While other versions have edited Shakespeare's words, Olivier cut two of its most famous characters, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. This version of Hamlet has lost some of its luster over the years chiefly because of Olivier's decision to omit almost half of the four hour play's dialogue. Olivier lost the Best Director Oscar to John Huston for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. In addition, Olivier remains the only actor to win an Oscar for a Shakespearean role and he was the first person to direct themselves to an acting Oscar (Roberto Benigni is, to date, the only other person to achieve this, for Life is Beautiful).
It was the first non-American film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture as well as being the first to also win the Golden Lion at the prestigious Venice Film Festival. It was the first English language sound film version of Hamlet. So I think the cultural moment is important here, too, because it was a film that said Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Age is part of what we’re fighting for.Of the more than fifty filmed versions of Shakespeare's most famous play that have been made since 1900, Laurence Olivier's 1948 adaptation remains the most celebrated. In peace there’s nothing so becomes a manīut when the blast of war blows in our ears,ĬROWL: And the film comes out at a time, and is bright, and he made it in Technicolor, because he wants to make a film that is a present to the English at this moment, and it was. So he begins to play with cinema the way Shakespeare plays with theater, and while Shakespeare is always willing to be meta-theatric, Olivier is being meta-cinematic here. And then we move from those representational sets, finally, at the Battle of Agincourt, into on-location landscape shooting.
So we start in the theater, and then we move out from the theater, not into location shooting, but into representational sets. What do you find different in his version of Shakespeare versus what Hollywood was doing?ĬROWL: Well, for one thing, as you know if you’ve seen the film, it all starts in the Globe theater.Īnd monarchs to behold the swelling scene!ĬROWL: And it uses many different forms of representation.
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SHEIR: You’ve said that it really took Laurence Olivier to break that code, to crack that code of how to successfully do Shakespeare on the screen. He was interviewed by Rebecca Sheir.īelow is an excerpt from their conversation about Laurence Olivier and Henry V. He’s also the author of A Norton Guide to Shakespeare and Film, Shakespeare at the Cineplex, and Shakespeare Observed. This Oscars season, we revisit a Shakespeare Unlimited podcast episode about Shakespeare on film, featuring Samuel Crowl, professor of English at Ohio University. ⇒ Related: Staging Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet with vintage paper dolls in a toy theater It was also nominated for Best Actress in a Supporting Role, Best Director, and Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture. It won the Oscars for Best Picture (the first non-American film to do so), Best Actor in a Leading Role, Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Black-and-White, and Best Costume Design, Black-and-White. It’s worth noting that Henry V wasn’t Olivier’s only Oscar-nominated Shakespeare movie he also directed and starred in Hamlet (1948), which did even better with its awards count. It also won a Special Award (now called an Honorary Award) for Olivier, “for his outstanding achievement as actor, producer and director in bringing Henry V to the screen.” Henry V was nominated for multiple Oscars: Best Picture, Best Actor in a Leading Role, Best Art Direction-Interior Decoration, Color, and Best Music and Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture. Laurence Olivier’s directorial debut, his film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry V during World War II, was only the third Shakespeare film ever to receive recognition at the Academy Awards, after A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935) and Romeo and Juliet (1936). ART File O49.3-H1 no.23 PHOTO. Folger Shakespeare Library. Photograph from the movie of Henry V by Laurence Olivier : At the gates of Harfleur.