Missed Opportunity or Good Decision?

If you don’t want the job, someone else will

Gary Cooper won the Oscar for the 1952 movie High Noon, but he wasn’t the first choice for the lead role.

He wasn’t the second choice either. Or even the third or … let’s just say there’s a long list of leading men who chose not to lead for this particular film.

High Noon producer Stanley Kramer first offered the town marshal role of Will Kane to a guy named John Wayne (officially Marion Michael Morrison). Wayne turned down the job for political reasons that are barely understood anymore.

Then Kramer offered the marshal’s role to Gregory Peck. No thanks, said GP. After that Kramer extended offers to other actors you might have heard about. In no particular order, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift and Charlton Heston got the call and didn’t take the offer. And for all we know in the cheap seats, there may have been others.

All those A-list actors had reasons for turning down the job. And some of them later had regrets, especially Wayne and Peck.

Did Wayne, Peck, Brando, Clift and Heston make bad decisions? Or was something else going on? Maybe they truly made the right decisions for themselves. Or maybe they wouldn’t have had the success that Cooper did and High Noon would have been just an average Western without him.

Or, some might say Cooper was destined for the role of Will Kane and that all these other luminaries had to get out of the way to give Kramer a chance to hire the right actor. It’s a possibility, but it doesn’t seem likely that anyone has proof.

Hollywood is rife with stories of actors who had grand success in roles after the first choices declined, so in that regard, High Noon has no special claim on that turn of events.

Rod Steiger, for instance, turned down the lead in Patton and The Godfather. Or maybe in some timeline of the Mandela effect, Steiger did…

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