Othello (1965)
You ever wanna make your boss go crazy and murder his wife?
Iago (Frank Finlay) is salty because his boss, the Venetian general Othello the Moor1 (Laurence Olivier), has passed him over for a promotion. Othello is named governor of Cyprus and he, his retinue, and his new wife Desdemona (Maggie Smith) decamp for the island to defend it from Turkish attack. There, Iago enacts his plan for vengeance: to incept Othello into believing that Desdemona is having an affair with Othello’s new lieutenant, Cassio (Derek Jacobi).
Iago’s war on Othello’s brain is fought on many fronts. He starts by recounting that he once heard Cassio confess to an affair with Desdemona in his sleep. Iago also tricks the lightweight Cassio into getting drunk2 and starting a brawl, after which Othello fires him. When Cassio goes to Desdemona to ask her to help him get his job back, Othello sees them together and his suspicions are heightened. (Yeah, it doesn’t take much to make him go nuts.)
Iago’s wife, Emilia (Joyce Redman), is serving as Desdemona’s handmaiden. Iago gets her to steal Desdemona’s handkerchief, which he plants in Cassio’s room. When Othello later finds Cassio with the handkerchief, that’s the LAST STRAW: Othello asks Iago to kill Cassio and murders Desdemona himself.3 When Emilia finds out what happened, she reveals how silly Othello has been—but what’s done is done. Then Iago kills Emilia, Othello leaves Iago alive to pay for his crimes, Othello kills himself, and a not-murdered Cassio ends up ruling Cyprus.
Rating: 4/10. Like “Three’s Company” but if Mr. Roper murdered all his tenants.
Cast and Crew
Responses to Laurence Olivier’s performance as Othello were mixed. Franco Zeffirelli feted it as “an anthology of everything that has been discovered about acting in the past three centuries.” The Sunday Telegraph, on the other hand, called it “the kind of bad acting of which only a great actor is capable” and “near the frontiers of self-parody.”
Whether or not Olivier represents everything we know about acting, the man gets his flowers when he brings Shakespeare to the big screen. We’ve skipped over Henry V (1944) and Hamlet (1948), but we did catch his awesome turn in Richard III. We also can’t overstate Olivier’s impact on the stage. Imagine being so good at theater actin’ that the London equivalent of the Tony Awards is named for you.
Anyway, we’ll be seeing Olivier again in the column, and when we do, he’ll be a baron. That’s because, in 1970, he was named to the Peerage of England.4
Dame Maggie Smith co-starred in Othello as Desdemona. This 2024 NYT obit referred to her as a time-traveler, quoting her as saying “I’m always in corsets, and I’m always in wigs, and I’m always in those buttoned boots […] I can’t remember when I last appeared in modern dress.” One of her many costume dramas was The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), where she played an eccentric teacher and for which she won an Oscar. She also had supporting roles in so, so many films. Here’s a smattering: California Suite (1978), Death on the Nile (1978), A Room with a View (1985), Hook (1991), Sister Act (1992), Gosford Park (2001).
Like all British actors, Smith featured in the Harry Potter movies (2001–2011), playing Transfiguration professor Minerva McGonagall.5 And her most famous role began six decades into her career: the savage Violet Crawley on Downton Abbey (2010–2015). We should watch a hundred hours of Maggie Smith movies and TV, but this is a silly project and instead all we’re getting is Desdemona. Sorry team.
The Trivia
Man, this section coulda been about the Moors. Tariq ibn Ziyad! The Battle of Tours! The Reconquista! But I think we gotta keep talking about “Othello.” The play has some more quotes you might want to know:
Iago, to Othello: “Beware, my lord, of jealousy! It is the green-eyed monster.”
Othello, after killing Desdemona and realizing he goofed, says that he’s “one that loved not wisely, but too well.” Kind of an understatement, bud. Othello then tells the dead Desdemona “I kissed thee ere I killed thee. No way but this, killing myself, to die upon a kiss,” after which he, yeah, kills himself.
Shakespeare coined the term “the beast with two backs” here. The play also has the line “Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war!” which gave Edward Elgar the title to that graduation song.
So now you know the plot, characters, and famous lines of “Othello.” Let’s talk about the history of staging the play and some famous people who played the lead.
“Othello” was written in 1603. The first actor to take up the title role was Richard Burbage, an actor in the King’s Men6. Burbage is the actor you should know from that troupe—he originated many of Shakespeare’s most famous roles.
Paul Robeson was the first African American to be cast as Othello in a major U.S. production. He helmed “Othello” on Broadway from 1943–44; that production remains the longest-running Shakespeare play on Broadway ever. James Earl Jones also had a Broadway run as Othello in 1982. You can catch Denzel Washington in the role starting February 2025.
What about some other films? Orson Welles directed, produced, and starred in a complicated7 film adaptation in 1951. Another film version, this one from 1995, had Laurence Fishburne in the lead role and Kenneth Branagh as Iago.
Remember the late-90s, early-2000s trend of turning Shakespeare plays into high school dramas8? Enter O (2001), a high school version of Othello. Mekhi Phifer played Odin, Julia Stiles was Desi, and Josh Hartnett was Hugo. I bet you can figure out who those characters map to in the play. I believe in you.
Odds and Ends
Laurence Olivier, as Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, says “The moors and I will never change”; he’s not referring to the kind of Moor he played in Othello…we last saw Joyce Redman in Tom Jones…there’s lotsa plays that retell “Othello” from Desdemona’s POV, including ones by Toni Morrison and Paula Vogel…Verdi and Rossini both did opera versions of “Othello,” while José Limón did a ballet called “The Moor’s Pavane”…Othello is the name of a board game that’s a modern variation of Reversi…Iago: “our bodies are our gardens, to the which our wills are gardeners.”
A final note: One of the things 1965’s Othello is most remembered for is Olivier darkening his skin to play the role. Olivier argued that Othello’s dark complexion is critical to the themes of the play: it makes him an “other” in Venetian society, informs Desdemona’s father’s concern about her marriage, and adds weight to Othello’s suspicions about those around him. We’re not really equipped at KW/OU to have a meaningful discussion about this topic, but a professor screening the film caused outrage (and made national news) in 2021.
Historically, “Moor” was used to refer to Muslims, Berbers, and Arabs. The play doesn’t state where Othello’s from but it’s relevant to the plot that he’s a dark-skinned foreigner.
At first, Cassio protests, saying he has “very poor and unhappy brains for drinking,” but Iago’s just too good at peer pressure.
Iago’s also been gaslighting Roderigo (Robert Lang), who is in love with Desdemona, into thinking she’s having an affair with Cassio. It’s Roderigo who incites the brawl with Cassio, and Iago later asks Roderigo to kill Cassio for him. Roderigo fails, leaving Cassio standing at the end of the play.
The Peerage is the titled nobility of England: in order of precedence, it’s duke, marquess, earl, viscount, and baron. You can remember them with this handy mnemonic: “Do Men Ever Visit Boston?”
She’s not the only actor from Othello to end up in Harry Potter. Othello was Michael Gambon’s first film role; he later took over for Richard Harris as Dumbledore.
Called the Lord Chamberlain’s Men when Elizabeth, a non-king, was monarch.
The Criterion Collection notes on Othello (1951) describe the filming as “plagued by many logistical problems” but credits Welles as possibly “cinema’s most audacious interpreter of the Bard.”
You know: 10 Things I Hate About You (1999, an adaptation of “The Taming of the Shrew”), Get Over It (2001, sorta based on “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”), She’s the Man (2006, based on “Twelfth Night”).