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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment

Olivier’s Othello was always a racially offensive anachronism

Laurence Olivier as Othello and Maggie Smith as Desdemona in the 1965 film Othello.
Laurence Olivier as Othello and Maggie Smith as Desdemona in the 1965 film Othello. Photograph: Cinetext Bildarchiv/Warner Bros/Allstar

In his fascinating piece on plays performed on screen rather than in the theatre (The film’s the thing: Ian McKellen’s new Hamlet shows the screen can outdo the stage, 12 February), Michael Billington says “The film of Olivier’s Othello now seems a racially offensive anachronism”. It seemed that to me at the time. I saw Othello at the National Theatre in 1964, when we were told that this was a great classical actor at the height of his powers. At 18, I was more susceptible to fashionable opinion than I have since become, but even then I thought that Laurence Olivier’s leaping, preening, shouting performance was grotesque. And although I wasn’t notably what we didn’t yet call politically correct or woke, I thought it was indeed racist, a parody from the days of minstrel shows. Did no one else then feel this?
Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Combe Down, Somerset

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