Did non-Caucasian actors become famous playing Caucasian characters?
From Wikipedia:
In the early years of film, black characters were routinely played by white people in blackface. In the first filmic adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1903), all of the major black roles were white people in blackface. Even the 1914 Uncle Tom starring African-American actor Sam Lucas in the title role had a white male in blackface as Topsy. D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915) used white people in blackface to represent all of its major black characters, but reaction against the film's racism largely put an end to this practice in dramatic film roles... This stands in contrast to made-up white people routinely playing Native Americans, Asians, Arabs, and so forth, for several more decades... As late as the 1940s, Warner Bros. used blackface in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942)...
It seems to me that there have been lots of examples, in European and American movies, of Caucasian actors disguised to look like other racial types. For example the Fu Manchu movies, Charlie Chan movies and Lawrence of Arabia featured Chinese or Arab characters played by Caucasians or Hispanics. In Little Big Man, Dustin Hoffman played the Indian in the title role, and in The Searchers, German-born Henry Brandon played an Indian named Scar. In these films (in my opinion) this racial mismatch was not for the sake of humor; casting was simply based on criteria other than race, and audiences were expected to accept the depictions.
In films made abroad (or here, I guess), are there comparable examples of non-Caucasian actors painted pink to play Caucasian characters?
Best Answer
A Dane got famous for playing a Chilean, does that count?
Giancarlo Esposito, born in Copenhagen of Italian and African descent, played Gus Fring, a Chilean-American.
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Answer 2
I don’t know about minority actors who necessarily became famous for playing caucasian characters in a serious role. But, there are quite a few actors who played characters who were originally supposed to be another race. Such as:
- Denzel Washington in the Pelican Brief
- Kevin Spacey in Pay it Forward
- Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell
- Arnold Schwarzenegger (nationality) in everything
- I’ll add to the list later
Often times, these actors were already famous. So, changing the race of the character from what it was in the source material is more likely a way of capitalizing on the actors fame and talent.
In decades past, this practice was more about keeping minorities out of the public eye. Not necessarily on the part of bigoted directors and producers (though, that was probably going on as well). But, to make movies more marketable/palatable to white Americans. There were many talented minority Americans in the theatre and film industry who found more acceptance overseas while white Americans played their parts here in the US.
Answer 3
Uhh... saying "became famous" is quite subjective. But there were quite a few famous non-caucasian actors playing caucasian characters (source - tvtropes), although it was usually "played for laughs"
Eddie Murphy in "The nutty professor" (and various episodes of "Saturday Night Live")
Whoopi Goldberg in "The Associate"
O.J. Simpson in "Juiced" (Displayed in "O.J.: Made in America")
Shawn and Marlon Wayans in "White Chicks"
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