Trailer
Plot summary
Born in the Highlands of Scotland in 1518, Connor MacLeod is a warrior of the MacLeod clan. In 1536 an outlander knight stabs him fatally in battle, but he recovers, and his clan accuses him of witchcraft and drives him out. He becomes a blacksmith and weds Heather. The swordsman Juan Sanchez Villa-Lobos Ramirez then seeks him out and tells him what he is: an immortal, one of many, who can be killed only by beheading and who must fight other immortals wherever the ground is not holy. The power of a defeated immortal passes to the one who takes his head. Ramirez trains Connor with the sword and warns him about the Kurgan, a vicious immortal who wants the Prize. In 1985 New York, Connor sells antiques as Russell Nash, helped by Rachel Ellenstein, while the Gathering nears.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Highlander (1986)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Director of photography Arthur Smith filmed the scene in which fish fall out of MacLeod's kilt, but Lambert's kilt proved too short. Smith said: "I stuck part of a drain pipe above Chris's kilt out of camera range, and fed live trout down the tube."
- Connery's opening voice-over has an echo because he recorded it in the bathroom of his Spanish villa, where he had been working on his Spanish accent with a voice coach. It was played to the producers over the phone, and they approved it because they could not discern the quality of the recording.
- On the first day of filming the producers decided the extras would not receive breakfast. The crew threatened to leave, and the producers only backed down when an assistant director threatened to bring in Connery; the largely Scottish extras burned then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in effigy.
- Gregory Widen wrote the script for Highlander as a class assignment while he was an undergraduate in the screenwriting program at UCLA, under the title Shadow Clan.
- Director Russell Mulcahy was flipping through a magazine when he saw a photograph of Christopher Lambert from Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes. Nobody on his staff knew who Lambert was: "He couldn't speak English. But he had the perfect look. And he learned English very fast."
- Highlander was not well received on its initial U.S. release, but gained wide and persistent popularity in Europe and on home video, becoming a cult film that led to four sequels, a television series and other spin-offs.
- A number of alternate and deleted scenes were cut from Highlander and then lost for good: the footage ended up being destroyed in a fire.
