Lake and Ladd - Nordic Twins
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — This Gun for Hire
Noir-It-All — 16 years ago(April 27, 2009 02:45 PM)
I've read elsewhere that Lake and Ladd were almost interchangeable. They had frozen, Nordic expressions. Lake was tough and Ladd was vulnerable.
"Two more swords and I'll be Queen of the Monkey People." Roseanne -
PillowRock — 16 years ago(May 20, 2009 04:53 PM)
And for the studio there was an added bonus: their heights matched.
In the image machine of the time, Ladd couldn't be paired with a woman as tall as Maureen O'Hara or Lauren Bacall or Ingrid Bergman.
And Lake would have looked like a little kid next to an actor with the height of John Wayne or Jimmy Stewart or Vincent Price. (Two-shots of Lake and one of those guys, with both of them standing up, wouldn't have worked.)
Paired with each other, they looked right on screen. Most of the time, you won't even notice how short they both are. -
Pharaoh Osmosis — 16 years ago(January 19, 2010 12:07 PM)
Well Veronica Lake's father was Danish, and Alan Ladd's distant ancestors were Danes or Swedes who settled in Normandy before helping to take over and ruin England maybe that has something to do with it?!
"Nothings gonna change my world!" -
daedalus1337 — 15 years ago(December 13, 2010 02:22 PM)
Yeah, well that's because they usually are
But yeah, look at Cagney or Robinson. Both were about the same height as Ladd was and both were constantly paired with average height women who weren't much shorter than they were and it worked fine. Then again, I've heard that Ladd was more like 5'4 than 5'6 but it seems like no one is certain. Robinson was about 5'5 and Cagney 5'7.