# King Lear (1987 film)
**King Lear** is a 1987 experimental film directed and written by [Jean-Luc Godard](https://www.edgepedia.org/jean-luc-godard), an unconventional adaptation of [William Shakespeare](https://www.edgepedia.org/william-shakespeare)'s tragedy produced by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus for Cannon Films and starring [Burgess Meredith](https://www.edgepedia.org/burgess-meredith), Peter Sellars, and Molly Ringwald.[1](https://www.bfi.org.uk/film/9e2b91d6-d7b6-58ca-afd8-688607ad1fc6/king-lear) Rather than filming the play as a script, it dramatizes the problem of adaptation itself: after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster destroys nearly all works of art, a fictional descendant of Shakespeare is charged with recovering his ancestor's lost plays.[2](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/58816-KING-LEAR?cp=1&pos=1&sid=d53dc902-27be-405b-ae2e-815007509986&sr=3.1134982)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Director and writer | Jean-Luc Godard; produced by Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus[1](https://www.bfi.org.uk/film/9e2b91d6-d7b6-58ca-afd8-688607ad1fc6/king-lear) |
| Principal cast | Burgess Meredith (Don Learo), Molly Ringwald (Cordelia), Peter Sellars (William Shakespeare Jr. the Fifth), with Woody Allen, Julie Delpy, Leos Carax, Norman Mailer, and Godard himself[3](https://www.ica.art/films/jlg-shakespeare) |
| Origin | Godard first wanted to adapt the play in 1982; in 1985 he signed a $1 million deal on a napkin at Cannes with Menahem Golan of Cannon Films[3](https://www.ica.art/films/jlg-shakespeare) |
| Premise | After Chernobyl, William Shakespeare Jr. the Fifth is sent to recreate lost works of art, beginning with his ancestor's plays[2](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/58816-KING-LEAR?cp=1&pos=1&sid=d53dc902-27be-405b-ae2e-815007509986&sr=3.1134982) |
| Runtime and rating | 91 minutes; MPAA rating PG; sound, color[2](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/58816-KING-LEAR?cp=1&pos=1&sid=d53dc902-27be-405b-ae2e-815007509986&sr=3.1134982) |
| Release | Premiered at Cannes on May 17, 1987; opened in New York City on January 22, 1988; unreleased in France until 2002[4](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1039810-king_lear) • [2](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/58816-KING-LEAR?cp=1&pos=1&sid=d53dc902-27be-405b-ae2e-815007509986&sr=3.1134982) |
| Reception | Metascore 50 (mixed or average); 69% on the Tomatometer from 16 reviews[5](https://www.metacritic.com/movie/king-lear-1987/critic-reviews/) • [4](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1039810-king_lear) |
## Spoilers
### Story and form
As the AFI Catalog describes it, the story is set after the 1986 [Chernobyl](https://www.edgepedia.org/chernobyl) nuclear accident, in which William Shakespeare Jr. the Fifth is recruited to re-create artworks that no longer survive, starting with the plays of his renowned forebear. Working at the Beau Rivage Hotel on the shore of [Lake Geneva](https://www.edgepedia.org/lake-geneva) in Nyon, Switzerland, he encounters Cordelia and her father, Don Learo, a gangster and manufacturer of executive jets; their conversations in the hotel restaurant supply some of the language he needs. With the help of a young man named Edgar, William seeks out the scholarly "Professor Pluggy", who has not left his house in twenty years and who, his head covered in patch cords, speaks in garbled fashion about life and images. Pluggy is played by Godard himself.[2](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/58816-KING-LEAR?cp=1&pos=1&sid=d53dc902-27be-405b-ae2e-815007509986&sr=3.1134982) • [7](https://www.newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town/movies/king-lear-11)
The Library of Congress finding aid describes the result as a collage of disconnected images, words, and sound effects, labeled in the film's subtitle as "a study, an approach, a clearing", built around the characters of William Shakespeare the Fifth and Don Learo dictating his memoirs to his daughter Cordelia.[8](https://wwws.loc.gov/rr/mopic/findaid/Shakespeare.pdf) Repeating title cards run through the film, including "A Picture Shot in the Back", "King Lear: Fear and Loathing", "No Thing", and "king LEAR: a cLEARing".[2](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/58816-KING-LEAR?cp=1&pos=1&sid=d53dc902-27be-405b-ae2e-815007509986&sr=3.1134982) Richard Brody, writing in [The New Yorker](https://www.edgepedia.org/the-new-yorker), reads the ending as a fable of cinema itself: on Easter Sunday, Godard as Pluggy makes petals pop back onto flowers through reverse photography and expires from the effort, after which Cordelia dies on a boulder by Lake Geneva; "the cinema is born of three things: invention, sacrifice, and mourning".[7](https://www.newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town/movies/king-lear-11)
## Development and production
Godard first expressed a desire to adapt *King Lear* in 1982. Three years later he signed a $1 million deal for the project on a napkin at Cannes with Menahem Golan of Cannon Films, the production company run by Golan and Yoram Globus that was among the most active in mid-1980s Hollywood. The Institute of Contemporary Arts describes what followed as a tortuous, acrimonious production.[3](https://www.ica.art/films/jlg-shakespeare)
**Abandoned versions.** Godard at first planned to shoot an interview in which either [Orson Welles](https://www.edgepedia.org/orson-welles) or Joseph Losey would portray Lear as the proprietor of a Los Angeles parking lot or a used-car garage. He also contacted Losey, Welles, Laurence Olivier, and [Ingmar Bergman](https://www.edgepedia.org/ingmar-bergman) in the hope of finding a guide to what he called the "foreign country" of Shakespeare. Bergman and Welles accepted, but Welles died shortly afterwards and Bergman, in Godard's words, "faded away". The photographs of Welles in the finished film recall this original conception. As the project drifted, Godard considered numerous options for the lead, including [Clint Eastwood](https://www.edgepedia.org/clint-eastwood), Tony Curtis, Lee Marvin, Broderick Crawford, Rod Steiger, and Richard Nixon.[3](https://www.ica.art/films/jlg-shakespeare)
Filming finally began in August 1986 with [Norman Mailer](https://www.edgepedia.org/norman-mailer), who had written a screenplay turning the play into a Mafia story, and his daughter Kate in the roles of Lear and Cordelia. The Mailers abandoned the film after the first day of shooting, following an argument over whether the writer could rewrite his dialogue. After a lengthy hiatus they were replaced by Burgess Meredith and [Molly Ringwald](https://www.edgepedia.org/molly-ringwald).[3](https://www.ica.art/films/jlg-shakespeare) • [6](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/8719-king-lear-after-the-end-of-the-world) The finished film retains traces of these abandoned versions, opening with a recorded telephone call in which Golan complains to Godard that he is taking too long, followed by footage of the Mailers deciding to quit and fly home.[6](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/8719-king-lear-after-the-end-of-the-world)
## Release and reception
Cannes hosted a screening of a nearly finished cut in 1987, and Godard was said to have spent sixty-two straight hours editing before it played. Golan was incensed by what he deemed a meaningless mishmash of "bits of film assembled any old how", and the critical reception at Cannes was not much warmer.[3](https://www.ica.art/films/jlg-shakespeare) The film premiered at Cannes on May 17, 1987, and was screened at the Montreal Film Festival on August 30, 1987.[4](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1039810-king_lear) • [2](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/58816-KING-LEAR?cp=1&pos=1&sid=d53dc902-27be-405b-ae2e-815007509986&sr=3.1134982)
[King Lear](https://www.edgepedia.org/king-lear) opened on January 22, 1988 in New York City, with Cannon planning to see how it performed before expanding the release; it opened in Los Angeles one month later. Critical reception was divided. The September 3, 1987 Variety review from Montreal called the film "lyrical" and credited Godard with restoring meaning "to the bankrupt term 'art film.'" [The Hollywood Reporter](https://www.edgepedia.org/the-hollywood-reporter) in March 1988 called it pretentious and "too inept to be even amusing", and Vincent Canby in The New York Times deemed it "a late Godardian practical joke". On the review aggregator Metacritic it holds a Metascore of 50, with four positive, three mixed, and four negative reviews among the eleven counted.[2](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/58816-KING-LEAR?cp=1&pos=1&sid=d53dc902-27be-405b-ae2e-815007509986&sr=3.1134982) • [5](https://www.metacritic.com/movie/king-lear-1987/critic-reviews/) Cannon Films later asked the [Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences](https://www.edgepedia.org/academy-of-motion-picture-arts-and-sciences), by a letter dated November 30, 1988, to withdraw the film from Academy Award consideration.[2](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/58816-KING-LEAR?cp=1&pos=1&sid=d53dc902-27be-405b-ae2e-815007509986&sr=3.1134982)
**Distribution.** The film played U.S. theaters for about two weeks and then disappeared for years; Time Out's Geoff Andrew noted that for a time [Quentin Tarantino](https://www.edgepedia.org/quentin-tarantino)'s resume claimed he had appeared in it, correctly figuring that nobody would have seen it. It went unreleased in France until 2002, when Bodega Films bought French distribution rights and released it on a "handful" of screens, with an estimated ten prints in circulation. Bodega and Godard were later ordered to pay the writer Viviane Forrester and her publisher $6,350 each in damages and interest for using an excerpt from her 1980 book *La violence du calme* without permission.[4](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1039810-king_lear) • [2](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/58816-KING-LEAR?cp=1&pos=1&sid=d53dc902-27be-405b-ae2e-815007509986&sr=3.1134982)
## Later reputation
Over time the film has come to be appreciated as a playful, personal, and digressive but sincere attempt to grapple with the world of Lear.[3](https://www.ica.art/films/jlg-shakespeare) When Sight & Sound ran its 2012 poll, the critic Richard Brody ranked King Lear as the finest film ever made, and that December, writing in The New Yorker, he described it as a *film maudit*, a French expression for a masterful artwork that critics failed to understand and turned away from when it first came out.[2](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/58816-KING-LEAR?cp=1&pos=1&sid=d53dc902-27be-405b-ae2e-815007509986&sr=3.1134982) In a 2025 Criterion essay Brody called it "the closest thing there is to a total film", an adaptation that dramatizes the nature and possibility of adaptation, and noted that it was perhaps more nearly unanimously disparaged in its time than any comparable masterwork.[6](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/8719-king-lear-after-the-end-of-the-world) Among Shakespeare on screen it stands apart from more conventional versions such as Grigori Kozintsev's 1970 film, Peter Brook's 1971 film, and Akira Kurosawa's *Ran* (1985); scholarly surveys place Godard's film among the boundary-pushing screen afterlives of the play.[9](https://www.rsc.org.uk/king-lear/past-productions/stage-history) • [10](https://assets.cambridge.org/97811084/26923/excerpt/9781108426923_excerpt.pdf)
## References
1. [King Lear (1987), BFI](https://www.bfi.org.uk/film/9e2b91d6-d7b6-58ca-afd8-688607ad1fc6/king-lear)
2. [King Lear, AFI Catalog of Feature Films](https://catalog.afi.com/Film/58816-KING-LEAR?cp=1&pos=1&sid=d53dc902-27be-405b-ae2e-815007509986&sr=3.1134982)
3. [Shakespeare: King Lear, Jean-Luc Godard: Unmade and Abandoned, ICA](https://www.ica.art/films/jlg-shakespeare)
4. [King Lear, Rotten Tomatoes](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1039810-king_lear)
5. [King Lear (1987) Critic Reviews, Metacritic](https://www.metacritic.com/movie/king-lear-1987/critic-reviews/)
6. [Richard Brody, King Lear: After the End of the World, The Criterion Collection, February 11, 2025](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/8719-king-lear-after-the-end-of-the-world)
7. [Richard Brody, King Lear, The New Yorker, April 28, 2017](https://www.newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town/movies/king-lear-11)
8. [Shakespeare on Film and Television, Library of Congress finding aid](https://wwws.loc.gov/rr/mopic/findaid/Shakespeare.pdf)
9. [King Lear Stage History, Royal Shakespeare Company](https://www.rsc.org.uk/king-lear/past-productions/stage-history)
10. [King Lear on Screen, Cambridge University Press excerpt](https://assets.cambridge.org/97811084/26923/excerpt/9781108426923_excerpt.pdf)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Films by genre, form, and subject › Adaptations of literature, stage, and other media › Shakespeare on film*
*Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*
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License: Edgepedia Community License 1.0, https://www.edgepedia.org/edgepedia/license