“Humiliation got the better of me”: Christopher Reeve’s embarrassing audition for ‘Pretty Woman’
Actors will do a lot of things to land a role, for even at the top levels of Hollywood, it’s a cutthroat business, with talent scrapping away to get lucrative roles under their belts and their names on the top of posters. Nevertheless, at some point, professional pride intervenes, and that was how former Superman Christopher Reeve once missed out on a massive payday.
Back in 1989, Reeve was a huge star thanks to the success of four movies as the Man of Steel, a high-earner even though his work outside of the DC comics franchise had been pretty limited. At that time, the director Garry Marshall was putting together a male and female lead for one of the hottest scripts in Hollywood, Pretty Woman, and was struggling to find the right person for both.
Several big names were offered the role of corporate high-flier Edward Lewis in the movie, including Al Pacino, Sylvester Stallone and Burt Reynolds, and the man who would eventually take the film, Richard Gere, had also passed several times because he thought the character was underdeveloped.
Although Julia Roberts was then cast as the wisecracking prostitute Vivian Ward, an audition process was needed to find who she would be up against, which was how Reeve found himself in the room with Marshall for a day that went disastrously. First off, Roberts wasn’t there, which frustrated Reeve, who wanted to see how any potential chemistry might look.
Secondly, as he once recalled, the behaviour of the producers who were there left plenty to be desired. Reeve said, “I had to play the scenes with the casting director, who kept her nose buried in the pages and read about as well as a reject from some community theatre. Halfway through the second scene, anger, frustration, and humiliation got the better of me. I ripped the pages in half, dropped them on the floor, told Garry Marshall and the producers that they had no right to treat any actor this way, and stalked out of the room.”
Reeve’s display of anger cost him, to say the least. Pretty Woman was a global smash when it came out in 1990, bringing in almost half a billion dollars at the box office and making an A-Lister out of Roberts, who was nominated for an Oscar. It was also nominated for four Golden Globes, one of which she won, with Gere also given a nod for his performance, and Reeve, on the other hand, picked up The Rose and the Jackal, a made-for-TV western.
Subsequently, his career drifted for a few years as he struggled to escape Superman’s shadow, until 1993, when he was cast in a major role in the movie adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. It starred Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson, landed eight Academy Award nominations and was a film Reeve would later say he was most proud of.
Sadly, just as he was beginning to see a future in films outside of superheroes, his life was devastated by a horse riding accident in May 1995 that saw him break two vertebrae, leading to a spinal injury that paralysed him from the neck down and left him unable to breathe unaided.
Reeve went on to show astounding resilience for the next nine years until his death in 2004, fundraising and creating foundations to help spinal cord research and even making acting appearances in shows like Smallville.
