> With a director like George Stevens behind the camera, already hugely popular movie star Cary Grant and respected character actor Victor McLaglen co-starring, the film was bound to be one of the many wonderful films to come out of Hollywood in 1939. Gunga Din was a career booster for Joan Fontaine, who played Emmy in the film, and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., who played Ballantine.

> Joan Fontaine had been in films for 4 years when she made Gunga Din, her twelfth of an eventual forty-five film roles. She followed older sister Olivia de Havilland into films and signed a contract with RKO Pictures. The sisters have had a life-long rivalry, with Fontaine saying at one point "I married first, won the Oscar®; before Olivia did, and if I die first, she'll undoubtedly be livid because I beat her to it!" She received excellent notices for her performance in Gunga Din, playing the love interest of British soldier Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. The same year Gunga Din was released, 1939, Fontaine was featured in The Women, and the next year she starred in the title role of Rebecca for director Alfred Hitchcock. That role won her her first of three Academy Award nominations for Best Actress in a Leading Role. In 1942 she won for Suspicion (1941), and was nominated for the last time in 1944 for The Constant Nymph (1943).

> Douglas Fairbanks had been in films for 18 years when he played Ballantine. His film career began with an uncredited role as a newsboy in his father Douglas Fairbanks' 1916 film American Aristocracy. He, as well as his career, was perhaps unfairly compared to his father and his film work. Fairbanks, Sr. was one of the very first Hollywood movie stars, he married a movie star (Mary Pickford), was a founding member of the Motion Picture Academy, hosted the first Academy Awards ceremony and also was a founding member of United Artists. That is a lot for a son to live up to! But, by the 1930s the career of Fairbanks, Jr. was really taking off with pictures like Howard Hawks' The Dawn Patrol, Robert Milton's Outward Bound and Mervyn Le Roy's Little Caesar (all 1930). He gave a fine handling of the male lead in Morning Glory (1933) opposite Katharine Hepburn. He displayed the physicality of his acting style in pictures like The Prisoner of Zenda (also 1937), Gunga Din and The Corsican Brothers (1941), but it may have been Max Ophuls' The Exile (1947), which he also scripted, that displayed his athletic prowess at its best. He was a swashbuckling hero in real life as well; he was a decorated war hero from his service in World War II.