Othello (1965) on Netflix

Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Othello (1965)

Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.

• Olivier's former backers for his Shakespeare films had all died by 1965, leaving him unable to raise money to shoot Othello on location or on elaborate sets. The film instead reused enlarged duplicates of the original National Theatre stage settings.
• In 2021, music professor Bright Sheng resigned from an undergraduate composition class at the University of Michigan after showing Othello without warning students that it contained blackface. He said he had wanted to show how Giuseppe Verdi adapted the play into his opera Otello.
• Othello was the first English-language filmed version of the play made in color and widescreen; a Russian color version had appeared in 1955. It was also the second major film adaptation, after Orson Welles's 1952 production.
• In the U.S., Othello did not get the usual several-week run given to most films; it played for only two days, exhibited as a roadshow presentation.
• Othello remains the only Shakespeare film in which all the principals were nominated for Oscars. Frank Finlay's Iago has 1,117 lines against Laurence Olivier's 856, yet Olivier appears on screen three minutes longer.
• Laurence Olivier's rolling of his eyes as Othello, a mannerism often shown in early depictions of black people in blackface films, caused distinctive amounts of offense and worked primarily on film rather than on stage.