They wanted Olivier, but he was too busy. They wanted a Russian, but he was too old. But when I was asked to play in it, I said, no, that part's for a real Italian. "I bought 11 copies of The Leopard because I thought it was a great novel. "It was my best work," Lancaster himself told me sadly, more than 20 years later. Visconti himself was blunt: "It is now a work for which I acknowledge no paternity at all," he said, adding that Hollywood treated Americans "like a public of children." Lancaster does have that blunt American voice that lacks the least suggestion of being Sicilian," wrote Bosley Crowther in the New York Times. And when the film finally opened in America, in a version with 40 minutes ruthlessly hacked out by the studio, and with a soundtrack unconvincingly dubbed into English, it was hard to see what Visconti and Lancaster had been thinking of. It was rumored that Lancaster's presence was needed to make the epic production bankable.
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