LOS ANGELES – Lesley Ann Warren knows a little something about geniuses.
She worked with filmmakers Walt Disney and Blake Edwards during her career and saw first-hand why they got the moniker.
Both, she says, were “absolutely wonderful to me.”
Disney, who cast her in her first movie, “The Happiest Millionaire,” “was protective and like a granddad. He invited me and the other actors to his home for dinners. I felt very taken care of.”
And Edwards, who directed her to an Oscar nomination in “Victor/Victoria,” had the capacity “to envision what someone was capable of without ever having seen it before.”
Grabbing ‘Victor’
Although Warren had played a number of leading ladies in film and on television, she never had a character part like Norma Cassidy in Edwards’ film.
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“My agent, Ron Meyer, called me and said, ‘You need to go meet Blake.’ And I said I couldn’t go because my hair was in braids and I had a baseball cap on. He said, ‘No, no. He’s leaving for London tomorrow; you’ve got to meet him.’”
Warren went and “we didn’t really discuss the part very much. We just kind of laughed and talked about Cinderella that both (wife Julie Andrews) and I had done. He knew that I danced and had this kind of character in me. And then he said, ‘Do you want to do this part?’ I hadn’t read it, but I was such a gigantic Blake Edwards fan I said, ‘I’d do anything you want me to do.’”
When she got home and pored over the script, Warren realized Norma was static and needed a little something – a backstory. Quickly, she created a character, worked with Edwards’ wig maker and costume designer and came up with this brassy chorine. “When I