TOM WINGO

Tom Berenger was considered, and so was Kevin Costner (“I was so nervous because I thought he was so attractive and I didn’t know how to deal with it,” Streisand confessed when she met Costner).  Jon Peters remarked that “As long as we’ve got a good-looking blond actor and we’ve got Barbra, we’re doing fine.”

And for a while, Robert Redford considered the role. “[Redford] had it first, and we’ve always wanted to work together (again), so we talked first,” Streisand said. “He had some qualms about the book and stuff, so we didn’t quite see eye to eye about it. So we didn’t do this one together. Warren Beatty was interested in it, but he didn’t really commit. Nick was the one who would allow himself to be most vulnerable and still be macho, and he is macho—and sexy. The challenge was getting him to trust and be whole and be vulnerable.”

“I could see the pain in his eyes,” Streisand said of casting Nick Nolte as Tom Wingo. “I could sense that he was at an interesting place in his life where he was willing to explore deep feelings.”

Streisand said that Nolte “has a kind of primitive maleness that I thought was essential to break down. This kind of macho ... the football player, the tough guy, the detective.  I wanted someone very masculine but with a lot of pain behind the eyes a lot of complexity sensitivity vulnerability behind the macho exterior.”

Nolte read one of the early screenplays for Tides and asked his agent, Sue Mengers, if he could meet with the director. “Yes, you can,” she said. “It’s Barbra Streisand.”

Once Streisand decided on Nolte for the role, she asked him to lose thirty pounds. The truth is that Nolte gained fifty pounds to play an alcoholic cop in the film he shot previous to Tides, Q&A. Streisand stated, “I wanted him to be more of a romantic leading man in this movie rather than just a play a character part which is what he’s used to playing so sometimes he resisted that.”

Nolte wrote in his memoir that “I moved into a house above Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, not too far from Conroy’s hometown of Beaufort, and began to dive into that watery Southern world of kudzu, shrimp, sand, and tradition.”

With Pat Conroy’s help, Nolte “got permission to teach some classes at Beaufort’s high school” and he also “spent a month or more hauling nets on the shrimping boats” — both intrinsic to Tom Wingo’s character.

SUSAN LOWENSTEIN

As Conroy wrote in his novel: “She was expensively dressed, and lean. Her eyes were dark and unadorned. In the shadows of that room, with Vivaldi fading in sweet echoes, she was breathtakingly beautiful, one of those go-to-hell New York women with the incorruptible carriage of lionesses. Tall and black-haired, she looked as if she had been airbrushed with breeding and good taste.”

When Streisand read the book, she immediately connected to the character. “Can you think of someone who could play it better?” Barbra asled. “She was a New York Jew. The way she lived her life, I knew all about her.”

Barbra explained, “I showed [Pat Conroy] a makeup test I did with a cinematographer. I was exploring a look as Lowenstein. I knew I could play Lowenstein; it was the look I was concerned about.”

LILA WINGO

Barbra Streisand saw Kate Nelligan in a play she did in 1988 called Spoils of War in which Nelligan played a troubled mother. “I think the genesis of her thinking of me for the part must have started there. I remember wearing a red wig in that part and [Barbra] was very concerned that I have that look that I’d had before.”

Originally, Streisand toyed with the idea of casting stage and screen actress Irene Worth as the older Lila Wingo. Streisand may have considered Worth because she won praise portraying the tough grandmother in Neil Simon’s play and film Lost in Yonkers around that time. But finding a credible match to play the younger version of Lila proved to be a problem, so Streisand offered Kate Nelligan the role, playing a character who ages on screen from around 28-years-old to 72.  “She goes from relatively a young woman to walking in the room as the grandmother,” Nelligan said, stressing that we don’t get to see Lila in her fifties or sixties. 

“The makeup,” Nelligan revealed, “was only about four hours, but we had done dozens and dozens of hours of tests … and tried all kinds of processes and prosthesis and adding parts to my face, and different wigs and different lighting…”

Internally, however, Nelligan found the character of Lila based on her mother, who she described as “very driven, imaginative, big personality, huge flaws, who loved her children and damaged them. And it was wonderful for me to bring part of her [to the role].”

HERBERT WOODRUFF / SALLY WINGO

Streisand knew Krabbé’s work with the Dutch director Paul Verhoeven and also from his role in the Amy Irving movie Crossing Delancey. She expressed that he’s a “wonderful man to work with. So easy. [He] loves to improvise, loves to have versions [of scenes] … a fabulous, loving individual.”

Blythe Danner was no stranger to Pat Conroy’s novels, having appeared in The Great Santini film in 1979, which was also filmed in Beaufort, South Carolina. “I was playing a very similar woman,” Danner said of Sally in Tides, “a woman with great, gentle qualities and great strength underneath. I think a very typical southern woman.”

Blythe Danner, of course, went on to appear in the Meet the Parent sequels, acting with Streisand as well.

When honoring Streisand for her Chaplin Award, Danner reflected on Tides: “My God, I admired her. Her performance—I still don't know how she did it, directing herself and us. And the confidence and the patience as a director were exemplary. If she wanted to be, she would be a brilliant camp counselor because she had to handle a crew that at first seemed to me—I don't know how she felt about it—I felt they were testing her. They were a real macho bunch. She never flinched. Kept her cool, and suddenly and skillfully bent them to her will and the result was The Prince of Tides.”

BERNARD

Although Streisand thought her son Jason was too old for the part, he did play Bernard when Streisand held a reading of the screenplay before filming began.  Although Streisand thought his performance was “very subtle, very understated,” she did not want to cast her son in the movie. She worried they would be attacked by critics for nepotism; and Streisand was aware of how Sofia Coppola was trashed by the media when her father cast her in 1990’s The Godfather Part III.

So, Streisand cast a handsome and athletic young actor as Bernard: Chris O’Donnell. O’Donnell was new to the business and wouldn’t make his mark in Hollywood until he acted in Scent of A Woman and Batman and Robin. 

Pat Conroy said: “[Barbra] showed me a kid, a very good actor, that she had hired to play her son. He was a good-looking kid and a really good athlete. I said, ‘Barbra, that ain’t the guy.’ She told me she had already hired him. I said, ‘You can do whatever you want, I’m just telling you, that doesn’t remind me of the kid. This kid is supposed to be having trouble. He’s kind of snotty.’ So she showed me some others, including a screen test that her son did, though she didn’t tell me it was her son. I said, ‘Man, that’s the kid. That’s the guy I’d choose.’ So that was my only casting choice.”

Chris O’Donnell was paid off and dismissed from The Prince of Tides.  Jason Gould was cast as Bernard.

Barbra explained how she managed the complex mother-son-director relationship: “As a mother I can’t be very critical of him. But when we bargained to do this movie the deal was I could be critical of him as a director.”

Gould was no neophyte, having already appeared in three movies:  The Big Picture (1989) with Kevin Bacon, Say Anything (1989) with John Cusack, and Listen to Me (1989) with Kirk Cameron.

Jason Gould studied the violin for three months to be able to play in the scene that took place in Grand Central Station.

SAVANNAH WINGO

It’s interesting that throughout her entire career — over forty years acting in films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Absence of Malice and A Christmas Story — Melinda Dillon has rarely given an interview. Back in 1976, however, Dillon confessed to a reporter that before her emergence as a film star in the mid-1970s, she had a brief stay in a mental hospital where she was restrained for suicidal tendencies. “My condition was diagnosed as manic depression and schizophrenia, so I checked into a mental hospital for a while,” she said. Certainly, this very personal history served her as she played Tom Wingo’s suicidal sister in The Prince of Tides.

EDDIE

The late George Carlin was an anti-establishment, stand-up comedy legend, most famous for his routine in which he named the “Seven Dirty Words” not allowed on TV.

For the role of Savannah’s supportive gay friend, Eddie, Streisand “wanted a comedian. I thought it would be funny for a comedian to play the part of Eddie. Because he’s a very lovable character; he’s a good, kind, funny guy. I didn’t want anyone who would overplay it.”

“It's not a typical comic’s role,” Carlin added. “It’s more of an actor’s part, although it has a light side to it. That pleases me, because I’m trying to put together the pieces that lead to some credibility in acting, and this is a useful step for me. It’s difficult to make the switch at this stage of a career that’s been very one-dimensional. For years I’ve been turning down all sorts of roles as a hippie or a disc jockey.”

Fincannon & Associates of Wilmington, N.C. held an open casting call in April 1990 in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. “We narrowed the list of children down by coloring and age,” said Tracy Fowler of Fincannon & Assoc. “We reduced the list to 60 children and then to 30 with four call-backs where the children auditioned for the parts.”

At the end, the children met with Streisand and Cis Corman and twelve were cast, including their stand-ins. These children of different ages played the three Wingo kids in flashbacks. Ryan Newman and Bobby Fain had their hair dyed for the movie. Also cast were young actors to play Tom’s children who appear in the Fripp Island scenes.

Streisand says she “did lots of improvisations with [Nick Nolte] and the children I wanted to find out who could be his daughters who would gravitate to him and who would not ... who was comfortable jumping into his arms, who was not?”