Moonstruck
All actors and roles (10)
All team (124)
Short description
Loretta Castorini, a thirty-seven-year-old Italian-American widow in New York, has decided that love is not something she can count on, so she agrees to marry Johnny Cammareri, a man she does not love. When Johnny travels to Sicily to visit his ailing mother, he asks Loretta to invite his estranged younger brother Ronny to the wedding. Ronny, who blames Johnny for the loss of his hand, pursues Loretta with little restraint, and she finds herself responding to him despite her intentions. Around them, other members of the Castorini household are carrying on romances of their own.
Norman Jewison directed the film, the thirteenth of the nineteen he made, between Agnes of God and In Country, from an original screenplay by John Patrick Shanley. Cher plays Loretta, with Nicolas Cage as Ronny, Vincent Gardenia and Olympia Dukakis as her parents, and Danny Aiello as Johnny; fifty-eight cast members and 125 crew are credited.
Released in December 1987, Moonstruck was made for about 15 million dollars and took in roughly 122 million worldwide. On IMDb it holds 7.2 out of 10 from around 78,000 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 6.8 from just over a thousand. A critics' rating of 7.9 from 78 reviews places it above both audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- Olympia Dukakis is only 15 years older than her on-screen daughter Cher.
- Initially, Nicolas Cage did not impress the studio executives at the audition, and they demanded that another actor be cast in the role of Ronnie. Cher insisted that Cage be cast. She even threatened to leave the project if they didn't, and the studio backed down.
- The actors' union fined director Norman Jewison for not letting the cast go to lunch until they had rehearsed the kitchen scene. Norman later claimed that the kitchen scene was the most difficult he had ever filmed. Jewison released the crew and rehearsed the scene with the actors as if they were going to perform it on stage. Only after the scene was perfected to his satisfaction did the director give the go-ahead for filming.
- Anne Bancroft (1931-2005) or Maureen Stapleton (1925-2006) were considered for the role of the heroine's mother, but that would have been too expensive for the film's budget. That's when Olympia Dukakis (1931-2021) was remembered, and she ultimately played the part.
- Fyodor Shalyapin Jr., the son of opera singer Fyodor Shalyapin Sr., appears in a minor role as the “old man” in the film.
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