Stanley Kramer put the film into production as a substitute for the script he had been developing, High Noon, which became bogged down with copyright issues.
José Ferrer won the 1947 Tony Award (New York City) for Actor in a Drama for "Cyrano de Bergerac" for his portrayal of the title role.
Asked if he has read Don Quixote, Cyrano responds that he has, and found himself the hero. José Ferrer would later actually play Don Quixote on stage in the musical Man of La Mancha.
Premiered on November 16, 1950. Exactly forty years later, on November 16, 1990, the French language film Cyrano de Bergerac, starring Gérard Depardieu premiered in New York. Depardieu, like Ferrer, was also nominated for the Best Actor Academy Award for his performance, and actually won Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival, and the Cesar Award for Best Actor.
The 1946 Broadway revival of "Cyrano de Bergerac", starring José Ferrer, opened at the Alvin Theater in New York on October 8, 1946 and ran for 193 performances. Cyrano became Ferrer's most famous role, and the one he most often revived.
The false nose that José Ferrer wore as Cyrano was reported to have cost United Artists $1,500.
There are fewer characters in the film than in the stage version or in other versions. This is not only because the play was cut for the film, but because four separate characters were combined into two. In the film, Cyrano's best friend Le Bret is a combination of Le Bret and Carbon de Castel-Jaloux, the Captain of the Gascony soldiers. And the cook Ragueneau in the film is a combination of himself and the alcoholic poet Ligniere, who, in the play, is the one who is threatened with an attack on him by a hundred men.
Three people who worked on the film were victims of the Joseph McCarthy HUAC hearings - director Michael Gordon, screenwriter Carl Foreman, and actor Morris Carnovsky, who played Le Bret in the film. José Ferrer himself was investigated, but managed to escape the blacklist.