The classic movie Henry Fonda regretted turning down: “The mistake of my life”
Even the greatest actors in history don’t make it through their careers without harbouring a regret or two, and it’s easy to see why Henry Fonda rued one missed opportunity above all others when it ended up becoming known as one of the finest features ever made.
Not that he didn’t make his own mark in Hollywood, with Fonda standing out among a stacked roster of superstars as one of the most naturally gifted and versatile performers in the business. There wasn’t a genre he couldn’t master, and although he was largely characterised by the many clean-cut heroes he played when he finally broke bad as a villain, it was a thing of beauty.
12 Angry Men remains the pinnacle of the courtroom drama, while Fonda’s long-standing partnership with John Ford was a regular source of greatness that included The Grapes of Wrath and My Darling Clementine. A fixture of the Western, it was Sergio Leone who convinced him to indulge his villainous side, which worked wonders when he chilled to the bone as Frank in the seminal Once Upon a Time in the West.
However, there’s one entry in the genre that could have had Fonda in the lead role, and it stung him that it didn’t come to fruition. Gary Cooper won an Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’ in the timeless High Noon for his work as Will Kane, but he was nowhere near being the first choice for the part.
John Wayne turned it down because he thought Carl Foreman’s screenplay was a touch too anti-blacklisting, given his staunch fear of Hollywood’s perceived communist infiltration, and it was subsequently rejected by Gregory Peck, Montgomery Clift, Charlton Heston, and Marlon Brando.
According to Darwin Porter’s exhaustive biography of Fonda, he was another name on the list of contenders who ultimately passed, leading him to call it “the mistake of my life.” Hindsight is always 20/20 for a reason, but his friendship with Cooper no doubt made it hit harder than it could have been him basking in the adulation of toplining High Noon.
Every major star turns down plenty of roles, and more than a few of them have ended up sitting idly by as the next person in line goes on to seize the opportunity with both hands and reap the rewards, but it’s nonetheless telling that from a career that stretched from 1935 to 1981, High Noon was a standout in terms of what might have been under different circumstances.
It was an exhaustive casting process, to say the least, and it’s not as if Fonda was the only established star to think better of signing on the dotted line, but everybody else’s loss turned out to be a huge gain for Cooper, who breathed new life into his own career after winning an Oscar during a time his own stint in Tinseltown was beginning to draw to a close.