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Oct 17, 2017 · For a significant number of movie stars, a career in pictures started instead with sexual exploitation on the “casting couch” of Harry Cohn, one of Hollywood’s most powerful—and brutal ...
- 10 Corinne Calvet
- 9 Theresa Russell
- 8 Bruce Robinson
- 7 Jenny Mccarthy
- 6 Goldie Hawn
- 5 Joan Collins
- 4 Dame Helen Mirren
- 3 Judy Garland
- 2 Rita Hayworth
- 1 Marilyn Monroe
Even when it was clear to him that actress Corinne Calvet lacked the talent to become the next Greta Garbo or Ingrid Bergman, Paramount Pictures producer Hal Wallis continued to show interest in Calvet. According to her autobiography, Has Corinne Been a Good Girl? (1983), Wallis expected her to have sex with him in exchange for her starring in the ...
According to Theresa Russell, she was propositioned by Sam Spiegel, the producer of the 1976 movie The Last Tycoonin which she starred with Robert De Niro. If she refused to have sex with Spiegel, he’d destroy her career, Spiegel told her. Russell refused. “If it meant the end of my career, then I don’t have a career,” she told an interviewer. As i...
Bruce Robinson landed his role as Benvolio in Romeo and Juliet (1968) after Italian director Franco Zeffirelli performed oral sex on the twentysomething actor. Robinson discussed the incident on a 1998 edition of The Ruby Wax Show. He’d just left acting school, he said, and Zeffirelli’s film was his big break. When Robinson went to the director’s a...
Jenny McCarthy said that Steven Seagal ordered her to strip during a casting call for his 1995 movie Under Siege 2. After inviting her to take a seat on his couch, Seagal asked, “So, you were Playmate of the Year?” He then told her to take off her dress, at which point McCarthy told him to “rent [her] Playboy video,” started crying, and fled his of...
In her 2005 New York Times best-selling autobiography, A Lotus Grows in the Mud, Goldie Hawn recounts the time that cartoonist Al Capp, creator of the comic strip Li’l Abner, exposed himself to her. Capp arranged to auditionher in his New York City apartment. He wanted to consider her for the part of Tenderlief Ericsson, a new character he’d create...
Marilyn Monroe warned Joan Collinsabout studio executive Darryl Zanuck’s casting couch. If he didn’t “get what he [wanted],” Monroe said, he’d drop Collins’s contract. A few days later, Collins said, Zanuck propositioned her, telling her that he was Hollywood’s “biggest” and had the stamina to “go all night.” Despite Monroe’s warning, Collins was s...
David Cameron, who was the United Kingdom’s prime minister when English producer and director Michael Winner died, didn’t show up for Winner’s funeral. Former prime ministers Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and Nick Clegg didn’t, either. The royals were also no-shows. Their absences may have had something to do with Winner’s treatment of Dame Helen Mirre...
Producer Louis B. Mayer, a cofounder of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, was fond of groping Judy Garland. According to her, Mayer and others sexually harassed and molested her from ages 16 to 20. The worst offender was Mayer himself, who praised her singing. “You sing from the heart,” he’d say. Touching her left breast, he’d add, “This is where you si...
Harry Cohn, a cofounder of Columbia Pictures Corporation, was its president. Rita Hayworth was an actress under contract with his studio. Possibly to avenge himself upon her because she’d “rejected Cohn’s casting couch” earlier in her career, the executive used his position and influence to “exacerbate her disastrous marriages and excoriate her hus...
Harry Cohn also pursued Marilyn Monroe, and when she rejected his advances, he went into a rage. Jonie Taps, his executive assistant at Columbia Pictures, reported a telephone call during which Cohn raged at the party on the other end of the line, demanding to know why “that fat pig” Monroe had been given a part in the 1948 film Ladies of the Choru...
Oct 17, 2017 · “The perils for women in Hollywood are embedded, like land mines, from an actress’s debut to her swan song,” says film critic and historian Carrie Rickey, “where moguls like Harry Cohn ...
- Thelma Adams
Harry Cohn managed the company's film production in Hollywood, while his brother managed its finances from New York. The relationship between the two brothers was not always good, and Brandt, finding the partnership stressful, eventually sold his third of the company to Harry, who took over as president, by which time the firm had been renamed Columbia Pictures Corporation.
Sep 13, 2011 · He was aggressive, bullying and foul-mouthed and was notorious for his use of the Hollywood casting couch - demanding sexual favors from young actresses in return for parts in movies. Cohn also liked to eavesdrop on employee's conversations using listening devices hidden around the studio.
Jan 13, 2016 · The Casting Couch. Claudette Colbert was a big star, but even she admitted to getting her start in Hollywood via someone’s ‘casting couch’. In fact, she told an interviewer that the only star she knew of who made it without resorting to the ‘couch’ was Bette Davis. She did not elaborate on that statement, but given Bette’s ...
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Oct 22, 2022 · Cohn went down in history as one of the men who cemented Hollywood's notorious "casting couch," per History — a system that more or less endured until the days of Harvey Weinstein. Cohn may not have been the first studio executive to trade sexual favors for a plum role, but under his leadership, the practice became common.
