4) Mickey Rooney As An Incredibly Stereotypical Japanese Man In Breakfast At Tiffany’s
Oh boy. People regularly refer to Breakfast At Tiffany’s as a favorite, but even when they do, the general rule is that they also have to address the elephant in the room: director Blake Edwards’ near film-ruining decision to cast impish American comedian Mickey Rooney as an essentially breathtakingly offensive Japanese character named Mr Yunioshi.
You can put Rooney’s casting down as ‘of its time,’ but even during the film’s production producer Richard Shepherd objected and expressed his opinion that a Japanese actor should be cast in the role instead. Edwards ignored him, and that’s how we ended up with one of the more notoriously offensive characters in a Hollywood classic.
3) Christopher Lee As Founder Of Pakistan Muhammad Ali Jinnah
The late, great Christopher Lee was inescapably English. It was the stiff upper lip, the cut-glass accent, the general air of solemn decency. You like most people probably think of him as a stereotypically upper crust Englishman (albeit one who also used to make heavy metal albums). Which is why Jamil Dehlavi’s Jinnah is such a jarring experience.
In Dehlavi’s biopic, Lee plays Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan who was born and raised in what was originally British India. Lee considered it an important film, and his performance in it his all-time best. None of which distracts from the fact that it’s a very serious drama with Sir Christopher Lee, a descendant of King Charlemagne himself, in fairly ill-advised brownface.
