Montgomery Clift
Robert Young
ADDISON DEWITT
José Ferrer
Clifton Webb
Claude Rains
Basil Rathbone
Charles Laughton
Vincent Price
Adolphe Menjou
EVE HARRINGTON
Jeanne Crain
Ann Blyth
Elizabeth Taylor
June Allyson
Olivia de Havilland
Donna Reed
Mona Freeman
MARGO CHANNING
Katharine Hepburn
Ginger Rogers
Greer Garson
Joan Fontaine
Joan Crawford
Paulette Goddard
Rosalind Russell
Hedy Lamarr
Gloria Swanson
Norma Shearer
MAX FABIAN
Everett Sloane
Walter Slezak
Fred Clark
George Jessel
Zero Mostel
----
Chapter 2
When Was It? How Long?
Our story actually begins several years before Joe Mankiewicz began filming All About Eve . During the 1943–44 Broadway season, at the Booth Theatre on Forty-fifth Street in New York, the Austrian actress Elisabeth Bergner (1897–1986) was appearing in a stage thriller called The Two Mrs. Carrolls . In the play, Bergner had the role of a devoted and unsuspecting wife who is slowly being poisoned by her husband.
The play is creaky by today’s standards. It was creaky in the forties, but without the competition of
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