After a turn in The Merchant of Venice as Shylock which didn’t do so well in the box office but got decent reviews, Al Pacino is going back for more, as Variety noted yesterday.
Pacino will be starring in Michael Radford’s film adaptation of King Lear as the titular character, a role that hasn’t been filled since Laurence Olivier starred in a British TV movie version back in 1983. Barry Navidi will be producing; no other cast members have been named, but since the entire thing will be filmed in Europe this year, I do hope to be seeing a lot of Royal Shakespeare Company alumni in the cast.
On a minor interesting note, Pacino and Navidi also worked on Salomaybe? which Pacino wrote and directed about Oscar Wilde’s “Salome,” in the same style as Looking for Richard, which Pacino also directed. They’ve been working on it since 2006 and once it gets a release date, you know I’ll be zooming over to either the Angelika or the IFC Theater to check it out.
zero says:
There have actually been a few Lears on film since Olivier. http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0011208/