9. Vivien Leigh // Gone with the Wind (1939)

Even in pre-Internet times, fans would get demanding about the casting of their favorite characters. With Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind, the problem was that she was a British actor playing the world's most famous Southern belle. Producer David O. Selznick tried to downplay Leigh's nationality in the official casting announcement, instead saying that she was educated in Europe and did some "recent screen work in England." Outraged fans wrote letters to newspapers that slammed Leigh's casting as an "insult to Southern womanhood” and "a direct affront to the men who wore the Gray and an outrage to the memory of the heroes of 1776 who fought to free this land of British domination." The President of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which initially planned to boycott the film, eventually warmed up to Leigh; according to the film’s historical advisor, Susan Myrick, she believed that an Englishwoman was preferable to “a woman from the East or Middle West."