3/19/2023 0 Comments Laurence olivier othello![]() Olivier was the greatest stage actor of his age, but he never properly managed the transition to camera. The effect on a modern viewer is not so much sinister as cartoonish. He spent hours practicing his body movements. Olivier, playing opposite Maggie Smith as Desdemona and Derek Jacobi as Iago, took over two hours every night to put on his makeup, dying his tongue and the palms of his hands, using drops to accentuate the white of his eyes, lacquering his fingernails. When Olivier’s film was made, black British actors were starting to take to the stage, but not in anything like today’s numbers. Well into the 20th century, white actors played Othello in Britain for the same reason that Japanese actors played him in Japan - because there were no other actors. They would wear wigs to play Cleopatra, humps to play Richard III, paunches to play Falstaff, and black makeup to play Othello. In Shakespeare’s time, all actors were white men. In Britain, it had no such connotations until they were imported from America. When the original 1965 movie came out, it got a far more hostile reception from American critics than British critics - and for the most obvious of reasons: Blackface has peculiarly ugly connotations in the United States. But it is a telling reminder of how, with unconscious imperialism, the woke expect the entire world to see race relations through American eyes. Just another everyday tale of authoritarian political correctness. Nothing very remarkable in any of this, you might say. The bare minimum? What else was he meant to do? Retire to an uninhabited island in Lake Huron? Commit ritual suicide? One graduate student told the Michigan Daily that stepping down from his post was “ the bare minimum” that Sheng should do. One of the characteristics of campus wokery is that it leaves no space for apology, forgiveness, or generosity of any kind. It did no such thing, but naturally, slighted feelings were deemed more important than facts. “The letter implies that it is thanks to him that many of them have achieved success in their careers.” “Professor Sheng responded to the events by crafting an inflammatory ‘apology’ letter to the department's students in which he chose to defend himself by listing all of the BIPOC individuals who he has helped or befriended throughout his career,” read a complaint signed by 40 students and staff. Sheng, stung by the accusation of racism, had recalled several occasions in which he had cast nonwhite singers, but this only served to drive his inquisitors into paroxysms of self-righteous fury. The students, as is now usual, refused to accept it. Sheng, obviously upset at having hurt her feelings, issued a lengthy apology. But - and you can guess where this is going, can’t you? - it was a version in which Olivier played Othello in dark makeup.Ī student complained. He showed a film version that had been nominated for four Academy Awards and eight Oscars. The Shanghai-born composer, an accomplished conductor and pianist, had been teaching a class on musical adaptations - specifically how Verdi had turned Shakespeare’s text into an opera. Bright Sheng, a music professor from the University of Michigan, has been removed from a teaching post for showing his students the 1965 film version of Othello, with Laurence Olivier as the eponymous Moor.
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