Film

The Taming of the Shrew

Name: The Taming of the Shrew
Genre: Comedy, Romance
Released: 1967
Cast: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Natasha Pyne, Michael York, Cyril Cusack

Franco Zeffirelli's lavish, brawling take on Shakespeare's problem comedy, built almost entirely around the real marital chemistry of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. It's loud, physical, gorgeously dressed and unapologetically theatrical — more interested in watching two enormous personalities collide than in Shakespeare's language. Good for anyone who wants spectacle and star power over subtlety, and can stomach a play that hasn't aged gracefully.

TMDb rating

6.9

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Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?1966

Same married combatants, same appetite for watching two people perform devotion and cruelty at once — except here the gloves come off entirely and the laughs curdle into something much uglier.

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Zeffirelli again, this time aimed at tragedy instead of comedy, with the same operatic colour, sweeping camerawork and hunger for beautiful young faces filling every frame.

But Trades sparring wit for teenage doom — if you came for banter, this won't scratch that itch.

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The exact same plot — a stroppy older sister must be tamed before the sweet younger one can date — dropped into a 90s American high school, and it's a genuine joy.

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Something you would not have found on your own.

Adam's Rib1949

Same engine — two enormous, mismatched egos who fall for each other by fighting — but run through classic Hollywood screwball instead of Renaissance Italy, decades before Taylor and Burton took a swing at it.

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Much Ado About Nothing1993

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Cleopatra1963no page yet

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Twelfth Night1996no page yet

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Kiss Me Kate1953

The same Shrew story turned into a backstage Cole Porter musical — a fun way to see how many costumes one plot can wear.

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Burton and Taylor2013no page yet

Explains the chemistry that makes the film sing: Taylor and Burton weren't just acting a marriage on that Padua set, they were performing their own — and this shows what it actually cost them.

A TV biopic, with Helena Bonham Carter and Dominic West, about the real Taylor-Burton marriage in its later, exhausted years — the private storm behind all that on-screen sparring.

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The War of the Roses1989

Same idea — marriage as a fight for dominance, played for laughs — pushed forward three centuries and stripped of any hope that taming ends happily.

Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas push courtship-as-combat to its logical, savage endpoint — a divorcing couple wrecking their house and each other in a pitch-black comedy that never flinches.

But It's genuinely nasty by the end, with none of the warmth or reconciliation Shrew insists on.