Humphrey Bogart
Gary Cooper
Errol Flynn
Charlton Heston
Boris Karloff
Bela Lugosi
Basil Rathbone
Frank Sinatra
John Wayne
Orson Welles
Does anyone think any of the actors listed above could've worked in a lead or supporting role in an Alfred Hitchcock film?
Hitchcock himself said that he had wanted Gary Cooper for what became the Joel McCrea role in Foreign Correspondent. And Cooper and Charlton Heston ended up costarring in The Wreck Of the Mary Deare, a film Hitchcock had originally agreed to make for a one-picture deal at MGM (he abandoned the story after deciding it was more whodunnit than suspense thriller, and gave them North By Northwest instead).
It's difficult to imagine how some of those you name - Karloff, Lugosi and Wayne, for example - may have fitted into a Hitchcock picture. I can readily imagine Flynn or Rathbone as one of his elegant villains, and Welles directed himself in The Stranger, a suspenseful tale bearing some thematic relation to Sabotage, Rebecca, Suspicion, Shadow Of A Doubt, Spellbound, Notorious and Dial M For Murder, with its examination of a woman who comes to realize her college professor husband is both killer and escaped Nazi criminal, and whose assistance in exposing him is enlisted by investigator Edward G. Robinson.
Bogart made two suspense thrillers, Conflict and The Two Mrs. Carrolls, in which he played homicidal husbands in stories that could have been right up Hitch's alley.
Sinatra might have been quite effective in Hitchcock's bleak and documentary-like The Wrong Man, and indeed may have embodied aspects of the character played by Henry Fonda - a Manhattan jazz musician of Italian heritage - more comfortably.
Poe! You are...avenged!
Despite his age I think that Basil Rathbone would have fitted into a Hitchcock film. As a detective or a dangerous husband.
shareWhat's intriguing is all the actors Hitchcock TRIED to get...and couldn't.
In the forties he tried to get:
Claudette Colbert(Foreign Correspondent)
Gary Cooper(Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur)
Barbra Stanwyck(Saboteur)
Clark Gable(Foreign Correspondent)
Henry Fonda(Lifeboat)
William Powell(Uncle Charlie, Shadow of a Doubt)
In the fifties, he tried to get:
William Holden(Strangers on a Train; The Trouble With Harry)
Yul Brynner(the villain in NXNW, but he went with James Mason instead)
In the sixties, he tried to get
Audrey Hepburn and Laurence Harvey(both SIGNED for an unmade film called "No Bail for the Judge";ended when Hepburn pulled out)
Rock Hudson(Marnie)
Yves Montand and Simone Signoret(Topaz)
In the seventies, he tried to get
Michael Caine(killer in Frenzy)
Glenda Jackson(first victim in Frenzy)
Richard Harris or Richard Burton(hero in Frenzy)
Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino, or Robert Redford(hero in Family Plot)
Burt Reynolds or Roy Scheider(villain in Family Plot)
Faye Dunaway(villainess in Family Plot)