Audiences and critics alike have been impressed by the performance of the young "find" Eamonn Owens as Francie Brady in the film of The Butcher Boy. The stocky redhaired youngster brings to life, in a realisation of the cliche, the disturbed but talented hero of Patrick McCabe's wickedly wonderful novel.
But not all casting is so satisfying. I clutched at my heart when I saw that Ralph Fiennes plays Oscar Hopkins in the Gillian Armstrong film of Peter Carey's Oscar and Lucinda.
Ralph Fiennes! One of his main attributes is that he is handsome, in an Armani catalogue sort of way, and has the fin de siecle, Cool Britannia version of the stiff upper lip. But the choice of Fiennes to play the eponymous hero of Peter Carey's novel of 19th-century Australia reinforces my feeling that casting may be something of a lost art in contemporary cinema.
In the novel, Oscar Hopkins is a gangling redhead, "long-necked and delicate. . .[with] such an open face you could thank God for its lack of guile" and "red hair, a frizzy nest which grew outwards, horizontal like a windblown tree".
Sound like Ralph? He may have won an Oscar (for Schindler's List); but in this case, Oscar he is not.
Personal relationship
I know appearances aren't everything, and perhaps Fiennes's acting ability transcends the sticky problem of over-attractiveness. But when a literary character with whom you have a personal relationship appears on the big screen in an unrecognisable form - well, it's like waking up one morning to find somebody has replaced your mother with Joan Collins.
Oscar and Lucinda's director, Gill Armstrong, herself said in a recent interview that she chose Fiennes because she believed he could play both a nerd and a very appealing character. But Hollywood just can't resist improving on things, can it? Even when it manages to make a film where someone wildly attractive is seen quite overweight and slobbish (John Travolta in the archangel film, Michael), there has to be a William Hurt on the sidelines in his Ralph Laurens with his hair permanently pressed.
The perfect Oscar Hopkins, at least for fidelity to his original embodiment, is there for all to see in The Full Monty. He plays Lumper, the chap with the sick mother who works as a security guard. Steve Gibson's acting ability is not terribly apparent from Monty, where all he has to do is look pigeon-chested and gormless. But if you need a pale, frizzy redhead who gangles and looks like the world is going to take him for a ride, there's Steve. But there, of course, go the box-office profits.
Melanie Griffith
The apogee of big-picture miscasting must surely be The Bonfire of the Vanities, in which all the leads were teeth-grindingly inappropriate. The film of Tom Wolfe's brilliant story of a New York yuppie's hell starred Tom Hanks as the anti-hero, Sherman McCoy, with Bruce Willis as Peter Fallow, a disreputable English journalist, and Melanie Griffith as McCoy's Latino girlfriend. No, she doesn't look very Latino, even when she wears a dark wig (as in Something Wild).
Giving anticipatory concern in the miscasting stakes are Julia Ormonde as Miss Smylla in of Smylla's Feeling For Snow, from Peter Hoeg's book; and Jonathan Pryce as W.H.R. Rivers - the first World War psychiatrist who must have looked avuncular in real life - in the film of Pat Barker's Regeneration.
To be fair, there are recent examples of wonderful casting too. What about Antony Sher as Disraeli in Mrs Brown? He nearly stole the whole picture, a mean enough feat with Judi Dench superb as Queen Victoria and Billy Connolly a grand John Brown. John and Ros Hubbard run one of Ireland's leading casting agencies, operating out of offices in the heart of Soho in London and the Irish Film Centre in Dublin's Temple Bar. Ros put a spoke in my wheel by commenting that everyone, yes, everyone, thinks they could be a casting director.
"I find that everybody in the world thinks that they can cast, and they can too, because after all they are the audience," said Ros, currently finding suitable actors for Alan Parker's project to film Angela's Ashes and a screen version of the story of Veronica Guerin. "You sit next to somebody at a dinner party and they will tell you how somebody was totally wrong for a role. Irish people are not frightened of telling you what's been done wrong."
Madonna as Eva Peron in Evita, she says, got a lot of people going. "But I thought she was great. Everyone has their own opinion." What the casting director brings to the selection of actors is "a fabulous memory, a hunch about what actors will want to do next, an ability to deal with agents and an instinctive knack of knowing who would be good in a role".
Kate Winslett
Ros and John brought these skills to bear on The Commit- ments, using a largely unknown cast. They also introduced Kate Winslet, now heroine of Titanic, as one of the New Zealand schoolgirl killers in Jane Campion's Heavenly Creatures. "Ultimately directors have responsibility to make the decision on casting," Ros says. "It is their decision and they take the rap. You follow their vision and are part of their team. When I was starting out, a director would perhaps not be so influenced by me, but now I am so experienced I find directors are more inclined to listen."
But how often do they listen? A colleague expounded the other day on the highlights of the video De Klerk and Mandela, available in your local shop, starring Sidney Poitier as the hero of the apartheid struggle and - wait for it - Michael Caine as F.W. De Klerk. The Financial Times film critic has described Caine as an actor "who can make bricks from straw, and then use them in a one-man smash-andgrab raid on an unpromising script." Even so, I rest my case.