Richard III (1955 film)

Richard III is a 1955 British color film adaptation of William Shakespeare's play of the same name, directed, produced, and starring Laurence Olivier as the hunchbacked Duke of Gloucester who murders his way to the English throne. It was the third and last of Olivier's Shakespeare films as director, after Henry V (1944) and Hamlet (1948), and was filmed in VistaVision and Technicolor.^{1 • 2}

Production

Olivier had wanted to film Richard III since the mid-1940s, when he played the role successfully at London's Old Vic, but Henry V seemed the more timely project at the time. By 1954 he no longer wanted to make the film, having convinced himself he did not have another large-scale Shakespeare movie in him. He was trying to fund a version of Macbeth to star in opposite his wife Vivien Leigh when Sir Alexander Korda, whose London Film Productions was backing the production, suggested that Richard III might be more bankable and promised to produce Macbeth if the film proved profitable. Olivier consented to direct only when Sir Carol Reed proved unavailable.^{2 • 3}

Shooting. The film was shot in sixteen weeks during late 1954 and early 1955, and Bruce Eder's Criterion essay calls it the final, crowning glory of the British studio system. The ten-year delay in production worked in Olivier's favor: as a 1954 production it could draw on two generations of English actors, including four acting knights (Olivier, Ralph Richardson, John Gielgud, and Cedric Hardwicke), veterans such as Laurence Naismith, John Laurie, and Esmond Knight, and younger players including Michael Gough and Patrick Troughton, who was also Olivier's stand-in.²

During filming an arrow struck Olivier in his left leg, the one on which his Richard was supposed to limp; he continued the scene with blood pulsing from the wound until the take was captured, and no longer had to act the infirmity for the part.²

Adaptation choices

Olivier spent two weeks in seclusion rethinking his stage characterization of Richard in filmic terms, working with the scholar Alan Dent to shape the text for the screen. He preferred cutting entire characters and scenes to trimming lines within scenes. Shakespeare scholars quarreled with his elimination of Queen Margaret, but others were impressed by his insertion of the coronation of Richard's brother from Henry VI, Part 3 to clarify the historical background, and he also inserted lines from the Cibber and Garrick stage adaptations.³

He also switched the corpse Lady Anne grieves over from that of her father-in-law to her husband's, making it plain that Richard was his killer as well, which heightened the drama of her yielding to his wooing.³ The film opens with a spoken preamble calling the story "one of the most famous, and at the same time, the most infamous of the legends that are attached to the crown of England," a framing the Guardian's Alex von Tunzelmann reads as an acknowledgment that the film inherits Shakespeare's pro-Tudor bias, itself built on sources including Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles, Thomas More's History of King Richard III, and Polydore Vergil's Anglica Historia.^{4 • 7} The real king's excavated skeleton shows scoliosis that made him short but not especially misshapen, and he is not thought to have walked with a limp; Olivier's Richard has a mild limp, a withered hand, and subtle back padding, which von Tunzelmann notes toned down the Tudor caricature.⁷

Release and reception

The film was unsuccessful upon its initial 1955 theatrical release, but it enjoyed a landmark U.S. television broadcast that same year; given the multi-million-member audience, the BFI has claimed that it "may have done more to popularize Shakespeare than any other single work." It was a hit upon theatrical re-release a decade later, and its critical reputation has grown with time.⁴ The U.S. box-office failure effectively ended Olivier's career as a director of Shakespearean films, and his planned 1957 film of Macbeth never gained financing.⁸ The loss of money in the U.S. may also have cost his performance the Academy Award, though the role brought his fifth Oscar nomination.³

Television premiere. In 1955, Alexander Korda sold the American television rights for $500,000 to NBC, and the film debuted on that network that very afternoon as it was reaching cinemas; according to the Library of Congress, this made it the first feature to launch in theaters and on television on one and the same day.^{2 • 9} For Olivier, the deal was problematic in that the film's largest and widest audience would see it in a medium that militated against its adequate reception.¹⁰

Aggregator scores reflect the film's standing: IMDb 7.3, Rotten Tomatoes 81 percent, and Metacritic 88.¹¹

References

1. Richard III, The Criterion Collection
2. Richard III, by Bruce Eder, The Criterion Collection (2004)
3. Richard III, by Frank Miller, Turner Classic Movies (2008)
4. Richard III (1955), AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center
5. Richard III, British Board of Film Classification
6. Richard III, Festival de Cannes
7. Richard III: Laurence Olivier's melodramatic baddie is seriously limp, by Alex von Tunzelmann, The Guardian (2015)
8. Richard III (1955), NetflixMovies.com
9. Shakespeare on Film and Television, Library of Congress
10. Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film (full text copy)
11. Richard III (1955), Cinegraph
12. Filming Shakespeare's history: three films of Richard III, by H. R. Coursen, The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film
13. In the Giving Vein: The Pop-Cultural Legacy of Olivier's Richard III, Folger Shakespeare Library

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

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