Responding to the protests of the children of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt to the inaccurate and largely fictitious depiction of their paternal grandmother Sara Delano Roosevelt as a controlling and domineering harridan, playwright Dore Schary cheerfully responded: "Every play needs a villain!"
According to Jay S. Steinberg at Turner Classic Movies, the film's screenwriter and source playwright Dore Schary, for this film's source Broadway stage play production, " . . . had considered casting Anthony Quayle as FDR when his wife suggested Ralph Bellamy, who, as fate would have it, lived in the Manhattan apartment building across the street from the Scharys. Within a few hours of the script's delivery, the actor called Schary and wanted to know when rehearsals would start." Schary wrote in his book "Heyday: An Autobiography" (1979): "The next morning the doorbell rang I opened the door and there stood Ralph, a cigarette holder clenched perkily in his mouth, a fedora perched on his head with the front brim turned up, and a broad smile on his face. I grabbed his hand and said, 'Mr. President, Welcome!'."
In the original stage production, Edward the butler was played by a 27-year-old making his Broadway debut: James Earl Jones.
After the movie was first released, actress Greer Garson, according to Jay S. Steinberg at Turner Classic Movies, " . . . took a certain amount of critical flak for her portrayal of Eleanor Roosevelt, from the dental appliance used to simulate Mrs. Roosevelt's overbite to the mannered effort to replicate the lilt of her speech".
Exteriors were filmed at real life Franklin D. Roosevelt locales such as Hyde Park and Campobello Island according to the home-video sleeve notes.