Not all movie stars get along. That should come as no surprise once you read this list of seven huge movie star feuds, including everyone from Marilyn Monroe to Laurence Olivier to Hugh Grant to Julia Roberts. Hollywood feuds have been around for about as long as movies have — our oldest feud on this list goes as far back as 1933.
Joan Crawford and Bette Davis
The feud between Whatever Happened to Baby Jane co-stars Joan Crawford and Bette Davis is one of the most well-documented in Hollywood history.
It all started when Joan Crawford’s divorce announcement upstaged Bette Davis’ publicity campaign for her first leading-lady role in Ex-Lady, which ended up flopping due to poor ticket sales in 1933.
Things got worse when Crawford married Franchot Tone, the handsome actor whom Davis had developed a massive crush on while starring opposite him in Dangerous in 1935. Davis believed that Crawford has purposefully stolen him from, her out of spite.
“I have never forgiven her for that, and never will,” Davis told journalist Michael Thornton in 1987, according to Harper’s Bazaar. “She took him from me… She did it coldly, deliberately and with complete ruthlessness.”
Crawford is quoted as saying in her biography Not The Girl Next Door: Joan Crawford: A Personal Biography: “Franchot said he thought Bette was a good actress, but he never thought of her as a woman.”
Sick burn.
Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra
The famous feud between Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra began on the set of their 1955 film Guys and Dolls. It would be another 17 years until Brando would win (and turn down) his best actor Oscar for The Godfather, but Sinatra had already won the best supporting actor award for From Here to Eternity in 1954.
Sinatra had wanted Brando’s role, Sky, in Guys and Dolls, but settled for the other lead, Nathan. And on top of that, he had also lost Brando’s iconic role of Terry Malloy in On The Waterfront, and he was apparently still bitter when they started shooting Guys and Dolls together.
“[Sinatra] saw in Marlon a figurehead of youthful rebellion, an avatar of all that threatened his career. The wounded swagger notwithstanding, Sinatra was a deeply insecure man in the mid-fifties,” Stefan Kanfer wrote in his 2008 book, Somebody: The Reckless Life and Remarkable Career of Marlon Brando.
Then, Kanfer writes, Brando dared to ask Sinatra to run lines together, since he didn’t have as much experience working in musicals as Sinatra did. This also irritated Sinatra.
“The tone for the film was set on the first day of rehearsals, when Brando was introduced to Sinatra. “Frank,” Marlon confided, sotto voce, “I’ve never done anything like this before, and I was wondering, maybe I could come to your dressing room and we could just run the dialogue together? Sinatra was succinct: “Don’t give me any of that Actors Studio s—,” Kanfer writes.
Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts
Among the many actresses Grant has admitted to falling out with is Julia Roberts, with whom he starred in the 1999 rom-com Noting Hill. Apparently, they didn’t get along so well together on set, because Grant had a few things to say about her later.
Grant called Roberts “very big-mouthed,” on the Oprah Winfrey Show in 2004, according to Australia’s News.com. “Literally, physically, she has a very big mouth. When I was kissing her I was aware of a faint echo.”
On a 2015 episode of Andy Cohen’s Watch What Happens Live, Grant responded to a fan question about whether he and Roberts had kept in touch after Notting Hill.
“I’ve probably made too many jokes about the size of her mouth. She might hate me by now,” he said.
But at least he’s still friends with his Bridget Jones’ Diary co-star Renee Zellweger.
“I love Renee. Uh, she’s one of the few actresses I haven’t fallen out with,” he told The Jess Cagle Show.
Vin Diesel and Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson
Diesel and Johnson have had a long-documented feud that seems to have started in 2016 when The Rock complained about his male co-stars on the eighth The Fast and Furious movie, calling them, including Diesel, “candy a–es.”
“My female co-stars are always amazing and I love ’em. My male co-stars however are a different story,” he wrote in a since deleted post. “Some conduct themselves as stand up men and true professionals, while others don’t. The ones that don’t are too chickens— to do anything about it anyway. Candy a–es.”
There was a lot more drama that happened that Insider aptly breaks down — but you should know that as of June 1, Johnson declared the feud over.
“”Last summer, @vindiesel and I put all the past behind us,” Johnson wrote on Instagram. “We’ll lead with brotherhood and resolve – and always take care of the franchise, characters & FANS that we love.”
Sylvester Stallone and Richard Gere
The Rocky and American Gigolo stars were supposed to star together in 1974’s The Lords of Flatbush, until Gere was fired and replaced by Perry King.
Stallone told Ain’t It Cool his side of the story in 2006.
“Yeah, the original part of Chico, which was played by Perry King, was originally supposed to be played by Richard Gere, but we never hit it off,” Stallone said.
“He would strut around in his oversized motorcycle jacket like he was the baddest knight at the round table. One day, during an improv, he grabbed me (we were simulating a fight scene) and got a little carried away. I told him in a gentle fashion to lighten up, but he was completely in character and impossible to deal with.
“Then we were rehearsing at Coney Island and it was lunchtime, so we decided to take a break, and the only place that was warm was in the backseat of a Toyota. I was eating a hotdog and he climbs in with a half a chicken covered in mustard with grease nearly dripping out of the aluminum wrapper. I said, ‘That thing is going to drip all over the place.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ I said, ‘If it gets on my pants you’re gonna know about it.’
“He proceeds to bite into the chicken and a small, greasy river of mustard lands on my thigh. I elbowed him in the side of the head and basically pushed him out of the car. The director had to make a choice: one of us had to go, one of us had to stay. Richard was given his walking papers and to this day seriously dislikes me. “
It worked out fine for everyone: Stallone went on to Rocky fame, and Gere was soon toplining films like American Gigolo, above.
Selma Blair and Charlie Sheen
The Legally Blonde actress and the Platoon actor had a huge falling out when Blair had a fraught exit from Sheen’s 2012 FX sitcom Anger Management.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, after Blair questioned his work ethic, Sheen fired her from the show, on which she played his love interest, via a text in which he called her a “c—.”
But in an interview with Jay Leno, Sheen described the encounter differently.
“One of our primary characters, Selma Blair, who played Kate, was written out because [the show] was not about our relationship, and the problem was too many people were still excited about the Two and a Half [Men] character and thought the Anger Management character was a little dull,” Sheen told Leno in 2013.
Laurence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe
The contentious working relationship between Olivier and Monroe is told in the 2011 drama My Week With Marilyn, with Kenneth Branagh playing Olivier and Michelle Williams playing Monroe.
When Olivier and Monroe starred together in 1957’s The Prince and the Showgirl, they had very different approaches to acting. Monroe adhered closely to the Lee Strasberg school of method acting, having been coached by Strasberg’s second wife, Paula. But Olivier was a traditional Shakespearean actor and didn’t respect her approach at all.
“They were sort of talking two different languages at this point,” My Week With Marilyn director Simon Curtis told NPR in 2011: “Oliver was an institutional figure of traditional British theater-based external acting,” while “Marilyn was a real devotee of the Strasberg school, you know, the Method — which meant that she loved to investigate inside the character.”
Olivier also had another issue.
“Marilyn would show up late, sometimes as late as three days late, and that created, often, comic frustration for Olivier,” Branagh told NPR. I don’t know how funny he found it at the time but in the movie, it allows us to perhaps sympathize or empathize for a bit with his plight. He doesn’t always deal with it well.”
The Prince and The Showgirl was a flop — but My Week With Marilyn did pretty well, generating $35 million at the box office and garnering decent reviews and currently sitting at 83% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Main image: Marilyn Monroe in a 1940 postcard
