I was today years old when I learned that the role of John McClane in Die Hard was originally offered to Frank Sinatra. Stay with me here - this gets a little weird.

As it turns out, Die Hard is based on a novel (another thing I didn't know) called Nothing Lasts Forever by Roderick Thorp. A lot of details got changed. In Thorp's book, the hero's name is Joe Leland, he's trying to rescue his daughter and grandchildren rather than his wife, and the daughter plunges off the building to her death alongside Anton "Little Tony the Red" Gruber. But the basic story is there. Christmas Eve, skyscraper, German terrorists, etc. So Die Hard is a pretty loose adaptation, but an adaptation nonetheless.

And as it happens, Nothing Lasts Forever is actually the second Joe Leland novel. The first was called simply The Detective. And The Detective was filmed in 1968 with... you guessed it, Frank Sinatra playing Leland.

The Detective sounds more like a neo-noir crime movie than a Die Hard-style action spectacular. Sinatra's police detective investigates a suicide that turns out to be a murder, etc. etc. But the movie was a financial and critical success for Sinatra, if not a career-defining blockbuster. And that was that, until years later when the producers of Die Hard discovered that Sinatra's contract for The Detective gave him right of first refusal for the role in a sequel. Which, technically, Die Hard was.

I'm guessing nobody was terribly surprised when Sinatra, then age 70, said, "no thanks, I think I'll pass on this one," and history went on as it was meant to. But they were obliged to offer it to him and get him to decline before they could offer it to anyone else. (And they offered the role to a lot of people before ending up with Bruce Willis, then known as a charming light comedian from Moonlighting.)

So that's not a world-changing revelation or anything, but I found it fascinating, and I thought you might too.