Cleopatra (film)
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Cleopatra is the name of several movies about the last Egyptian queen of the same name. Movies of this title were released in 1912, 1917, 1920, 1934, 1963, and 1999.
The 1934 film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture and won for cinematography (Victor Milner). It was written by Bartlett Cormack, Vincent Lawrence, and Valdemar Young and was directed by Cecil B. DeMille. It starred Claudette Colbert as Cleopatra, Warren William as Julius Caesar, Henry Wilcoxon as Marc Antony, Joseph Schildkraut as King Herod, and Ian Keith as Octavian. This movie was made during the time the Hays code had just taken place so it got away with more then other movies later might have.
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Produced by Walter Wanger, the 1963 film won Academy Awards for cinematography, art direction, costumes, sets, and special effects. It was also nominated in the best picture category. It was written by Sidney Buchman, Ben Hecht, Ranald MacDougall, and Joseph L. Mankiewicz from a book by Carlo Mario Franzero and was directed by Mankiewicz. It starred Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, Richard Burton as Marc Antony, and Rex Harrison as Julius Caesar (nominated for Academy Award for Best Actor). The supporting cast included Roddy McDowall as the villainous Octavian, Martin Landau as Antony's aide Rufio, and Hume Cronyn as Cleopatra's servant Sosigenes. Cleopatra premiered at the Rivoli Theatre in New York City on June 12, 1963.
The film is infamous for almost bankrupting 20th Century Fox. It was made at an estimated cost ranging from $36 million to $44 million -- an impossibly extravagant figure for that time; in 2005 dollars the amounts would be $215 million to $260 million, the most expensive film ever produced (see List of most expensive films (inflation)), partly due to the fact that the film's elaborate, complicated sets, costumes and props had to be constructed twice, once during a botched shoot in London and once more when the production relocated to Rome.
Cleopatra was not a box-office flop by any means, in fact the film had the highest gross of the year, returning some $26 million in revenue to the studio, but even those earnings weren't enough to recoup the studio's investment. With such a huge cost and the price of movie tickets at that time, Cleopatra didn't have a chance of making a profit on its first run. The film could ultimately be said to have made a small profit from television sales and other revenue. The financial strain from the film forced the studio to undertake drastic retrenchments. The suit of golden armor worn in the movie by Elizabeth Taylor was made from real gold, at a cost of about $1 million. It was so heavy that she could only wear it for short periods of time.
The 1999 Cleopatra (produced by Hallmark Entertainment) starred Leonor Varela (Cleopatra), Timothy Dalton (Caesar), Rupert Graves (Octavius) and Billy Zane (Antony). Based on the book Memoirs of Cleopatra by Margaret George and even less faithful to history than the earlier versions, it was shown first on television and then released on videotape and DVD.
External links
- Cleopatra on the Web: Movies (Tim Spalding)
- The Cleopatra Costume on Stage and in Film (David Clauson)
- Ancient Greece in the Cinema (Nick Lowe)