Film

Richard III

Name: Richard III
Genre: Drama, History
Released: 1955
Cast: Laurence Olivier, Cedric Hardwicke, Nicholas Hannen, Ralph Richardson, John Gielgud

Olivier directs and stars in this Technicolor, big-budget filming of Shakespeare's play, turning Richard's villainy into a running joke he shares only with the camera. It's theatrical, stagey, gloriously hammy in places, and utterly commanding whenever Olivier's crooked smile fills the frame. For anyone curious what 1950s prestige Shakespeare looked like at its most confident.

TMDb rating

7.2

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Ian McKellen relocates the same play to a fascist 1930s England, all art deco menace and newsreel pageantry. It's the clearest modern answer to Olivier's version, made by someone who studied it closely.

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Orson Welles's Falstaff film, stitched together from several history plays, is scrappier and poorer-looking than Olivier's Richard III but arguably more emotionally devastating by the end.

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Something you would not have found on your own.

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This is the direct descendant: Andrew Davies modelled Urquhart's asides explicitly on Richard's, transplanting the fourth-wall-breaking villain-hero into modern parliamentary politics.

Francis Urquhart, a Tory chief whip plotting his way to the premiership, turns to the camera and confides his schemes exactly as Richard does — this miniseries was built directly on that trick.

But Very British, very 1990, and dry in its political detail if you don't already find Westminster machinations funny.

Hamlet1948

Olivier's earlier Shakespeare triumph, shot in stark black and white, shows the same directness and vocal control turned toward melancholy rather than mischief.

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Olivier's wartime Shakespeare film, made to boost British morale, opens as a recreation of an Elizabethan stage performance before blooming into full colour spectacle — a fascinating companion piece.

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A lush, paranoid account of a young queen learning to survive court plots and assassination attempts, with the same appetite for intrigue and betrayal in gorgeous period dress.

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The BBC's handsome television adaptations of Shakespeare's history plays, including Richard II and the Henry IVs, give the same material room to breathe across hours rather than minutes.

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Same Shakespearean structure as Richard III — a warrior's guilty, doomed climb to power — proving the story survives a total change of language, century and culture.

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Takes the exact moral shape of Richard's court — grasping men murdering their way upward while smiling at each other — and plays it as absurdist comedy instead of tragedy.

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