General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

Isadora (1968 film)

Isadora is a 1968 British biographical film directed by Karel Reisz about the American dancer Isadora Duncan (1877 or 1878 to 1927), a pioneer of modern dance, with Vanessa Redgrave in the title role alongside James Fox, Jason Robards, Ivan Tchenko, John Fraser, Bessie Love, and Cynthia Harris.¹ The screenplay is credited to Melvyn Bragg and Clive Exton, with additional dialogue by Margaret Drabble, and the film draws on Duncan's autobiography and Sewell Stokes's account of her life.² Released in several different cuts over the following two decades, it earned Redgrave the Best Actress prize at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival and an Academy Award nomination.³

Key fact	Detail
Director and year	Karel Reisz, 1968, a British production by the Hakim brothers' Paris Film with Universal Pictures¹^•⁴
Subject	The life of dancer Isadora Duncan, from her early career to her death in 1927, told largely as memoirs dictated on the French Riviera⁵
Principal cast	Vanessa Redgrave (Isadora), James Fox (Gordon Craig), Jason Robards (Paris Singer), Ivan Tchenko (Sergei Yesenin), John Fraser (Roger), Bessie Love (Mrs. Duncan), Cynthia Harris (Mary Desti)⁶
Key crew	Screenplay Melvyn Bragg and Clive Exton; cinematography Larry Pizer; score Maurice Jarre; production design Jocelyn Herbert⁷^•⁸
Running times	Original premiere cut 2:57; Universal's linear re-edit "The Loves of Isadora" 2h11; Reisz's 1987 restoration 2h33⁹
Major honors	Cannes 1969: Best Actress (Redgrave), Palme d'Or nomination; Oscar nomination for Best Actress; National Society of Film Critics Best Actress; National Board of Review Top Ten Films³
Format	Color, 70 mm prints, VistaVision aspect ratio; Spanish certification records an original running time of 138 minutes⁷

Spoilers

Story and structure

The film opens in 1927, with Duncan past forty and short of money, dictating her memoirs in a Riviera hotel accompanied by her companion Mary and her secretary Roger. Flashbacks carry the story from her California girlhood, through her 1896 Chicago music-hall debut dancing as "Peppy Dora," to the free-form, Greek-classicism-based style that won her fame in Europe.⁵ The narrative follows her love affairs and marriages, including the English theater designer Edward Gordon Craig (James Fox), the sewing-machine heir Paris Singer (Jason Robards), and the Russian poet Sergei Yesenin (Ivan Tchenko), and ends with her death in 1927 when her long red scarf caught in the wheel of a car, a Bugatti, in which she was riding at Nice.¹¹^•¹²

The frame of dictated memoirs gives the film its memory-biography shape. The Cannes festival synopsis describes Duncan, a few days before her death, installed at Nice among her oldest friends, reliving her life, with her imagination perhaps exaggerating and embellishing some facts.¹³

Origin and development

Reisz, the British director of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960) and Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (1966), became involved when a French producer who had just seen Morgan told him, "I'd like a film about Isadora Duncan starring Vanessa Redgrave." Reisz said he was intrigued by Duncan himself.¹⁰ The project followed Ken Russell's admired 1966 BBC television film Isadora Duncan: The Biggest Dancer in the World, starring Vivian Pickles; Reisz's feature, shot in color, offered a stronger visual treatment than the earlier black-and-white biopic.⁸

The script passed through several hands, which the Time Out review linked to the film's impersonal, multi-viewpoint quality: Clive Exton, Melvyn Bragg, and Margaret Drabble all worked on it.¹¹ Sewell Stokes, Duncan's friend and biographer, is credited with the plot source in Spanish film records.⁷

Production and design

Production designer Jocelyn Herbert, who had designed Tom Jones and If...., gave the film a color scheme that tracks Duncan's psychological journey: muted browns and candlelight for the childhood scenes, warm orange for the apartment she shared with Gordon Craig, opulent tones for the French château where she ran a dance school for girls, and gray, sombre Soviet interiors punctuated by red costume, flags, and regalia. Duncan wears a scarlet scarf at the moment of her death.⁸ The New Yorker's review singled out Herbert's designs as speaking "for what Isadora wanted to do as completely as Vanessa Redgrave's dancing does."²

Redgrave's choreographer, Litz Pisk, reconstructed Duncan's movement. The dance scholar Lincoln Kirstein, otherwise skeptical of filmed dance, was impressed enough to write to Life defending the performance: "Vanessa Redgrave dances absolutely gloriously," adding that her dancing "breathes the effect Duncan had on the world" and that Pisk "understood the essence of Isadora's movement, and reconstructed it as an archaeologist might have restored the Pergamon Altar."¹⁴ Opatija, in Croatia's Kvarner Bay, stood in for Nice, where Duncan died.¹²

Release and re-editing

The original version, just under three hours long (2:57), premiered at Loew's Hollywood in Los Angeles on 18 December 1968. After critics complained about its length and pacing, 20 minutes were cut and the film closed there on 6 February 1969.⁵ After a one-week Academy Award qualifying run, the releasing studio, Universal, drastically edited the film and restructured it in a strictly linear fashion; the resulting 2-hour-11-minute version was released as The Loves of Isadora, and the Los Angeles Times later wrote that this cut "was responsible for the film's generally bum rap wherever it played."⁹

In 1987 Reisz, working with the film's original editor John Bloom, prepared a new version for the Z Channel pay-television service: 2 hours and 33 minutes, some 24 minutes shorter than the 1968 original but restored to the director's wishes by pruning and restructuring rather than simply reinserting the cut footage.⁹ Spanish certification records list an original running time of 138 minutes, and MoMA has screened a 131-minute 35 mm print, so the film circulated in several authorized lengths.⁷^•¹⁴

Theatrical release dates included the United Kingdom on 4 March 1969 and the United States on 27 April 1969.¹⁵ In Spain, where it opened on 15 September 1969, the film sold 1,188,097 admissions for a gross of 241,568.06 euros.⁷ Kino Lorber issued the film on DVD and Blu-ray in 2020 with a new audio commentary.¹⁶

Reception and honors

At the 1969 Cannes Film Festival the film competed for the Palme d'Or and Redgrave won the Best Actress prize.³^•¹³ Redgrave also received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role, a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Drama, and the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actress; the film was named one of the National Board of Review's Top Ten Films, and BAFTA nominated Ruth Myers for costume design and Terry Rawlings for the sound track.³

Critical response has centered on Redgrave's performance. Paul Schrader wrote in the Los Angeles Free Press that "In Isadora Vanessa Redgrave finds the role she was made to create," and Penelope Gilliatt in The New Yorker called it "a wittily distanced account of a believable woman." Penelope Houston of The Spectator took the opposite view of the film's stance, writing that she could not remember "a biographical film that leaves one with less clearly defined feelings about the central character."¹⁷ The film holds an 80 percent Tomatometer rating on Rotten Tomatoes from 10 reviews.¹⁷ A 2026 scholarly study of Reisz's career places Isadora within his post-1960s turn toward films about the committed artist whose art collides with love and death, noting the film's symbolic focus on the dancer's identification with water.¹⁸

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026