For many actors, the fear of being typecast only becomes an issue once they’ve achieved fame and success in one or more roles as the same type of character. However, there are groups of actors who are typecast too, and often before they’ve ever played a role.

Racial Typecasting

One group of actors who seem to be particularly susceptible to being typecast are Asian actors and in fact, in 2003, one actor made legal history by taking his agent to court for alleged racial typecasting. He claimed that the only roles the agency put him forward for were “kebab-shop owners and terrorists”.

The Independent reported that the only auditions he’d been offered in his first nine months with the agency were as “a rapist in Cold Feet, a paedophile in BBC1 drama Cops and a ‘shifty Arab’ in a corporate video entitled Knights of Malta for the Spanish Tourist Board.”

Pakistan-born actor Art Malik, who played an arms dealer in the James Bond film The Living Daylights and a Middle Eastern terrorist in True Lies, once complained that Asians were offered roles only as “doctors, lawyers or people pushing brooms around Heathrow”.

Typecast For Life

However, being typecast can happen for many reasons and for some actors, it’s not necessarily a negative thing. Many Hollywood greats such as Errol Flynn or John Wayne only played heroic, macho characters such as cowboys, battle-hardened soldiers or similar heroic roles, and without being typecast as such, they may not have found work.

Hugh Grant has found a very profitable niche playing mild-mannered, stiff-upper-lip British gentlemen, while actors like Gary Oldman are often cast as villains and nothing else.

Actors in the genre of sci-fi seem to be very prone to being typecast in their roles and often struggle to shake them off. Leonard Nimoy of course played Mr Spock in the original Star Trek series from 1966 to 1969 and although it was a relatively short time in the role, he’s never managed to shake off the character.

Again, other characters that seem tough to shake off are those in successful comedies. Penelope Keith played Margo Leadbetter in The Good Life and she’s never really been recognized for her work in anything else. Like Spock, the character of Margo only existed for three years but her next major role was very similar when she played the upper-class Audrey Forbes-Hamilton in To The Manor Born.

Some actors recognize that typecasting has meant they’ve had a hugely successful career – and without it, they may not have done – and aren’t at all bitter about it. Christopher Lee played Count Dracula and although he played Dracula in just eight films, it’s the role that he’s best remembered for.

“I do not regret anything” he’s quoted as saying by the BBC.

Playing the Count, he said, gave him “a name, a fan club and a second-hand car, for all of which I was grateful”.

Typecasting can though be the death of an actor’s career, as Christopher Eccleston could testify. Yes, he’s had other roles since he left Doctor Who but can anyone remember them? I’d be hard pushed to recall a role in which he’s had a significant presence.

Some actors though are prepared to take rather a big gamble with their careers to avoid being typecast; Coronation Street actor Rob James-Collier quit the show after just two years because he feared being typecast but will he have ultimately ditched the most, and possibly only, successful role of his life? Time will tell.

It seems that many actors have to accept that playing similar roles to their original defining role is the only work they’re offered. Sean Connery, for instance, who found fame as James Bond, later found audiences unwilling to accept him as anything else.

“I have always hated that damn James Bond” he once said in a BBC interview, adding, “I’d like to kill him.”

But that didn’t stop him from returning to the part twice, first in Diamonds Are Forever, and again in Never Say Never Again.

Julie Andrews was also typecast because of her roles in Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music so in an attempt to shake off her ‘wholesome’ image, she went topless in the 1981 comedy, S.O.B.

“I don’t want to be thought of as wholesome” she told the Daily Mail at the time. “Does Mary Poppins have an orgasm? Does she go to the bathroom? I assure you she does.”

That conjures up some unsettling mental images doesn’t it?

Merchant Ivory actress Helena Bonham Carter was equally daring in her attempt to rid herself of her corset-clad characters.

“I hate this image of me as a prim Edwardian” she once said. “I want to shock everyone.”

She thought that playing a chain-smoking drug addict in Fight Club and, even more oddly, a monkey in Planet of the Apes, would do it, but it didn’t.

Similarly, Keira Knightley actively pursued the role of a troubled alcoholic in the psychological thriller, The Jacket.

“As a British actor in Hollywood you get typecast very fast” she said in another BBC interview, adding, “I don’t want to play the same character for my entire career. That would be supremely boring.”

Sir Alec Guinness is a classic example of how an already established and respected actor may be typecast evermore by one hugely successful role. Although he’d had legendary triumphs on stage and screen in his long and venerable career, they were completely overshadowed by his role in Star Wars.

“I shrivel up every time someone mentions it” he once said.

In an interview published by the US media a year before his death, the actor revealed that he’d persuaded director George Lucas to kill off Obi-Wan Kenobi, saying his character would be “more effective as a ghost.”

“What I didn’t tell him was I just couldn’t go on speaking those bloody awful, banal lines. I’d had enough of the mumbo jumbo.”

Those Who Escape

Yet many actors manage to avoid being typecast altogether, but the reason why they escape seems unclear.

For instance, Sarah Lancashire achieved huge fame during the eight years she played Racquel Watts in Coronation Street but went on to play a number of roles that couldn’t have been further from the ditsy-blonde-girl character. She’s since had roles in pretty much every genre of TV, stage and film you could think of and none of them have even remotely resembled Racquel.

Similarly, John Travolta is arguably most famous for his role in Grease but has since played arch villains, a mental patient and a variety of roles that haven’t required the use of Brylcreem or any sort of hip wriggling.

Robin Williams too has avoided being typecast and seems versatile enough to make a success of any role.

So what’s their secret? Well, it seems to be something of an enigma and no-one seems to have a formula for avoiding typecasting. It would appear to be luck of the draw and the versatility of the actor to some extent. That said, few actors are more versatile than the late Alec Guinness, but he didn’t escape the typecasting trap.

What do you think? Why is it that some actors can play just about anything and some are destined to be in the same role forever?