The one movie Henry Fonda always regretted making: “I knew I was physically all wrong”
In 1956, Henry Fonda starred alongside Audrey Hepburn in a three-hour epic based on a seminal Russian novel that was infamous for its length: 1,225 pages, to be exact. Naturally, the book had to be condensed and reshaped to fit within a feature film runtime, even one that ran a bladder-straining 208 minutes. However, Fonda wasn’t a fan of some of the tactics used to shorten proceedings and regularly clashed with the producer over the visual interpretation of his character. In fact, he struggled throughout production because, right from the start, he felt he was wrong for the part.
When Fonda was first cast as Count Pierre Bezukhov in King Vidor’s adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, he felt uneasy. The protagonist of Tolstoy’s Napoleonic War epic is described in the text as a large-bodied, ungainly misfit who is awkward in social situations. He’s also 20 years old. Fonda, on the other hand, while known for playing everyman characters with conflicted emotions, didn’t physically resemble Pierre at all. He was a rake-thin, 50-year-old Hollywood leading man who audiences had been watching for the last two decades.
Still, Fonda knew how Pierre was depicted in the book, and was intrigued about how his appearance could be convincingly altered for the movie. In The Films of Henry Fonda, he mused, “I knew I was physically all wrong for Pierre, but I decided that, with the right spectacles, some strategically placed padding and my hair combed forward, I could pass.”
To Fonda’s shock, though, producer Dino De Laurentiis had no intention of his movie star padding his gut and wearing his hair in an unusual way. He had never read War and Peace and simply envisioned Pierre as a standard romantic lead. “They didn’t want a Pierre who looked like Pierre,” Fonda lamented. “One who looked like Rock Hudson is closer to what they had in mind.”
“They went into a nervous shock when they saw my original make-up.”
Henry Fonda
In fact, when De Laurentiis saw the original makeup test with Fonda altered to look more like the novel character, he baulked at it. “They went into a nervous shock when they saw my original make-up,” he admitted. “The padding went immediately – over my anguished protests.”
When it came time to actually shoot the picture, though, it was another aspect of Fonda’s look that was like a red rag to a bull for De Laurentiis. Fonda groaned, “From that point on, it was a constant struggle between the producer and me as to whether or not I’d wear the spectacles.” For whatever reason, De Laurentiis hated the idea of his romantic hero – who shouldn’t have even been a romantic hero – wearing glasses in the film. Fonda claimed he would fly into a rage when he caught him wearing them.
However, Fonda was determined that the movie would be accurate to the source material in some way, so he came up with a novel solution. Through chicanery and subterfuge, he only wore the glasses when De Laurentiis was “nowhere near the set”.
He smiled, “I won about half the time.”
Ultimately, War and Peace wasn’t a particularly happy experience for Fonda, and he later admitted that he regretted agreeing to play Pierre. He mostly took on the job because the money was good, and he loved the novel, but he always knew he was too old and thin for the part.
