He dyed his hair red before he went to meet the man he was going to play. The man could not stand him anyway.
The man was Doolittle Lynn, called Doo, and he was Loretta Lynn's husband. The picture was Coal Miner's Daughter, 1980. The actor with the dyed hair was from San Saba County, Texas, and his name was Tommy Lee Jones.
Here is the part most people have never noticed. The woman playing Loretta was a Texan too. She was born Mary Elizabeth Spacek in Quitman, over in Wood County, on Christmas Day. Her daddy was the Wood County agricultural agent. Everybody calls her Sissy.
So the most Kentucky movie ever made was carried by a girl from Quitman and a boy from San Saba.
Spacek said she took one look at him and expected a good old boy, and then found out he had gone to Harvard. She wrote about him later. "I can honestly say he's always the smartest person in the room." And this. "Tommy Lee had great instincts about the film. He elevated my performance in every way."
She did not fake a note of it either. She insisted on doing her own singing, and Loretta agreed, and she spent the better part of a year with Loretta, touring with her and staying in her house, learning how she talked and how she sang. She trained with Owen Bradley, the man who had recorded Loretta and Patsy Cline. When she and Loretta sang together at the Grand Ole Opry, people had a hard time telling them apart. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress.
And Doo Lynn came around in the end. Loretta said flatly that her husband "was jealous of him" and would not help him with a thing. Then somebody needed to teach the actor to drive a tractor, and it had to be Doo. He taught him the tractor. Then he taught him how to get the top speed out of the old World War II jeep he drives in the picture.
In Loretta's words, "Doo ended up falling in love with Tommy Lee."
It was the first Golden Globe nomination of his life.