William Shakespeare's Macbeth has been screened numerous times, featuring many of the biggest names from stage, film, and television.
The earliest known film Macbeth was 1905's American short Death Scene From Macbeth, and short versions were produced in Italy in 1909 and France in 1910. Two notable early versions are lost: Ludwig Landmann produced a 47-minute version in Germany in 1913, and D. W. Griffith produced a 1916 version in America featuring the noted stage actor Herbert Beerbohm Tree. [1] Tree is said to have had great difficulties adapting to the new medium, and especially in confining himself to the small number of lines in the (silent) screenplay, until an ingenious cameraman allowed him to play his entire part to an empty camera, after which a real camera shot the film. [2]
In 1947, David Bradley produced an independent film of Macbeth, intended for distribution to schools, most notable for the designer of its eighty-three costumes: the soon-to-be-famous Charlton Heston. [3]
Orson Welles' 1948 Macbeth , in the director's words a "violently sketched charcoal drawing of a great play," [4] was filmed in only 23 days and on a budget of just $700,000. These filming conditions allowed only a single abstract set, and eclectic costumes. Dialogue was pre-recorded, enabling the actors to perform very long individual takes, including one of over ten minutes surrounding the death of Duncan. [5] Welles himself played the central character, who dominates the film, measured both by his time on screen, and by physical presence: high-angle and low-angle shots and deep-focus close-ups are used to distort his size in comparison to other characters. [6] Welles retained from his own 1936 stage production the image of a Voodoo doll controlling the fate of the central character: and at the end it is the doll we see beheaded. [7] The film's allegorical aspect is heightened by Welles' introduction of a non-Shakespearean character, the Holy Father (played by Alan Napier), [8] in opposition to the witches, speaking lines taken from Shakespeare's Ross, Angus and the Old Man. [9] Contemporary reviews were largely negative, particularly criticising Welles' unsympathetic portrayal of the central character. Newsweek commented: "His Macbeth is a static, two-dimensional creature as capable of evil in the first scene as in the final hours of his bloody reign." [10]
George Schaefer directed Maurice Evans and Judith Anderson in a 1960 made-for-TV film which later had a limited European theatrical release. (The three had also worked together on the earlier Hallmark Hall of Fame 1954 TV version of the play.) [11] Neither of the central couple was able to adapt their stage acting style to the screen successfully, leading to their roles being described by critics as "recited" rather than "acted". [12]
Roman Polanski's 1971 Macbeth was the director's first film after the brutal murder of his wife, Sharon Tate, and reflected his determination to "show [Macbeth's] violence the way it is ... [because] if you don't show it realistically then that's immoral and harmful." [13] His film showed deaths only reported in the play, including the execution of Cawdor, and Macbeth stabbing Duncan, [14] and its violence was "intense and incessant." [15] Made in the aftermath of Zeffirelli's youthful Romeo and Juliet , and financed by Playboy mogul Hugh Hefner, Polanski's film featured a young sexy lead couple, played by Jon Finch (28) and by Francesca Annis (25), who controversially performed the sleepwalking scene nude. [16] The unsettling film score, provided by the Third Ear Band, invoked "discord and dissonance." [17] While using Shakespeare's words, Polanski alters aspects of Shakespeare's story, turning the minor character Ross into a ruthless Machiavellian, [18] and adding an epilogue to the play in which Donalbain (younger son of Duncan) arrives at the witches' lair, indicating that the cycle of violence will begin again. [19]
In 1973, the Virginia Museum Theater (VMT, now the Leslie Cheek Theater), presented Macbeth, starring E.G. Marshall. Dubbed by the New York Times as the "'Fowler' Macbeth" after director Keith Fowler, it was described by Clive Barnes as "splendidly vigorous, forcefully immediate... probably the goriest Shakespearean production I have seen since Peter Brook's 'Titus Andronicus'." [20]
Trevor Nunn's RSC Other Place stage performance starring Ian McKellen and Judi Dench as the leading couple was adapted for TV and broadcast by Thames Television (see Macbeth (1978 film) ). [21]
In 1992 S4C produced a cel-animated Macbeth for the series Shakespeare: The Animated Tales , [22] and in 1997 Jeremy Freeston directed Jason Connery and Helen Baxendale in a low budget, fairly full-text, version. [23]
In Shakespeare's script, the actor playing Banquo must enter the stage as a ghost. The major film versions have usually taken the opportunity to provide a double perspective: Banquo visible to the audience from Macbeth's perspective, but invisible from the perspective of other characters. Television versions, however, have often taken the third approach of leaving Banquo invisible to viewers, thereby portraying Banquo's ghost as merely Macbeth's delusion. This approach is taken in the 1978 Thames TV production, Jack Gold's 1983 version for BBC Television Shakespeare, and in Penny Woolcock's 1997 Macbeth on the Estate. [24] Macbeth on the Estate largely dispensed with the supernatural in favour of the drug-crime driven realism of characters living on a Birmingham housing estate: except for the three "weird" (in the modern sense of the word) children who prophesy Macbeth's fate. [24] This production used Shakespeare's language, but encouraged the actors – many of whom were locals, not professionals – to speak it naturalistically. [25]
Twenty-first-century cinema has re-interpreted Macbeth, relocating "Scotland" elsewhere: Maqbool to Mumbai, Scotland, PA to Pennsylvania, Geoffrey Wright's Macbeth to Melbourne, and Allison L. LiCalsi's 2001 Macbeth: The Comedy to a location only differentiated from the reality of New Jersey, where it was filmed, through signifiers such as tartan, Scottish flags and bagpipes. [26] Alexander Abela's 2001 Makibefo was set among, and starred, residents of Faux Cap, a remote fishing community in Madagascar. [27] Leonardo Henriquez' 2000 Sangrador (in English: Bleeder) set the story among Venezuelan bandits and presented a shockingly visualised horror version. [28]
In 2004 an "eccentric" Swedish/Norwegian film, based on Alex Scherpf's Ice Globe Theatre production of Macbeth, was said by critic Daniel Rosenthal to owe "more to co-director Bo Landin's background in natural history documentaries than to Shakespeare." [29] More conventional adaptations of 21st-century stage productions to television include Greg Doran's RSC production filmed in 2001 with Antony Sher and Harriet Walter in the central roles, [30] and Rupert Goold's Chichester Festival Theatre Macbeth televised in 2010 with Patrick Stewart and Kate Fleetwood as the tragic couple. The cast of the latter felt that the history of their stage performance (moving from a small space at Chichester to a large proscenium arch stage in London to a huge auditorium in Brooklyn) made it easier for them to "re-scale", yet again, their performances for the cameras. [31]
In 2006, Geoffrey Wright directed a Shakespearean-language, extremely violent Macbeth set in the Melbourne underworld. Sam Worthington played Macbeth. Victoria Hill played Lady Macbeth and shared the screenplay credits with Wright. [32] The director considered her portrayal of Lady Macbeth to be the most sympathetic he had ever seen. [33] In spite of the high level of violence and nudity (Macbeth has sex with the three naked schoolgirl witches as they prophesy his fate), intended to appeal to the young audiences that had flocked to Romeo + Juliet , the film flopped at the box office. [34]
Justin Kurzel's feature-length adaptation Macbeth , starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, was released in October 2015.
Also in 2015, Brazilian film A Floresta que se Move (The Moving Forest) premiered at the Montreal World Film Festival. [35] Directed by Vinícius Coimbra and starred by Gabriel Braga Nunes and Ana Paula Arósio, the film uses a modern-day setting, replacing the throne of Scotland with the presidency of a high-ranked bank. [36] [37] [38]
Denzel Washington was nominated to an Academy Award for his performance in the title role of Joel Coen's The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021).
Joe MacBeth (Ken Hughes, 1955) established the tradition of resetting the Macbeth story among 20th-century gangsters. [39] Others to do so include Men of Respect (William Reilly, 1991), [40] Maqbool (Vishal Bhardwaj, 2003) [41] and Geoffrey Wright's Australian 2006 Macbeth . [42]
In 1957, Akira Kurosawa used the Macbeth story as the basis for the "universally acclaimed" [43] Kumunosu-jo (in English known as Throne of Blood or (the literal translation of its title) Spiderweb Castle). [44] The film is a Japanese period-piece (jidai-geki), drawing upon elements of Noh theatre, especially in its depiction of the evil spirit who takes the part of Shakespeare's witches, and of Asaji, the Lady Macbeth character, played by Isuzu Yamada, [45] and upon Kabuki Theatre in its depiction of Washizu, the Macbeth character, played by Toshiro Mifune. [46] In a twist on Shakespeare's ending, the tyrant (having witnessed Spiderweb Forest come to Spiderweb Castle) is killed by volleys of arrows from his own archers after they come to the realization he also lied about the identity of their former master's murderer. [47]
William Reilly's 1991 Men of Respect , another film to set the Macbeth story among gangsters, has been praised for its accuracy in depicting Mafia rituals, said to be more authentic than those in The Godfather or GoodFellas . However the film failed to please audiences or critics: Leonard Maltin found it "pretentious" and "unintentionally comic" and Daniel Rosenthal describes it as "providing the most risible chunks of modernised Shakespeare in screen history." [48]
Billy Morrissette's Scotland, PA reframes the Macbeth story as a comedy-thriller set in a 1975 fast-food restaurant, and features James LeGros in the Macbeth role and Maura Tierney as Pat, the Lady Macbeth character: "We're not bad people, Mac. We're just under-achievers who have to make up for lost time." Christopher Walken plays vegetarian detective Ernie McDuff who (in the words of Daniel Rosenthal) "[applies] his uniquely offbeat menacing delivery to innocuous lines." [49] Scotland, PA's conceit of resetting the Macbeth story at a restaurant was followed in BBC Television's 2005 ShakespeaRe-Told adaptation. [50]
Vishal Bhardwaj's 2003 Maqbool , filmed in Hindi and Urdu and set in the Mumbai underworld, was produced in the Bollywood tradition, but heavily influenced by Macbeth, by Francis Ford Coppola's 1972 The Godfather and by Luc Besson's 1994 Léon . [51] It deviates from the Macbeth story in making the Macbeth character (Miyan Maqbool, played by Irfan Khan) a single man, lusting after the mistress (Nimmi, played by Tabbu) of the Duncan character (Jahangir Khan, known as Abbaji, played by Pankaj Kapoor). [41] Another deviation is the comparative delay in the murder: Shakespeare's protagonists murder Duncan early in the play, but more than half of the film has passed by the time Nimmi and Miyan kill Abbaji. [52]
The 2011 short film Born Villain , directed by Shia LaBeouf and starring Marilyn Manson, was inspired by Macbeth and features multiple scenes where characters quote from it.
In 2014, Classic Alice wove a 10 episode arc placing its characters in the world of Macbeth. The adaptation uses students and a modern-day setting to loosely parallel Shakespeare's play. It starred Kate Hackett, Chris O'Brien, Elise Cantu and Tony Noto and embarked on an LGBTQ plotline.
The 2015 American black and white film, Thane of East County , features actors in a production of Macbeth who mimic the characters they portray. [53]
The 2021 Malayalam-language film Joji directed by Dileesh Pothan is a loose adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth. [54]
The 2021 Bengali web-series Mandaar on Hoichoi, directed by Anirban Bhattacharya and starring Debasish Mondal and Sohini Sarkar, is a loose adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth. [55]
Title | Format Country Year | Director | Macbeth | Lady Macbeth |
---|---|---|---|---|
Duel Scene from Macbeth [56] [57] | Silent United States 1905 | Billy Bitzer (cinematographer) | ||
Macbeth [58] | Silent United States 1908 | J. Stuart Blackton | William V. Ranous | Louise Carver |
Macbeth [59] | Silent Italy 1909 | Mario Caserini | Dante Cappelli | Maria Caserini |
Macbeth [60] | Silent France 1909 | André Calmettes | Paul Mounet | Jeanne Delvair |
Macbeth [61] [62] | Silent United Kingdom 1911 | Will Barker | Frank Benson | Constance Benson |
Macbeth [63] | Silent Germany 1913 | Arthur Bourchier | Arthur Bourchier | Violet Vanbrugh |
Macbeth [64] [58] | Silent France 1915 | Séverin-Mars | Georgette Leblanc | |
Macbeth [65] | Silent United States 1916 | John Emerson | Herbert Beerbohm Tree | Constance Collier |
Macbeth | Silent United Kingdom 1922 | H. B. Parkinson | Russell Thorndike | Sybil Thorndike |
Title | Format Country Year | Director | Macbeth | Lady Macbeth |
---|---|---|---|---|
Macbeth [66] | Germany 1922 | Heinz Schall | ||
Macbeth [67] | United Kingdom 1945 | Henry Cass | Wilfrid Lawson | Cathleen Nesbitt |
Macbeth [68] | United States 1956 | Thomas A. Blair | David Bradley | Jain Wilimovsky |
Macbeth | Feature United States 1948 | Orson Welles | Orson Welles | Jeanette Nolan |
Macbeth [68] | United States 1951 | Katherine Stenholm | Bob Jones Jr. | Barbara Hudson Sowers |
Hallmark Hall of Fame Macbeth [69] | TV United States 1954 | Hudson Faucett, George Schaefer | Maurice Evans | Judith Anderson |
Macbeth [70] | France 1959 | Claude Barma | Daniel Sorano | María Casares |
Hallmark Hall of Fame Macbeth – Emmy Award–winning remake [71] | filmed on location in England and Scotland 1960 | George Schaefer | Maurice Evans | Judith Anderson |
Macbeth | TV Australia 1960 | William Sterling | Kenneth Goodlet | Dinah Shearing |
Macbeth [72] | TV Canada 1961 | Paul Almond | Sean Connery | Sharon Acker |
Macbeth | TV Australia 1965 | Alan Burke | Wynn Roberts | Terri Aldred |
Play of the Month: Macbeth | TV United Kingdom 1970; TV United States 1975 | John Gorrie | Eric Porter | Janet Suzman |
Macbeth [73] - a 5-part adaption released for ITV School's Drama series | TV United Kingdom 1970 | Charles Warren | Michael Jayston | Barbara Leigh-Hunt |
Macbeth | Feature United States and United Kingdom 1971 | Roman Polanski | Jon Finch | Francesca Annis |
Macbeth – film of the Royal Shakespeare Company's Other Place production | TV United Kingdom 1979 | Philip Casson, Trevor Nunn (writer) | Ian McKellen | Judi Dench |
Macbeth [74] | United Kingdom 1981 | Joan Ashworth | ||
Macbeth | United Kingdom 1981 | Arthur Allan Seidelman | Jeremy Brett | Piper Laurie |
Macbeth | TV Hungary 1982 | Béla Tarr | György Cserhalmi | Erzsébet Kútvölgyi |
BBC Television Shakespeare Macbeth – released in the United States as part of the Complete Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare series. | TV United Kingdom 1983 | Jack Gold | Nicol Williamson | Jane Lapotaire |
Shakespeare: The Animated Tales Macbeth | TV Russia and United Kingdom 1992 | Nicolai Serebryakov | Brian Cox | Zoë Wanamaker |
Macbeth [75] | Australia 1996 | Thomas R. Gough (producer) | Julia Reece | Julienne Horsman |
Macbeth | United Kingdom 1997 | Jeremy Freeston, Brian Blessed | Jason Connery | Helen Baxendale |
Macbeth [76] | Belarus 1997 | Mikhail Ptashuk | Oleg Garbuz | Tatjana Zhdanova |
Macbeth Horror Suite di Carmelo Bene Da William Shakespeare [77] | TV Italy 1997 | Carmelo Bene | Carmelo Bene | Silvia Pasella |
Macbeth | TV United Kingdom 1998 | Michael Bogdanov | Sean Pertwee | Greta Scacchi |
Macbeth [58] | United States 1998 | Paul Winarski | Stephen J. Lewis | Dawn Winarski |
Macbeth – film of the Royal Shakespeare Company's Swan production | Video United Kingdom 2001 | Gregory Doran | Antony Sher | Harriet Walter |
Macbeth [78] | United States 2003 | Bryan Enk | Peter J. Brown | Moira Stone |
Macbeth [79] | Sweden 2004 | Alex Scherpf, Bo Landin | ||
Macbeth – television adaptation of Royal Shakespeare Company's stage production | TV United Kingdom 2010 | Rupert Goold | Patrick Stewart | Kate Fleetwood |
Wee Willie Macbeth [80] | Canada 2011 | Paul Lenart | ||
Macbeth [81] | Paraguay 2011 | Horacio Ojeda Lacognata | Horacio Ojeda Lacognata | Alicia Ávalos |
The Soliloquy [82] | United States 2012 | Josh Murray | Josh Murray | Kate Foster |
Macbeth - Shakespeare's Globe - The Globe on Screen's stage production | United Kingdom 2013 | Eve Best | Joseph Milson | Samantha Spiro |
Macbeth | United Kingdom 2015 | Justin Kurzel | Michael Fassbender | Marion Cotillard |
Macbeth | United Kingdom 2018 | Kit Monkman | Mark Rowley | Akiya Henry |
Macbeth | Russia 2020 | Sergei Tsimbalenko | Sergei Tsimbalenko | |
The Tragedy of Macbeth | United States 2021 | Joel Coen (writer, producer, and director) | Denzel Washington | Frances McDormand |
Macbeth | United States 2022 | Christopher Carter Sanderson | Sean Kenin | Meaghan Bloom Fluitt |
Title | Format Country Year | Director | Macbeth | Lady Macbeth |
---|---|---|---|---|
Macbeth | United Kingdom 1956-59 | Laurence Olivier | Laurence Olivier | Vivien Leigh |
Another way in which filmmakers use Shakespearean texts is to feature characters who are actors performing those texts, within a wider non-Shakespearean story. In Opera , the 1987 Italian giallo horror film written and directed by Dario Argento and starring Cristina Marsillach, Urbano Barberini, and Ian Charleson; young opera singer Betty (Marsillach) is reluctantly thrust into the lead role in Verdi's Macbeth. During her first performance, a murder takes place in one of the opera boxes. Mysterious murders continue throughout the film as Betty is stalked and those around her meet their unfortunate end. During the final performance of the opera, the killer is revealed, and Betty must confront her past in a terrifying climax.
In Thane of East County , a 2015 American black and white film, actors in a production of Macbeth mirror the actions of the characters they portray.
Cymbeline, also known as The Tragedie of Cymbeline or Cymbeline, King of Britain, is a play by William Shakespeare set in Ancient Britain and based on legends that formed part of the Matter of Britain concerning the early historical Celtic British King Cunobeline. Although it is listed as a tragedy in the First Folio, modern critics often classify Cymbeline as a romance or even a comedy. Like Othello and The Winter's Tale, it deals with the themes of innocence and jealousy. While the precise date of composition remains unknown, the play was certainly produced as early as 1611.
Macbeth is a 1971 historical drama film directed by Roman Polanski, and co-written by Polanski and Kenneth Tynan. A film adaptation of William Shakespeare's tragedy of the same name, it tells the story of the Highland lord who becomes King of Scotland through treachery and murder. Jon Finch and Francesca Annis star as the title character and his wife, noted for their relative youth as actors. Themes of historic recurrence, greater pessimism and internal ugliness in physically beautiful characters are added to Shakespeare's story of moral decline, which is presented in a more realistic style.
Maqbool is a 2004 Indian Hindi-language crime drama film directed by Vishal Bhardwaj, starring Irrfan Khan, Tabu, Pankaj Kapur, Naseeruddin Shah, Om Puri, Piyush Mishra, Murali Sharma and Masumeh Makhija in an adaptation of the play Macbeth by Shakespeare.
Lady Macbeth is a leading character in William Shakespeare's tragedy Macbeth. As the wife of the play's tragic hero, Macbeth, Lady Macbeth goads her husband into committing regicide, after which she becomes queen of Scotland. Some regard her as becoming more powerful than Macbeth when she does this, because she is able to manipulate him into doing what she wants. After Macbeth becomes a murderous tyrant, she is driven to madness by guilt over their crimes and kills herself offstage.
James Edward Fleet is an English actor of theatre, radio and screen. He is most famous for his roles as the bumbling and well-meaning Tom in the 1994 British romantic comedy film Four Weddings and a Funeral and the dim-witted but kind-hearted Hugo Horton in the BBC sitcom television series The Vicar of Dibley. Since 2020, he has played King George III in the Netflix Bridgerton.
John Nicholas Finch was an English stage and film actor who became well known for his Shakespearean roles. Most notably, he starred in films for directors Roman Polanski and Alfred Hitchcock.
Dame Harriet Mary Walter is a British actress. She has performed on stage with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and received an Olivier Award, and nominations for a Tony Award, five Emmy Awards, and a Screen Actors Guild Award. In 2011, Walter was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) for services to drama.
Macbeth is a play by William Shakespeare.
Romeo and Juliet is a 1954 film adaptation of the Shakespearean tragedy of the same name. It is directed and written for the screen by Renato Castellani, and stars Laurence Harvey as Romeo and newcomer Susan Shentall as Juliet, with Flora Robson, Mervyn Johns, Bill Travers, Sebastian Cabot, Enzo Fiermonte and John Gielgud. A British and Italian co-production, it was released in the United Kingdom by General Film Distributors on September 1, 1954.
William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet may be one of the most-screened plays of all time. The most notable theatrical releases were George Cukor's multi-Oscar-nominated 1936 production Romeo and Juliet, Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 film Romeo and Juliet, and Baz Luhrmann's 1996 MTV-inspired Romeo + Juliet. The latter two were both, at the time, the highest-grossing Shakespeare films. Cukor featured the mature actors Norma Shearer and Leslie Howard as the teenage lovers while Zeffirelli populated his film with beautiful young people, and Baz Luhrmann produced a heavily cut fast-paced version aimed at teenage audiences.
Jack William Frederick Gwillim was an English character actor.
Learning on Screen - The British Universities Film & Video Council (BUFVC) is a representative body promoting the production, study and use of moving image, sound and related media for learning and research. It is a company limited by guarantee, with charity status, serving schools, colleges and post compulsory education interests in the UK.
The Real Thing at Last is a "lost" satirical silent movie based on the play Macbeth. It was written in 1916 by Peter Pan creator and playwright J. M. Barrie as a parody of the American entertainment industry. The film was made by the newly created British Actors Film Company in response to news that American filmmaker D. W. Griffith intended to honor the 300th anniversary of William Shakespeare's death by producing of a film version of the play. It was subtitled A Suggestion for the Artists of the Future. It was screened at a charity benefit attended by the royal family, but was not widely distributed, and no copies are known to survive.
Makibefo is a 1999 Malagasy black-and-white drama film written and directed by Alexander Abela. The director filmed the movie near the town of Faux Cap, Madagascar, with a single technical assistant. With the exception of an English-speaking narrator, all the roles are played by indigenous Antandroy people who performed a largely improvised story based on William Shakespeare's Macbeth set in a remote fishing village.
The tragic play Macbeth by William Shakespeare has appeared and been reinterpreted in many forms of art and culture since it was written in the early 17th century.
Othello is Liz White's 1980 dramatic adaptation of William Shakespeare's Othello. An all black cast and crew, including actor Yaphet Kotto, created the film.
Sangrador, also known as Macbeth, Sangrador, is a 2003 Venezuelan film written and directed by Leonardo Henríquez. Set in 1900s Andean Venezuelan gangland, it retells the story of Shakespeare's Macbeth.
The Star Trek franchise, begun in 1966, has frequently included stories inspired by and alluding to the works of William Shakespeare. The science fiction franchise includes television series, films, comic books, novels and games, and has material both Star Trek canon and non-canon. Many of the actors involved have been part of Shakespearean productions, including Patrick Stewart and Christopher Plummer.
Macbeth is a 1981 television film consisting of a recording of the stage play at the Vivian Beaumont Theater and shown on the ARTS cable network. Philip Anglim plays Macbeth and Maureen Anderman plays Lady Macbeth. The stage play was directed by Sarah Caldwell while Kirk Browning directed the film. The original production played from January 23, 1981, to March 8, 1981.
Unless otherwise specified, all citations of Macbeth refer to Muir (1984), and of other works of Shakespeare refer to Wells and Taylor (2005).