Fred Roos, casting director whose gambles paid off in The Godfather, Star Wars and Apocalypse Now – obituary

Fred Roos, the casting director, who has died aged 89, was thought to be one of the best in the business, and gave several Hollywood stars their big break. “He suggested and brought me people I would never have met,” said Francis Ford Coppola, who adopted Roos as his consigliere.

When Harrison Ford was working as a carpenter between screen jobs, Roos hired him to fit a door at Coppola’s offices, where the auditions for the original 1977 Star Wars film were being held. “I was, from the get-go, pushing him for Han Solo,” he recalled. Kurt Russell, Christopher Walken and Nick Nolte were all in contention for the part, but when the director George Lucas asked Ford to stop work and feed lines to other actors, he was won round. Lucas also took up Roos’s suggestion that Carrie Fisher play Princess Leia.

Roos had first cast Ford in the Coppola-produced, Lucas-directed American Graffiti, as the Stetson-wearing drag racer Bob Falfa, alongside other newcomers such as Ron Howard, Richard Dreyfuss and Cindy Williams. Roos was then promoted to Coppola’s co-producer, and successfully put Ford forward for small roles in two more films that Coppola directed, The Conversation (1974), which won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and Apocalypse Now (1979), the legendary war epic – shot around the same time as Star Wars – that survived a string of disasters.

After the US Army refused to allow filming on military sites in Georgia and Florida, Apocalypse Now – based on Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, but transplanted from the 1890s Congo to the Vietnam War – was shot in a Philippines jungle.

Roos had contacts in the country after making two 1964 action films there, Flight to Fury and Back Door to Hell, with another of his protegés, Jack Nicholson. (“He seemed very smart in a street way. I was from Southern California, and this high-energy, New Jersey street thing was very alien to me,” recalled Roos, who in 1970 would cast Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces, the film that got him his first Oscar nomination.)

Negotiations were still needed, however, with the Philippines’ dictator, Ferdinand Marcos, to allow filming at Australian military bases. Once the Apocalypse Now shoot was under way, the challenges were even greater. Roos had the difficult job of keeping everything on track following Coppola’s firing of Harvey Keitel after just a week, to be replaced by Martin Sheen as the soldier going behind enemy lines to assassinate a colonel, played by Marlon Brando, who has lost his mind.

Sheen had previously impressed Coppola and Roos, then a casting director, with his screen test for the role of Michael Corleone, eventually taken by Al Pacino in The Godfather (1972). (The studio bosses had wanted the more bankable James Caan to play Michael, but Coppola and Roos diverted him to the part of Sonny, to make way for the unknown Pacino.)

But when Sheen suffered a heart attack, filming of Apocalypse Now was delayed by more than a month. Despite the film going over schedule and over budget, it won the top prize at Cannes, and has become a classic.

Frederick Ried Roos was born in Santa Monica, California, on May 22 1934 to Florence, née Stout, a teacher, and Victor Roos, a GP. On leaving Hollywood High School, he graduated in theatre studies from the University of California Los Angeles. While serving with the US Army in Korea, he wrote and directed an Armed Forces documentary series, The Story of Korea.

Back in Hollywood, he got a job at the MCA talent agency, where he was a driver for Marilyn Monroe, then an agent, before becoming a casting director.

Roos helped to launch the careers of Diane Lane, Tom Cruise, Patrick Swayze and Rob Lowe (all in The Outsiders, 1983), as well as Diane Keaton (in The Godfather) and Josh Hartnett, Billy Bob Thornton, Laurence Fishburne and Jennifer Connelly.

Roos’s 50-year-plus partnership with Coppola also saw him working as a producer on The Godfather Part II (1974), for which he shared the Best Picture Oscar, and Part III (1990) and The Cotton Club (1984).

Having once been babysitter for Coppola’s daughter, Sofia, Roos was also an executive producer on all the films she has directed, including The Virgin Suicides (1999), Lost in Translation (2003), Marie Antoinette (2006), The Beguiled (2017) and Priscilla (2023).

He was also executive produced Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, a 1991 documentary co-directed by Eleanor Coppola about her husband’s troubled shoot, and Paris Can Wait (2016), her feature debut.

Among the many other films he produced were Drive, He Said (1971), Jack Nicholson’s directorial debut, and Wonderwell (2023), featuring Carrie Fisher’s last screen appearance.

He is survived by his wife, Nancy, née Drew, and their son, Alexander, his producing partner in FR Productions.

Fred Roos, born May 22 1934, died May 18 2024