Trivia / Princess O'Rourke

• Troubled Production: The film's production was tumultuous to say the least:
  • First, Olivia de Havilland was forced by Warner Bros. to do the film per her contract after initially refusing, resulting in a brief suspension (the reason she was cast was because producer Hal Wallis wanted to showcase de Havilland, his "protege"). She didn't want the part because of her fear of Typecasting into "lightweight" roles; this anxiety caused medical issues for her, which led de Havilland to start showing up late and leaving early to go home whenever the stress got too much for her to handle.
  • Robert Cummings (Eddie) was tied up in another movie at Universal and was often absent from the set, necessitating a stand-in for de Havilland to work off of; Cummings also fell ill with food poisoning and thus missed several days of filming.
  • Charles Coburn (Holman) was getting on in years and forgot his lines a lot, meaning frequent retakes (which drained de Havilland even more).
  • The film wound up being completed 9 days behind schedule, and then the release got delayed a year after de Havilland and Cummings filed suit against WB over their contracts; the former's case would eventually lead to the passage of the "De Havilland Law", meaning actors under contract couldn't be held to them for longer than seven calendar years (as opposed to seven years of cumulative acting).
• What Could Have Been: Loretta Young was initially slated to play Princess Maria, with Fred MacMurray, then under contract to Paramount, to star as Eddie (in exchange for Ann Sheridan; Paramount wanted Sheridan to be the lead in a movie based on Texas Guinan.) This arrangement was never realized, partially because of MacMurray being busy with filming No Time for Love (the Texas Guinan movie wound up being made as Incendiary Blonde with Betty Hutton in the lead). After de Havilland was suspended by WB, they briefly considered Alexis Smith as a replacement and got as far as a screen test.
  • The movie was nearly censored by the war-era Bureau of Motion Pictures, who hadn't pre-approved the script and considered everything in it to be an example of Hollywood studios "recklessly using the war for background incidents in an opportunistic attempt to capitalize on the war rather than interpret it." But since the film was already finished, they didn't do anything to censor it at all.