In his 1983 book Adventures in the Screen Trade, scriptwriter william Goldman was critical of the fact that Forbes cast his wife (then in her early forties) as Carol, one of the robotic spouses in The Stepford Wives, and revealed that it led to a major rift between them. In Goldman's original script (of which, he claimed, about 75% was re-written by Forbes), the android replacement wives were meant to be like (Playboy) "Playmates come to life", the acme of youth and beauty, dressed in skimpy tennis shorts and T-shirts. Although Goldman conceded that Newman was both a good Actress and attractive, she clearly did not fit his conception of the part ("a sex bomb she isn't"), and he objected to Forbes' decision to change the appearance of the 'wives' (making them older, more demure and much more conservatively dressed), expressing the view that Newman's casting "destroyed the reality of a story that was only precariously real to begin with". Goldman also recounted his misgivings about casting an Englishwoman to play an American - although, in the event, Newman delivered a perfect accent, and few viewers would have realised she was not American.