The early films were often melodramatic in tone, and there was a distinct preference for storylines which were already known to the audience-in particular adaptations of Shakespeare plays and Dickens ' novels.

In 1990 Franco Zeffirelli, whose Shakespeare films have been described as " sensual rather than cerebral ", cast Mel Gibson — then famous for the Mad Max and Lethal Weapon movies — in the title role of his 1990 version, and Glenn Close — then famous as the psychotic " other woman " in Fatal Attraction — as Gertrude.

The company also made films such as Pulp Fiction, Flirting with Disaster, Heavenly Creatures and Shakespeare in Love.

Sequels to Rounders, Bad Santa, and Shakespeare in Love are among the films being developed under this new deal, while sequels to Bridget Jones ’ s Diary, Cop Land, From Dusk till Dawn, Swingers, Clerks, Shall We Dance ?, and The Amityville Horror are being billed as " potential " projects.

During the latter part of his career, celebrated actor John Barrymore starred in a radio program, Streamlined Shakespeare, which featured him in a series of one-hour adaptations of Shakespeare plays, many of which Barrymore never appeared in either on stage or in films, such as Twelfth Night ( in which he played both Malvolio and Sir Toby Belch ), and Macbeth.

She received several notable film awards for her role as Queen Victoria in Mrs. Brown ( 1997 ), and has since been acclaimed for her work in such films as Shakespeare in Love ( 1998 ), Chocolat ( 2000 ), Iris ( 2001 ), Mrs Henderson Presents ( 2005 ) and Notes on a Scandal ( 2006 ), and the television production The Last of the Blonde Bombshells ( 2001 ).

In 1998, Fiennes appeared in two films that were nominated at the Academy Awards: he played Robert Dudley opposite Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth and he portrayed William Shakespeare opposite Gwyneth Paltrow in Shakespeare in Love, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, she appeared in many television films including a memorable Duchess of York in the BBC Television Shakespeare production of Richard II ( 1978 ), the irascible Edwardian Oxford academic in Miss Morrison's Ghosts ( 1981 ) and the BBC dramatizations of Julian Gloag's Only Yesterday ( 1986 ) and the Vita Sackville-West novel All Passion Spent ( 1986 ), in which she was the quietly defiant Lady Slane.

He also composed the music for two of Franco Zeffirelli's Shakespeare films, and for the first two films of Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather trilogy, receiving the Academy Award for Best Original Score for The Godfather Part II ( 1974 ).

He is also generally dismissive of the contemporary arts and culture in the various eras in which he lives, such as medieval folk pageants, Shakespeare, Georgian Romanticist poetry, theatre and Charlie Chaplin films.

She featured in the films Felicia's Journey, Sea Sick and Mersinias, and has had numerous theatre roles, including work for the National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company.

Throughout his stage career, his parts ranged from musical comedy to Shakespeare, and years of such versatile acting on two continents led to many offers to appear in films.

He has also appeared in some Shakespeare films, playing Macmorris in Kenneth Branagh's Henry V ( 1989 ), Philostrate in the 1999 film of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Salerio in 2004's The Merchant of Venice, with Al Pacino and Jeremy Irons and The Adventures of Pinocchio in 1996.

Branagh took this insight a step further and turned the play into a musical, going much further in his adaptation of the play than he had ever done in his Shakespeare films, and risking the alienation of both audiences and serious critics.

A long series of Shakespeare adaptations were the first done of the Bard's works in the U. S. The 1915 feature The Battle Cry of Peace ( written and directed by Blackton ) was one of the great propaganda films of World War I. Ironically, after America declared war, the film was modified for re-release because it was seen as not being sufficiently pro-war, thus it also earns a place in the history of censorship.

Category: Teen films based on works by William Shakespeare

The studio was also responsible for financing and distributing one Shakespeare film, Orson Welles ' Macbeth ( 1948 ) and several of the films of John Ford during the 1940s and early 1950s, and for developing the careers of John Wayne, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers.

He has appeared in a number of Shakespearean roles on both stage and screen, including four of the five Shakespeare films directed by Kenneth Branagh: as The Duke of Exeter in Henry V ( 1989 ), Antonio in Much Ado About Nothing ( 1993 ), The Ghost of Hamlet's Father in Hamlet ( 1996 ) and the dual role of Duke Frederick and Duke Senior in As You Like It ( 2006 ).

Although Jones enjoyed playing villains in Shakespeare plays and religious films — he founded the BJU cinema department in 1950 — he genuinely enjoyed a life of ideas and the fine arts.

Notable films included Shakespeare in Love, which received 13 nominations and won 7 awards, Saving Private Ryan, which received 11 nominations and won 5 awards, and Life Is Beautiful, which received 7 nominations and won 3 awards.

Three of the films nominated for Best Picture ( Life is Beautiful, Saving Private Ryan, and The Thin Red Line ) were set in World War II, while the other two films nominated ( Shakespeare In Love and Elizabeth ) were set in Elizabethan England.

Laurence Olivier's 1948 moody black-and-white Hamlet won best picture and best actor Oscars, and is still, as of 2011, the only Shakespeare film to have done so.

Other prominent academics associated with the University include Geoffrey Bennington, the creator of the MA programme in Modern French Thought ( Derrida, Lyotard ); Homi K. Bhabha ( postcolonialism ); Rachel Bowlby ( feminism, Woolf, Freud ); Geoff Cloke FRS ( Inorganic Chemistry ); Jonathan Dollimore ( Renaissance literature, gender and queer studies ); Katy Gardner ( social anthropology ); Gabriel Josipovici ( Dante, the Bible ); Michael Land FRS ( Animal Vision-Frink Medal )); Michael Lappert FRS ( Inorganic Chemistry ); Alan Lehmann FRS ( Genetics and Genome Stability ); ( Laura Marcus ( Woolf ); John Murrell FRS ( Theoretical Chemistry ); Peter Nicholls ( Pound, modernism ); John Nixon FRS ( Inorganic Chemistry )); Laurence Pearl FRS ( Structural Biology ); Guy Richardson FRS ( Neuroscience ); Jacqueline Rose ( feminism, psychoanalysis ); Nicholas Royle ( modern literature and theory ; deconstruction ); Alan Sinfield ( Shakespeare, sexuality, queer theory ); Norman Vance ( Victorian, classical reception ); Richard Whatmore & Knud Haakonssen ( intellectual historians ); Gavin Ashenden ( Senior Lecturer in English, University Chaplain, and Chaplain to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II ; Cedric Watts ( Conrad, Greene ); Marcus Wood ( postcolonialism ).

In 1959 she appeared at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre under the direction of Peter Hall as Helena in A Midsummer's Night Dream opposite Charles Laughton as Bottom and Coriolanus opposite Laurence Olivier ( in the title role ), Albert Finney and Edith Evans.

She repeated her stage role of Rosalind, opposite Laurence Olivier's Orlando, in the 1936 film As You Like It, the first sound film version of Shakespeare's play, and the first sound film of any Shakespeare play filmed in England.

* 1958 Titus Andronicus with Laurence Olivier ( Shakespeare Memorial Theatre )

The play has been adapted as a musical at least three times, first as The Boys from Syracuse with a score by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, then in 1976 in a version by Trevor Nunn, scored by Guy Woolfenden, for the Royal Shakespeare Company, winning the Laurence Olivier Award for best musical on its transfer to the West End in 1977, and in 1981 as Oh, Brother!

Through his paternal great-grandmother, Anne Gilbert, Power was related to the actor Laurence Olivier ; through his paternal grandmother, stage actress Ethel Lavenu, he was related by marriage to author Evelyn Waugh, and through his father's first cousin, Norah Emily Gorman Power, he was related to the theatrical director Sir ( William ) Tyrone Guthrie, founder of the Stratford Festival ( now the Stratford Shakespeare Festival ) in Canada and the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Notable actors who have portrayed Shylock include Richard Burbage in the 16th century, Charles Macklin in 1741, Edmund Kean in 1814, William Charles Macready in 1840, Edwin Booth in 1861, Henry Irving in 1880, George Arliss in 1928, John Gielgud in 1937, Laurence Olivier at the Royal National Theatre in 1972 and on TV in 1973, Patrick Stewart in 1965 at the Theatre Royal, Bristol and 1978, plus ( as Shylock ) in a one-man stage show Mr. Stewart developed entitled " Shylock: Shakespeare's Alien " in 1987 and 2001, Al Pacino in a 2004 feature film version as well as in Central Park in 2010, and F. Murray Abraham at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2006.

Gielgud directed a production at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre with Laurence Olivier as Malvolio and Vivien Leigh playing both Viola and Sebastian in 1955.

Much of Shakespeare in Love ( 1998 ), a comedy involving Shakespeare in a fictionalised romance, was set around the original Globe Theatre, as was Laurence Olivier's 1944 Henry V.

* His performance in the title role of the Royal Shakespeare Company's staging of Henry IV, Part 1 and Part 2, at the Barbican Centre in London, earned him the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor in 1993.

* He was awarded the Laurence Olivier Award in 1993 ( 1992 season ) for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for Henry V at the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Having graduated from the Oxford School of Drama in 2008, Laurence has built up a portfolio of theatre credits including ' Twelfth Night ' with the Royal Shakespeare Company, Mad Forest and Paradise Lost at Southwark Playhouse.

The most famous Coriolanus in history is Laurence Olivier, who first played the part triumphantly at the Old Vic Theatre in 1937 and returned to it to even greater acclaim at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in 1959.

During 2006 and early 2007, Greig played Beatrice in a much acclaimed production of Much Ado About Nothing for which she won a Laurence Olivier Award, and Constance in King John, as part of the Royal Shakespeare Company's The Complete Works season.

* Enniskerry was also the setting for some of the scenes of Laurence Olivier's film of Henry V by William Shakespeare in 1944, and provided many of the extras in the film

In 1955, Vivien Leigh played Lady Macbeth opposite Laurence Olivier at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Anthony Holden ( born 22 May 1947 ) is an English writer, broadcaster and critic, particularly known as a biographer of artists including Shakespeare, Tchaikovsky, Leigh Hunt, Lorenzo da Ponte and Laurence Olivier, and of members of the British Royal family, notably Charles, Prince of Wales.

After training at the Central School of Speech and Drama, she worked in theatre, touring with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre in Juno and the Paycock directed by Laurence Olivier, King Lear, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, The Merchant of Venice and as Hero in Franco Zeffirelli's production of Much Ado About Nothing.

At the time of his death, Toone was one of the last survivors of the Old Vic theatre company of the 1930s, having appeared alongside the likes of John Gielgud and Laurence Olivier in productions of Shakespeare.

Merrison was a member of Laurence Olivier's National Theatre Company in the 1970's and the Royal Shakespeare Company, at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-on-Avon.

In 1975 a flier advertising the spring season was condemned by Labour councillor Laurence McGarry for its depiction of " Shakespeare, in drag with large cleavage, painted lips, corsets, suspenders and hand on hip ".