Nine actors who learned to play a musical instrument for films ...

... and one who definitely didn’t!

Ryan Gosling in La La Land. Picture: Rex

By Maddy Shaw Roberts

Among the annals of actors who have made uncomfortable attempts to mime playing an instrument (we’re looking at you, Jeremy Irons), here are a few who did it for themselves…

1. Ryan Gosling – La La Land

   It’s a huge compliment to Gosling that most people assume his piano close-ups were played by a jazz double – but it was all him.
   He said: “I had to play ‘City of Stars’ for six months, for hours every day. It’s a lot of time alone, and you become a bit anti-social. Every time I tried to have a conversation with someone during that rehearsal period, I felt like Bambi on ice.”

2. Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon – Walk the Line

   Joaquin and Reese's performance as country-singing duo Johnny Cash and June Carter was ridiculously impressive. Trained by Roger Love, the actors were rumoured to have nearly quit over the difficulty of learning to sing and play the guitar at the same time. But just watch them together in ‘Time’s a Wastin’’ – their musicality is perfect, and their chemistry? Through the roof.

3. Adrien Brody – The Pianist

   To prepare for his role as Chopin virtuoso Szpilman, Roman Polanski forced Adrien Brody to practise piano for a gruelling four hours a day. Plus, in order to truly inhabit a man who had lost everything, Brody also left his girlfriend, gave up his apartment, sold his car, starved himself and lived in solitary confinement in Europe. Yay acting!
   It all (sort of) paid off in 2003, when Brody became the youngest person to win an Oscar for Best actor in a leading role. Here he is, playing Chopin’s beautiful Ballade in G minor with no dubbing whatsoever:

4. Matt Damon and Jude Law – The Talented Mr Ripley

   Damon and Law learned to play piano and saxophone respectively to create this memorable jazz club scene. However, although Damon’s piano training enabled him to play all the proper fingering, the music we hear is actually played by pianist Sally Heath and Gabriel Yared, who composed The Talented Mr Ripley soundtrack.

5. Robert Downey Jr – Chaplin

   To channel Charlie Chaplin, the silent film legend who always carried his violin with him, Downey Jr learned to play the violin (and tennis, for that matter) with his left hand – just as Chaplin did. 10/10 for effort.

6. Bill Murray – Groundhog Day

   Despite using a double for the close-ups, Bill Murray learned just enough piano to play some of Rachmaninov’s ‘Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini’. Some of the miming looks a tad questionable, but in the wider shots, it was apparently all Bill.

7. Hugh Grant – About a Boy

   Grant had guitar lessons from British composer Paul Englishby to create this cringey scene from About a Boy. Sure, the actor’s playing and singing are musically questionable, but we want this scene to be horribly awkward – and that’s exactly what Grant gives us.

8. Rachel Weisz – The Brothers Bloom

   Weisz’s role in The Brothers Bloom required her to play accordion, violin, guitar and banjo in the space of 10 seconds – so she had lessons in all four instruments. It isn’t totally clear whether the music we hear in the film is actually played by Weisz, but the accuracy of her fingering certainly gives a good impression of it.

9. Nicholas Cage – Captain Corelli’s Mandolin

   Before Paul Englishby taught guitar to Hugh Grant, he was busy making sure Nicholas Cage’s mandolin skills were in ship-shape for Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.
   “Cage actually played it and there is lots of footage of him doing that. It was incredible,” said Englishby. “He really is very talented. Nicolas used to go away for the weekend. He had a private jet and one weekend he asked me to go to Venice with him so he could have his music lessons.”

But not all actors have braved the real deal…

Christopher Walken – A Late Quartet

Despite his loveability, there’s no way Walken could have passed off this illogical bowing action as authentic. We’d suggest a direct line to Yo-Yo Ma for the sequel…

The Romantic Piano Battle, by Edoardo Brotto

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Henry Mancini - His Music and His Life

Henry Mancini was not the first composer to introduce jazz elements into film and television scoring, but he was the first to become wildly successful with the public, particularly with the slinky, playful theme for the Pink Panther movies and the brassy, big band sound of the TV series Peter Gunn. Mancini was equally adept at broader, lyrical pop styles, especially in the song "Moon River," the achingly beautiful theme for the film Breakfast at Tiffany's. He won 20 Grammy awards out of 73 nominations and became a familiar public figure as a gentle, avuncular presence on his own syndicated musical TV series and as a frequent guest conductor of orchestral pops concerts.

Young Enrico Nicola Mancini played piccolo and flute with his father in a local Sons of Italy band. In his early teens, he determined to become a film composer and was sent to Pittsburgh to study piano and arranging. Mancini entered Juilliard to study piano in 1942, but within a year was drafted; Glenn Miller arranged for him to play with a service band until he was assigned to combat duty in Europe. Discharged in 1946, Mancini joined the Glenn Miller Orchestra as pianist and arranger. The following year, he followed his wife-to-be to Los Angeles, where he wrote music for bands and radio shows, while bolstering his composition skills through studies with Ernst Krenek and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. Mancini landed a job with Universal Pictures in 1952; over the next six years, he worked on 100 films, most of them forgettable low-budget affairs. He made his reputation in 1954, though, with his score for The Glenn Miller Story, which garnered his first Academy Award nomination.

Universal laid Mancini off in 1958, but the composer quickly developed an association with producer Blake Edwards, scoring his TV show Peter Gunn, the theme from which won him a recording contract with RCA. Mancini began issuing extremely popular and award-winning LPs of arrangements of pop and jazz hits, ultimately working on crossover albums with such classical artists as James Galway and Luciano Pavarotti.

Meanwhile, Mancini and Edwards would collaborate on 26 movies between 1960 and 1993. Three of Mancini's most enduring hits came from 1961: "Moon River" from Breakfast at Tiffany's, the similarly lush theme from Days of Wine and Roses, and the playful "Baby Elephant Walk" from Hatari! Despite averaging three film scores a year through the 1980s, Mancini would always be best-remembered for these earliest efforts, along with the theme from 1964's The Pink Panther and perhaps his score for the 1983 TV miniseries The Thorn Birds. He was a more versatile composer than his mainstream fans may think; for example, he adopted an avant-garde style for the 1985 science fiction movie Lifeforce. Mancini's final work was on a stage adaptation of Edwards' Julie Andrews vehicle Victor/Victoria, which originated as a 1982 film and opened on Broadway in 1995, shortly after the composer's death, running more than 700 performances.