Trivia for
The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942)

photos

board

trailer

details

• Bette Davis saw "The Man Who Came to Dinner" on Broadway and immediately wanted to play the role of Maggie, the antithesis of her usual roles. She wanted the role desperately because she wanted to act opposite John Barrymore who was to play Sheridan Whiteside. At her insistence, Warner Bros. tested Barrymore for the role but his failing health and inability to remember his lines cost him the job.
  
  
• Late in December 1941, the film's world premiere was hosted by the Capitol Theatre in Paragould, Arkansas - the home town of star Richard Travis (aka Bill Justice), who had been one of the theater's employees.
  
  
• The poem Whiteside recites ("Harriet Stanley took an ax; gave her father forty whacks...") is -- but for the name -- the same as the rhyme about Lizzie Borden, who was accused of killing her father and step-mother...with an ax.
  
  

• Banjo is based on Harpo Marx. Sheridan Whiteside is based on noted theatre critic and personality Alexander Woollcott.
  
  
• The character of Lorraine Sheldon was based on Gertrude Lawrence, and the character of Beverly Carlton was based on Noel Coward.
  
  
• This was Laura Hope Crews's final film.
  
  
• Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, who wrote the play the movie is based on, were good friends with Alexander Woollcott, a famous critic, radio personality, and lecturer at the time. Woollcott requested that they write a play FOR him, but they never came up with a plot. One day Woollcott came to visit Hart unexpectedly and turned his house upside down, taking over the master bedroom, ordering Harts staff around and making a general pain of himself. When Hart told Kaufman of the visit he said "imagine what would have happened if he broke his leg and had to stay." They looked at each other and knew they had a play.
  
  
• The authors asked Alexander Woollcott if he would like to play the part of Whiteside when the play opened on Broadway. He declined. The authors then approached Monty Wooley who at that time was a professor at Yale. They wrote him "would it amuse you to play the part of Whiteside?" to which Wooley replied "it would amuse everyone."
  
  
• The role of Maggie is reportedly base on Algonquin Round Table member Dorothy Parker.
  
  
• Mary Wickes, the only member of the original Broadway cast in the film version, makes her screen debut.
  
  

Related Links