Post by *~Mrs. Cooper ~* on Dec 15, 2007 1:17:22 GMT -5
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Anthony John is an actor whose life is strongly influenced by the characters he plays. When he's playing comedy, he's the most enjoyable person in the world, but when he's playing drama, it's terrible to be around him. That's the reason why his wife Brita divorced him; although she still loves him and works with him, she couldn't stand living with him anymore. So when Anthony accepts to play Othello, he devotes himself entirely to the part, but it soon overwhelms him and with each day his mind gets filled more and more with Othello's murderous jealousy.
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Ronald Colman ... Anthony John
Signe Hasso ... Brita
Edmond O'Brien ... Bill Friend
Shelley Winters ... Pat Kroll
Ray Collins ... Victor Donlan
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In the film, Ronald Colman plays a fictional actor who stars in the longest-running "Othello" in history. In real life, actor Paul Robeson, who had just become the first black actor to star in an otherwise white production of "Othello" on Broadway, had just completed the longest run of the play.
The role of Anthony John was originally written for Laurence Olivier. Olivier was unavailable when the film finally went into production.
The "Othello" scenes were filmed separately and in the exact order in which they occur in Shakespeare's play, so as to give Ronald Colman the feeling that he was actually appearing in "Othello". Colman felt uneasy about performing Shakespeare, so director George Cukor and Shakespearean actor Walter Hampden, who acted as coach and advisor for these scenes, tried to make Colman as comfortable as possible in them.
Paddy Chayefsky, who later became a highly successful author and playwright ("Marty"), can be seen as an uncredited photographer at the death scene. According to Shelley Winters, Chayefsky needed the money to go to New York and get married.
In movie, Anthony John stars in a Broadway production of Othello, that plays more than 300 performances and runs over a year. In reality, no production of a Shakespeare play has chalked up anywhere near that many performances on Broadway; at best, most are lucky to run several months, like Richard Burton's four-month stint in a 1964 production of Hamlet, which undoubtedly owed much of its success to his then-notorious relationship with Elizabeth Taylor.
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