Casting Genevieve Bujold was Hal Wallis’s smartest decision in making Anne of the Thousand Days, and he did so without benefit of a screen-test or even a personal interview, simply on the basis of viewing her in the French-Canadian film Isabel (1968, and directed by then-husband Paul Almond).
“The minute she appeared on the screen, Wallis wrote in his autobiography Starmaker, “I was riveted. I saw a tiny, seeming fragile woman made of steel—willful, passionate, intense. She was exactly the actress I wanted to play Anne.”