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Actors who hated remakes of their movies

Actors who hated remakes of their movies

Actors who hated remakes of their movies
09 April 2014

The word 'remake' easily inspires reams of fury from even the most passive cinemagoer so it's no surprise that the actors who've starred in the films being remade are prone to an extreme reaction every now and then.

Here we've found seven actors who were less than happy with their films being remade:

Robert Englund on A Nightmare on Elm Street

"I thought the movie was a little cold. We weren’t really given time to see the kids when they were normal, before they were frantic and haunted by Freddy. That made it harder to connect with them, harder to care what happened to them...I think the change to a more “realist” burn make-up with melted features took a lot of the strength away from the character. The strong nose and chin in the make-up I wore gives Freddy presence and power. And I played Freddy as if he liked being evil, he liked his work. Jackie went a different way."

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Angela Lansbury on The Manchurian Candidate

"I love Denzel. And for that reason I was interested in it. But I don't know how you can make a movie which you know the end result. The cat was out of the bag before it even began. For that reason it did not succeed."

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Gene Wilder on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

"I think it's an insult. It's probably Warner Bros.' insult."

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Jerry Lewis on The Nutty Professor

“When he had to do fart jokes, he lost me. As a matter of fact, I told his editor, If he wants any more from me on a creative level, tell him to pull the whole sequence. What I did was perfect. And all you’re going to do is diminish that perfection by letting someone else do it. I won’t go through it again."

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Christopher Lee on The Wicker Man

"It sounds more and more strange. I'm not condemning it, I just don't see how it could possibly work. I mean, you might as well remake Citizen Kane."

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Michael Caine on Alfie

"At the end of the movie, Alfie says, ‘What’s it all about?’ But the minute Jude walks on, you see a young man who knows exactly what everything is all about. Alfie was a sort of innocent blunder, shagging birds here and there for a nice apple crumble, at the end he’s puzzled why everyone’s pissed off at him. Jude, being so knowing looking, looked like it was deliberate and it became sinister instead of funny. It just became some guy who doesn’t care about women, he just screws them and leaves them – a male chauvinist pig, but with knowledge. I played an innocent male chauvinist pig."

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Nancy Allen on Robocop

"I don't think you remake iconic films. Ours was created out of an extraordinary script with the right director and an amazing cast. Jon believed in the script and an exceptional movie was made. I'm troubled by studios who take a perfect piece and try to milk more money off it. How can this new script be as great as Neumeier's and Miner's original? If I were a director, I wouldn't touch an iconic director's work. It would be insane. To quote Paul Verhoeven about the new film, he said, "It's very depressing, I should be dead.""

(Images: Rex Features, All Star)