Sakini in Daniel Mann’s The Teahouse of the August
Moon(1956), and Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi in
Blake Edwards’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s(1961), to
name just a few. The practice is nearly but not com-
pletely extinct today. In Julian Schnabel’s Before
Night Falls(2000), for example, Sean Penn plays a
dark-skinned Cuban, Cuco Sanchez; the somewhat
darker-skinned Johnny Depp plays both Bon Bon, a
transvestite, and Lieutenant Victor, a Cuban mili-
tary officer. An even more striking example was
the casting of Anthony Hopkins as a light-skinned
African American in Robert Benton’s The Human
Stain(2003)—a decision that struck many critics
as a critical casting error.
The long-standing explanation for this custom
among movie executives was that they could not
find the appropriate actors. Instead, they gave such
all-purpose actors as Anthony Quinn, an Irish
Mexican, roles of different races and ethnicities.
Using costume, makeup, and accents to change
himself, Quinn played a Spaniard, an Italian, a
Greek, a Frenchman, an Arab, and a Native Amer-
ican, while Alec Guinness, a great British actor
famous for his facility in international accents,
played an Indian, an Arab, and a Scotsman. Lau-
rence Olivier played an equally diverse set of roles
on the stage and screen, including Shakespeare’s
Moor, Othello. This does not mean that Quinn,
Guinness, and Olivier took these roles because they
could not get other work; or that they did not look
or sound appropriate in these roles, which they
most often did; or even that actors should be lim-
ited to roles matching their own genders, races,
ethnicities, or ages (since acting is, after all, about
the creation of a character). But it is clear that pro-
ducers simply felt more comfortable casting roles
in this manner, that minority actors were disquali-
fied as a result, and that, absent public opposition,
the custom continued unabated.
Such barriers were not always in place—or at
least not so firmly. Beginning in the 1920s, in reac-
tion to the stereotyping of African Americans in
D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation(1915), some
African Americans strove to make their own
films. Producer, director, and exhibitor Oscar312 CHAPTER 7ACTING
132The faces of contemporary casting The diversity of
contemporary film actors is apparent whenever we go to the
cineplex to see the latest releases. Among the most popular
actors working today are [1] Denzel Washington, seen here in
his role as Ben Marco in Jonathan Demme’s The Manchurian
Candidate(2004); [2] Jennifer Lopez, shown here as Charlie
in Robert Luketic’s Monster-in-Law(2005); and [3] Antonio
Banderas, here playing the role of Carlos Rueda in
Christopher Hampton’s Imagining Argentina(2003).