Why the only actor Alfred Hitchcock was dying to work with turned him down: “That was a mistake”
For better or worse, Alfred Hitchcock was always very particular about his actors. While his endless fascination with blondes became progressively creepier, he usually had a knack for hiring the right performers for the right roles.
Apart from when he wasn’t allowed, of course. In the early years of his career, the future ‘Master of Suspense’ was occasionally hamstrung by a studio foisting an actor on him that he didn’t think fitted the character he had in mind, but he wasn’t in a position to do anything about it.
Cary Grant, James Stewart, and Anthony Perkins all delivered top-drawer performances in Hitchcock flicks, and his ongoing preoccupation with blonde-haired women did lead to several stellar turns from the likes of Grace Kelly, Ingrid Bergman, Janet Leigh, and even Tippi Hedren before the vindictive filmmaker went out of his way to try and ruin her.
Hitchcock didn’t make the jump to Hollywood until 1940, but he made up for lost time when his American debut, Rebecca, won the Academy Award for ‘Best Picture’. It enhanced his status to no end, but he was still a relative newcomer to Stateside cinema, which meant he couldn’t extend an offer to the silver screen’s biggest icons and have them come running.
Four months after Rebecca was released, Hitchcock’s sophomore Tinseltown effort, Foreign Correspondent, landed in cinemas. The monochromatic spy thriller was also shortlisted for the Academy’s most prestigious prize, but the director was never too thrilled by the leading man he ended up with.
The year before he left the United Kingdom behind, Hitchcock played his hand and revealed the solitary superstar he believed was his perfect match, calling Gary Cooper “an actor well suited to the type of film I like to make” and somebody who can “do it all so dramatically and with such accurate timing.”
As fate would have it, the ‘Master of Suspense’ decided to shoot his shot. “When I had completed the script of Foreign Correspondent, I went to Gary Cooper with it,” he told Francois Truffaut. “But because it was a thriller, he turned it down.”
Cooper was largely associated with westerns and adventure films at the time, and didn’t feel like deviating from the formula, which forced Hitchcock into a corner. “This attitude was so commonplace when I started to work in Hollywood that I always ended up with the next best,” he said. “In this instance, with Joel McCrea.”
The back-up plan made a solid fist of playing John Jones, a reporter drawn into an assassination plot with global ramifications, but at no point was he ever the guy Hitchcock wanted for the lead. He only had eyes for Cooper, but he clearly wasn’t ready to add espionage to the list of genres he was willing to tackle.
They never did get the chance to work together, and Hitchcock even revealed that the High Noon frontman came to regret it: “Many years later, Cooper said to me, ‘That was a mistake. I should have done it.'”
