Marilyn Monroe

Truman Capote, who wrote the novel on which Breakfast at Tiffany's is based, apparently possessed three major complaints.

1) He hated the sentimental ending. (Of course, the film is a romantic comedy, so what does one expect?)

2) He hated the casting of Mickey Rooney as the Japanese neighbor and his absurdly ethnocentric caricature (a fair point, and Rooney and director Blake Edwards later expressed remorse over it).

3) He felt that Marilyn Monroe should have been cast in the main part instead of Audrey Hepburn.

So how do people feel about that last complaint? I expressed my thoughts in another thread:

As for Hepburn, her casting is certainly problematic. She is playing a character who is supposed to be, what, nineteen? And Hepburn was about thirty-one during the filming. Moreover, her character is supposed to be an ingenue, whereas Hepburn was worldly and sophisticated. No, matters do not entirely mesh.

But in other ways, her casting works. Hepburn fit the part of a waif physically, in terms of her body type, and she projected a sense of quirkiness and barely suppressed desperation that also fit the role. Additionally, her combination of irreverence and vulnerability matched the character.

Certainly, her casting is imperfect, but I feel that it works better than Marilyn Monroe—the preference of author Truman Capote—would have worked. Monroe could certainly play melancholy and depressive anxiety, as she proved in The Misfits from that same year, but she she was even older (by three years) than Hepburn, and her voluptuous figure would not have fit the part of a waif.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054698/board/thread/263416172?d=264026532#264026532