Cleopatra 5: Cleopatra on Screen

Mary and Charlotte talk to Professor Maria Wyke, classicist and film historian, about Cleopatra’s rebirth on the screen. By far the most famous Cleopatra film is the 1963 epic starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton - at the time the most expensive film ever made and with a steamy on-set love affair between the two stars to match that of the characters they were playing. Almost as brilliant, in its way, is the parody made the following year - Carry on Cleo - giving Kenneth Williams, as Julius Caesar, one of the greatest lines of all time: “Infamy, infamy, they’ve all got it in for me.”

This pair of films hog the limelight, but Maria shows how cinema’s fascination with Cleo goes right back to the early years of silent film through to the 21st Century. Why? On one hand, the Cleopatra story is an opportunity for spectacle and sex appeal - in other words, good business. On the other, the story is reinvented by each generation, playing on the anxieties and desires of the age. Looking at Cleopatra films tells us a lot about changing attitudes to sex, race and politics over the last 100+ years.

Mary and Charlotte recommend some further reading:

Maria has written about Cleopatra on film in her books Projecting the Past (Routledge, pb, 1997) and The Roman Mistress (OUP, 2002).

Films also figure in Lucy Hughes Hallett’s, Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions (Fourth Estate, pb, 2026)

A discussion of the Taylor-Burton film on its 60th anniversary: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/jun/12/cleopatra-60th-anniversary-elizabeth-taylor-richard-burton

And for the fashion aspect: https://fashionhistory.fitnyc.edu/1963-mankiewicz-cleopatra/

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