The Bad and The Beautiful - Cast

Cast

• Lana Turner as Georgia Lorrison
• Kirk Douglas as Jonathan Shields
• Walter Pidgeon as Harry Pebbel
• Dick Powell as James Lee Bartlow
• Barry Sullivan as Fred Amiel
• Gloria Grahame as Rosemary Bartlow
• Gilbert Roland as Victor "Gaucho" Ribera
• Leo G. Carroll as Henry Whitfield, a British director
• Vanessa Brown as Kay Amiel, Fred's wife
• Paul Stewart as Syd Murphy, Shield's press agent
• Sammy White as Gus, Lorrison's over-emotional agent
• Elaine Stewart as Lila
• Ivan Triesault as Von Ellstein

There has been much debate as to which real-life Hollywood legends are represented by the film's characters. Jonathan Shields is thought to be a blending of David O. Selznick, Orson Welles and Val Lewton. Lewton's Cat People is clearly the inspiration behind an early Shields-Amiel film. The Georgia Lorrison character is the daughter of a "Great Profile" actor like John Barrymore (Diana Barrymore's career was in fact launched the same year as her father's death), but it can also be argued that Lorrison includes elements of Minnelli's ex-wife Judy Garland. Gilbert Roland's Gaucho may almost be seen as self-parody, as he had recently starred in a series of Cisco Kid pictures, though the character's name, Ribera, would seem to give a nod also to famed Hollywood seducer Porfirio Rubirosa. The director Henry Whitfield (Leo G. Carroll) is a "difficult" director modeled on Alfred Hitchcock, and his assistant Miss March (Kathleen Freeman) is modeled on Hitchcock's wife Alma Reville. The James Lee Bartlow character may have been inspired by Paul Eliot Green, the University of North Carolina academic-turned-screenwriter of The Cabin in the Cotton.