Trivia / Young Bess

• Billing Displacement: Deborah Kerr gets third billing, and yet Catherine Parr features less than the advertising lets on. Guy Rolfe (Ned Seymour) and Kay Walsh (Kat Ashley) have more screen time than her.
• Cast the Runner-Up: Deborah Kerr was originally up for the role of Young Bess. Due to complications while filming Edward, My Son, they cast Jean Simmons instead and Deborah was given the smaller role of Catherine Parr.
• Creator Backlash: This was the latest in a string of Costume Drama roles for Deborah Kerr where she was stuck playing English Roses in what she called "poker up the arse parts". After the film wrapped, she went to MGM and asked to have her contract terminated. Luckily for her, the next film she did was From Here to Eternity - where she went heavily against type and showed audiences her range.
• Dawson Casting:
  • Jean Simmons was twenty-three playing Elizabeth from the ages of twelve to fifteen, which robbed the story of its context.
  • Inverted for Deborah Kerr - twenty-four playing Catherine Parr in her early thirties.
• Fake Brit: In a mostly British cast, Edward VI was played by New York native Rex Thompson. Not that you'd know, the accent is very convincing. There's also Robert Arthur as Tom's page Barnaby.
• Missing Trailer Scene: The trailer has a shot of a carriage moving through the grounds of one of the castles, possibly Bess' at Hatfield.
• Real-Life Relative: Jean Simmons and Stewart Granger were married at the time.
• Reality Subtext: As noted above, Stewart Granger and Jean Simmons were married and he had also had a fling with Deborah Kerr.
• Role Reprise: Charles Laughton plays Henry VIII again, 20 years after The Private Life of Henry VIII.
• Those Two Actors: Deborah Kerr starred with Stewart Granger in King Solomon's Mines and The Prisoner of Zenda and Jean Simmons in The Grass Is Greener and Black Narcissus, and Rex Thompson in The King and I. Kathleen Byron also starred in Black Narcissus.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The novel was written in 1944 and was greenlit as a film almost instantly - with James Mason and Judy Garland in the lead roles.
  • Elizabeth Taylor also turned the title role down. Amusingly years later she'd lobby to play Anne Boleyn in Anne of the Thousand Days but get turned down for being too old.

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