Why the practice let non-singing actors headline musicals
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One of playback singing's most significant effects on the industry was practical: it allowed performers with little or no singing ability to headline films built around elaborate musical sequences. An actor could be cast purely for screen presence, dramatic range and dancing ability, with the vocal performance supplied entirely by someone else.
This widened the pool of possible leading performers considerably, since studios no longer needed to find the rare combination of strong acting, strong dancing and strong singing in a single individual. Instead, three different specialists, actor, choreographer and singer, could each contribute their strongest skill to a single finished sequence.
It also changed audience expectations in an interesting way, since viewers grew accustomed to a purely aesthetic pairing of voice and face that had no necessary connection to the performer's actual vocal ability offscreen. The illusion became so normalised that few viewers questioned it at all during a screening.
This arrangement remains one of the clearest examples of how a technical convention, developed for entirely practical reasons, ended up reshaping the entire creative structure of an industry built around music and movement together, right down to how basic casting decisions are made from film to film.