ONTD Original: The Biltmore Estate, the Vanderbilts, and Hollywood
Click to viewThe Biltmore Estate might be America's largest private home and a tourist destination visited by over one million visitors to the Asheville, North Carolina area each year, but its connections to Hollywood, the film industries, and a few well-known celebrities via a now mostly broke old money dynasty run deeply. A full deep dive into its legacy and impact on Hollywood would require many posts, but since I am lazy and just wanted an excuse to post some Richie Rich clips and some Timothy Olyphant pictures, here is a brief original post about the Biltmore legacy.
The Biltmore Estate is one of the last vestiges of the prestige and old money of the Vanderbilts, a once-storied family that gained riches and prominence in the Gilded Age through the shipping and railroad empires of patriarch Cornelius Vanderbilt. Beyond the Biltmore Estate and its grounds, the Vanderbilts owned multiple grand mansions on Fifth Avenue in New York City and a summer "cottage" (The Breakers, a 70-room mansion with an area of 62,484 square feet in livable space) in Newport, Rhode Island - now a museum operated by the Newport Preservation Society and open to visitors. But the Biltmore House, with 135,280 square feet of living space and 178,926 square feet total, remains the key symbol of their now mostly dead legacy. The Vanderbilts lost most of their money to bankruptcy and financial ruin by the 1970s. The descendants of George Washington Vanderbilt, grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, still own the estate to this day. Meanwhile, in the fall of the family from their perch as the once richest family in America, their 10 mansions on Fifth Avenue were torn down.
George Vanderbilt bought 125,000 acres of woodland in the North Carolina mountains in 1888 and employed architect Richard Morris to construct a palatial house based on the Chateau de Blois in France. Using his inherited fortune, Vanderbilt hired experts in forestry and horticulture, including the designer of Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsted, to manage the forests, create massive gardens, and even participate in scientific farming on the property. When Vanderbilt's descendants took the reins of the family they sold 87,000 acres to the US Forest Service, creating the Pisgah National Forest (a key filming location for the first Hunger Games movie, along with nearby Dupont State Forest, itself sold to the state of North Carolina by the Dupont Corporation and later Sterling Diagnostic Imaging, which owned the property where ones of its plants were once located.
Since 1930, the family fortune was decimated by the Great Depression, and Biltmore has been open to tourists, with more and more of the house opening over the years as the family died and left. The Cecil Family now owns the estate, descended from George Vanderbilt's daughter Cecilia. A famous tradition started by George Vanderbilt, known for his generosity to his staff, includes a massive Christmas tree where many presents are placed for the children of Biltmore employees each year for over 100 years. The house and the now 8,000-acre estate is assessed at a value of $157.2 million, but its true value is worth much more as a famous tourist destination (tickets start at around $90 for full access, and much higher for the candlelit Christmas tours) for visitors to North Carolina and the United States.
Beyond tourism, though, the legacy of Biltmore and the Vanderbilt Family carries on through film, television, and two famous grandsons of Cornelius Vanderbilt.
Richie Rich (1994)
While the Biltmore Estate has played host to productions for many movies (such as Forrest Gump, The Swan, The Last of the Mohicans, My Fellow Americans, and Patch Adams), few have actually been granted permission to film inside. For ONTDers, the most famous of these movies is probably Richie Rich.
Filmed extensively on the estate (although some locations, such as the roller coaster and McDonald's, have never existed there, and the city scenes were filmed in Chicago, where the movie ostensibly takes place - OP question, why do movies think Illinois and North Carolina look alike? The Fugitive is also guilty), Biltmore played Rich Manor and its grounds. Many interiors were untouched, including portraits of the Vanderbilt Family in the dining room.
Hannibal (2001)
In 2001's Hannibal, the sequel to The Silence of the Lambs, Biltmore plays the home of Mason Verger. One famous location seen in the movie is the estate's massive library.
A Biltmore Christmas (2023)
The most recent addition to this small list, Hallmark's A Biltmore Christmas is more of a Hallmark advertisement for visiting Biltmore at Christmas than anything, and is the first movie filmed at Biltmore that is actually set at Biltmore. I have not seen it as I am not big into Hallmark.
Famous Vanderbilt Descendants
Hollywood has also been impacted by several Vanderbilt descendants. Cornelius Vanderbilt's many descendants have gone on to many endeavors - businessmen, British peerage, politicians, experts on art - but what you are here for, ONTD, are the two most famous ones in 2024 - Anderson Cooper and Timothy Olyphant.
Whereas Anderson Cooper's lineage is much more well-known through that of his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, Timothy Olyphant's is not so much, even though he is indeed a great-great-great-great-grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt himself, descended from Cornelius Vanderbilt's eldest son, William Henry Vanderbilt, a railroad tycoon, and William's second eldest daughter, Emily Vanderbilt Sloane Hammond, an author, philanthropist, and socialite, who was involved with the Moral Re-Armament movement (and donated the family mansion to it in 1949). Glenn Close, whose parents were part of the movement, had described it as a cult. Here are a few gifs of Timothy Olyphant just because it's my post and I can do whatever I want.
SOURCE 2 3 4 5 6 7