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The series is only slightly less important for Vincent, who plays her husband Byron Henry. A boyish-looking 37, Vincent has been largely typecast in surfer or truck-driver roles, and Curtis picked him somewhat reluctantly. "But I get down on my hands and knees and thank God that I did," says Curtis, "because he is the one who has surprised me the most. He has incredible instincts." Curtis was also surprised by the unsuspected abilities of Polly Bergen, who plays Victor Henry's wife Rhoda. Bergen, 52, a former singer, won a TV Emmy for The Helen Morgan Story (1957), but she abandoned acting years ago to become a cosmetics executive, lecturer and women's rights activist.
Aaron Jastrow was always thought of as a sort of Jewish John Houseman, and so, in typical Hollywood fashion, the role was given to the late Lee Strasberg. But Curtis belatedly concluded that Strasberg was too New York in his style, and he decided to meet with Houseman himself. Says Curtis: "When John told me his mother was Jewish, I said: 'O.K., you've got the part.'" For the role of Pamela Tudsbury, the young Englishwoman who falls in love with Pug, Curtis and his casting assistants looked in vain at 200 actresses. Then, says Curtis, "I was looking out the window, nearly suicidal, and in walks this girl. I said a prayer to myself: 'Oh, God, please let her be able to act.' " She was able, all right, and as a result the little-known Victoria Tennant, 30, has her best crack yet at breaking through with the U.S. audience.
The choices for the world leaders were perhaps hardest of all. Millions have seen them countless times in photographs, newsreels or historical documentaries, and millions have seen other portrayals. The President, almost inescapably, had to be Ralph Bellamy, who played F.D.R. as a younger man in Sunrise at Campobello. Curtis saw his Churchill in British Actor Howard Lang, whom he spotted from the back on a BBC series called The Onedin Line. "He turned around and he didn't really look like Churchill, but he had that demeanor, that great granite-like face and the big gut," says Curtis.
Stalin, French-Russian Actor Anatoly Shaginyan, looked right after makeup, but at 5 ft. 1 in. (3 in. under Stalin's height) he appeared absurdly short next to Mitchum. For their one scene together, in a Kremlin dining room, he walked on ramps hidden from the camera. Gunter Meisner, who had played Hitler twice before, was most afraid that the Führer's posturing would appear comical. He bought books, looked at photographs and examined documentary films on a videotape machine. Hitler, he eventually decided, was also an actor: "He studied many of his gestures, although he didn't have a video recorder as I had, just a mirror." The man who portrayed Mussolini was not an actor at all, but a director, Enzo Castellari, who strutted in a Mussolini-like way on the sets of his movies.