![]() ![]() Besides Jacobi, others from Branagh's regular company of performers include Brian Blessed as Hamlet's Ghost, Richard Briars as Polonius and Michael Maloney as Laertes. Others are genius, like Derek Jacobi as Claudius, Julie Cristie as Gertrude, Kate Winslet as Ophelia, Nicholas Farrell as Horatio and Charlton Heston as the Player King. Many of them are strange choices, like Jack Lemmon, Robin Williams and Billy Crystal. In order to hedge against possible audience rejection, he filled the cast with stars. There are some exceptional performances by the cast, though the casting is uneven. Hamlet is extremely interesting because it shows, on the one hand, the beauty of Kenneth Branagh's genius, and, on the other, the excesses of his madness. His "madness" seems to be merely a lack of discipline. But Branagh seems to use Hamlet's madness as an excuse to give his usual over-the-top performance. There has never been an adequate explanation of why Hamlet chose to play the madman in his uncle's court, since he was not in any danger. Instead of coming across as the melancholic Danish prince, he seems to be a pampered and bored aristocrat intent on playing games with the people in his life. It also confuses the politics involved, such as England paying tribute to Denmark.īranagh echos the look and feel of the design with his performance. This goes at cross-purposes with the austerity of the play and its archaic themes. Both influences are evident in the look of the film, which is overtly opulent. Rather than setting it in the Middle Ages, as Shakespeare intended, he chose the Napoleonic era, which corresponds with the Empire style in France and the Biedermeier style in Germany. If he could fulfill his life's ambition and produce Hamlet, perhaps that would be the vehicle to boost his career and catapult his image to stardom.īranagh decided to make his 1996 production of Hamlet an anachronism. ![]() He was beginning to fancy himself as a sex symbol, a movie star and the successor to Lawrence Olivier. But Branagh was drunk with the lure of success. That same year he produced Othello to decent reviews. The following year, 1995, he and Emma divorced. It is almost as if there were two Kenneth Branaghs.įrankenstein was a disaster critically, financially, and personally for Branagh. If you look at a list of his work, it is very dichotic, with noble, uplifting pieces like Henry V and Much Ado on one side, and darker, sinister ones like Dead Again and Frankenstein on the other. They say there is a thin line between genius and madness, and I think Branagh crossed over that line during the production of Frankenstein. But with Frankenstein, they were apart a good bit of the time, and that seemed to be all that was needed to push them over the top and Branagh over the edge. His marriage to actress Emma Thompson was already strained, even though they had done a number of projects together. He decided to make an adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and he decided to make it very macabre. Along the way, he was doing some very interesting roles, including Guy Pringle in Fortunes Of War and both Roman Strauss and Mike Church in Dead Again. In 1993, he directed his second successful Shakespeare adaptation, Much Ado About Nothing, again to both critical and popular acclaim. He was instantly established as a genius. It is still considered by most critics and audiences to be the best film version of a Shakespeare play ever produced. He started as an actor and then directed his first film, Henry V, in 1989, to rave reviews. Kenneth Branagh had one great life's ambition when he began his film career in 1981: to do a full-length (4 hour) version of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Let me know what you think or find me on Google+. HAMLET The Brilliance and Madness of Kenneth Branagh by Waitsel Smith ![]()
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