The “awful” actor Stanley Kubrick fired after two days on set: “It was not working”
Such was his reputation for perfectionism, any actor who signed on to appear in a Stanley Kubrick movie was under no illusions that they needed to bring their A-game from minute one. Unfortunately, a domino effect led to one actor being given their marching orders just two days into shooting.
That said, while there were a series of circumstances out of their control that were at least partially responsible, it didn’t help matters that at least one member of the production team never seemed sold on them from the beginning. In fact, the comments were borderline misogynistic, not that it helped their cause.
Technically, it was all Harvey Keitel’s fault. He’d initially been cast as Victor Ziegler in Eyes Wide Shut, and after reaching his breaking point after being tasked by the meticulous auteur to walk through a door dozens upon dozens of times without satisfying Kubrick’s vision, he reached his breaking point and was ultimately given the boot for getting on the wrong side of the iconic director.
At the time, Ziegler’s wife, Ilona, was being played by Victoria Eisermann. It wasn’t a substantial role, but it was a part in a Kubrick film nonetheless. Best known by the stage name of Vicky Lee, she was a glamour model, Page 3 staple, back in the days when that was a thing, and had also appeared in the pages of Playboy.
She’d been hired in what was supposed to be a non-speaking role for the orgy scenes, but was asked to audition for a more significant role by Kubrick’s trusted lieutenant, Leon Vitali, and found herself upgraded to Ziegler’s spouse for a daily rate of £2,000. It was a decent gig, but she only got paid twice before she became the latest name to be ejected from the Eyes Wide Shut ensemble.
“It was like Groundhog Day,” she recalled. “Two days of the same thing.” Lee didn’t get a script and was asked to improvise as a wealthy hostess, calling it “the most nervous two days” of her life, although things were even more hair-raising when she was near the stars, recalling that she couldn’t remember “being as scared as I’ve been as I was around Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.”
Why was she fired? Cinematographer Larry Smith wasn’t in the mood to sugar-coat it. “Harvey’s wife was played by a complete bimbo, a non-actress,” he ungraciously described Lee in Robert P Kolker and Nathan Abrams’ Eyes Wide Shut: Stanley Kubrick and the Making of His Final Film. “I think she was, if I’m polite, a topless model. It was awful. It was not working.”
After various consultations, since nobody gets fired from a Kubrick production without Kubrick’s approval, she was dismissed. “They didn’t think that I worked with this new actor,” Lee lamented. “So they went with another actress, which was a shame.” Her scenes were excised, and with Keitel also gone, Leslie Lowe stepped in to play the spouse of Pollack’s Ziegler.
Could this be the same person Tim Blake Nelson was talking about when he shared a similar anecdote under the condition of anonymity? Maybe, but then again, that would mean Lee was a friend of his, but he wasn’t even in the movie, and the Oklahoma-born actor being an acquaintance of a British glamour model seems unlikely.
