Orson Welles was 20 years younger than the character he was cast to play in The Long, Hot Summer. Perhaps that's why chose to wear heavy make-up and a prosthetic nose to play the part. It's also possible he thought the big nose would make him more menacing (an appropriate attribute for the forceful patriarch, Will Varner), or -- let's face it -- Welles had a thing for fake noses. Whatever the reason, it made for a difficult shoot.

In an episode of AMC's Backstory, the cast talked about working with the legend and his prosthetic. He was, Angela Lansbury felt, "having difficulty living in his skin." Lansbury, like Welles, often played characters older than her real age but, unlike Welles, she did it without make-up (most successfully in The Manchurian Candidate). In The Long Hot Summer she was the same age as Paul Newman but played, Minnie Littlejohn, a much older woman in love with Varner. You have to give her credit; Varner was not an easy character to love and Welles didn't make him any more attractive. "He was very, very heavy," she noted. "We were working under dreadful conditions of heat and he was perspiring and he seemed to have a lot of thick make-up on."

Shooting took place near Baton Rouge, Louisiana in September of 1957. The weather was as steamy as the Faulkner-inspired script. "There's nothing worse than having someone start a scene," recalled Newman, "and then the make up guy comes over and starts picking and gluing your nose back on." Newman and Joanne Woodward (who starred as Varner's daughter) sympathized with the classically trained actor who had fallen out of fashion. "It must have been a terrible, terrible feeling for him to have to be confronted by all these young hot shots... trained at the Actors Studio," said Woodward.

With the help of the disguise, or in spite of it, he gives a great performance. "There was something you couldn't resist about Orson," said Lansbury. "Even though he was a son of a b--- at times."

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