Trivia and Quotes
Trivia
 Laurence Olivier was 41 when Hamlet was released. Eileen Herlie, who played Hamlet`s mother Gertrude, was 28. With this film, Laurence Olivier became the first person ever to direct themselves to a best actor or actress Oscar. Roberto Benigni in La vita č bella (1997) is the only other actor to achieve this feat.
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The first film to win both the Academy Award for best picture and the Venice Film Festival Golden Lion Award for best picture.
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The final scene to be filmed was the famous shot of Olivier jumping off a high tower onto Claudius and killing him, because it was considered to be so dangerous that it was feared that Olivier would injure himself too badly performing the stunt to film any other scenes. Olivier emerged uninjured from the leap, but the stuntman doubling as Claudius was knocked out from the impact and lost two teeth.
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The first non-American film to win the Oscar for Best Picture.
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One of the Shakespearean purists who criticized this shorn-down version of the play was Ethel Barrymore, who complained that it wasn`t as faithful as the stage version produced on Broadway in 1922, in which her brother John Barrymore played Hamlet. Ethel Barrymore was the presenter of the Best Picture Oscar at the Academy Awards that year and was visibly shaken when she read out Olivier`s name as the winner.
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Stanley Holloway was an 11th-hour choice; the actor who was supposed to play the grave digger, F.J. McCormick, died shortly before filming.
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At $2 million, this was a very expensive production in its day.
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Initially, Olivier was not keen on producing "Hamlet". Although he wanted to repeat the success of The Chronicle History of King Henry the Fift with His Battell Fought at Agincourt in France (1944), he found that the Danish play was the only really viable choice, as Orson Welles had just done Macbeth (1948) and was prepping The Tragedy of Othello: The Moor of Venice (1952). By casting himself in the lead, however, he was able to secure the necessary financing.
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This is the first of many films that Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee would do together, including once where Cushing played Dr. Frankenstein and Lee was the Monster, and three times where Lee played Dracula and Cushing played Van Helsing.
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This is the only major film version of "Hamlet" that entirely omits the characters Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Olivier was severely criticized for leaving them out of the film, as they provide many opportunities for Hamlet to behave in a sarcastically humorous way toward them, and many felt that Olivier probably would have played these moments brilliantly.
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Olivier played the voice of Hamlet`s father`s ghost himself by recording the dialog and playing it back at a reduced speed, giving it a macabre quality. Many references inexplicably credit the voice of the ghost as being performed by John Gielgud, perhaps because it does sound vaguely like him, but it has been said that Olivier actually disliked working with Gielgud in Shakespearean films, and turned down his request to play the Chorus in his film of "Henry V". If Gielgud had played the Ghost in Olivier`s "Hamlet", it would have been the first of three appearances (so to speak) as the character: Gielgud played the Ghost in the Richard Burton and Richard Chamberlain version.
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Greatly influenced by the inventive camera effects that Orson Welles and Gregg Toland pioneered in Citizen Kane (1941), and by the psychological reinterpretations of the play that were being floated at the time.
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Olivier didn`t attend the Academy Awards ceremony in which he won two Oscars as he was performing in a play in London at the time with his wife, Vivien Leigh.
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Some of Fortinbras` lines from the play were given to Horatio. Fortinbras does not appear in this film version of "Hamlet".
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This was the first sound film version in English of the play.
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Because they wanted to aim at a wider public in their film adaptation of "Hamlet" than they had in their 1944 film version of "Henry V", Olivier and text adaptor Alan Dent modernized and/or clarified several obscure phrases in the play: "The cock, that is the trumpet to the morn" became "The cock, that is the herald to the morn", "recks not his own rede" became "minds not his own creed", "In the same figure, like the King that`s dead" became "in the same figure, like the dead King Hamlet", and "It may be, very like" became "It may be, very likely", among others.
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Claire Bloom auditioned for the role of Ophelia.
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When the movie was released Laurence Olivier said it had been filmed in black and white for artistic reasons. The true reason, as he later admitted, was that "I was in the middle of a furious row with Technicolor".
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Desmond Dickenson had a very maneuverable Camera Dolly specially made for this film with Pneumatic tires (the first of its kind in England).
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According to a book written in 1948, many actresses refused the role of Hamlet`s mother because of age concerns.
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First full length feature film of Terence Morgan.
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Christopher Lee, Patrick Macnee and Jean Simmons are the only surviving cast members of the film.
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Laurence Olivier
(as Hamlet)
with Jean Simmons
(as Ophelia)
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