Help, I've Been Miscasted

So true about T.E. Robert Graves once wrote that Lawrence was so short he felt the need to stand on things (chairs and such) when at parties and the like. Alan Ladd wanted desperately to play Lawrence back in the Fifties but even then he was way too old to play such a young man. A younger Ladd might have worked in the role fifteen or twenty years earlier,--but as an Englishman? Not bloody likely!

Which reminds me...

The Oklahoma Kid (1939)

Bogie and Cagney transpose urban mob turf wars to the old west. But what the hey, in the days of the studio system, even the big-name contract players got pressed into genre-hopping to see what worked. Sometimes, it did (Errol Flynn in Dodge City, for instance). And a smaller hat for Cagney might have helped just a bit here.

Speaking of genre-hopping, a related example of casting that could have gone wrong but, oddly, worked was Bogart's appearance as a pasty-faced quasi-vampire (executed for murder but brought back to life and requiring human blood for survival) in The Return Of Dr. X from the same year.

If he seems out of place, it's only because of our familiarity with him in other milieux, but his studiously twitchy intensity serves the project well and, in an alternate, fickle-finger-of-fate career trajectory, he could have had success as a reliable fixture in similar B thrillers, along the lines of Lionel Atwill or George Zucco.   
  

One could say Orson Welles as Othello but with his acting ability, facial features and the use of black and white film, I think he's passable.

Miscasted is still not accepted but "forecasted" is now accepted to the point that its use is not deemed wrong. The finance community frequently uses "forecasted". It is even more prevalent in the scientific community than in the finance community. I personally believe that given the affinity of subcontinent people with using "ing" and "ed" forms words like miscasted will become accepted in the future.