'Dogs bark at me': Cumberbatch, Olivier and Rylance as Richard III – in pictures
It’s a glorious summer of Richard IIIs with Ralph Fiennes playing the role at the Almeida in London and Lars Eidinger starring in the Schaubühne’s production at the Edinburgh festival. Here are some of the many actors who have tackled Shakespeare’s villain
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Ralph Fiennes in the Almeida’s new production of Richard III. ‘It is a masterly performance, full of lethal touches,’ writes Susannah Clapp. ‘Richard licks blood from the executioner’s block. On becoming king, he simpers with false modesty, then raises a clenched fist.’Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian
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In the Thomas Ostermeier production for Berlin’s Schaubühne, coming to the Edinburgh festival in August, Lars Eidinger plays Richard wearing a neck brace and an oversized boot. ‘You can clearly see, in the scene where he undresses, that a hump is part of his costume,’ said Ostermeier. ‘We wanted to tell the audience that this is a theatre performance – we are telling the story in a self-aware way.’Photograph: Arno Declair
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When Donald Wolfit played the role in 1941, critics observed parallels between his Richard and Hitler.Photograph: Tunbridge/Getty Images
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Alec Guinness as Richard III at the first Shakespeare festival held at Stratford, Ontario, put on by the British director Tyrone Guthrie in 1953.Photograph: Everett/Rex/Shutterstock
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Laurence Olivier directed himself as Richard in a 1955 film that the Guardian heralded at the time as ‘a superb and bold achievement, most honourable to Shakespeare and to the actor-producer-director, something of a cinematographic miracle’.Photograph: ITV/Rex
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Ian Holm played Richard III at Stratford upon Avon in the RSC’s Wars of the Roses cycle, presented by Peter Hall and John Barton, in 1963. ‘I played Richard very much as a cog in the historical wheel and not as an individual character,’ said Holm. ‘We tried very hard to get away from the Olivier/Irving image of the great Machiavellian villain.’Photograph: ANL/Rex/Shutterstock
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Al Pacino as Richard III on Broadway in 1979. Pacino later made a documentary, Looking for Richard, exploring perceptions of the character.Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive
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Antony Sher played Richard III in 1984. ‘I did a lot of research,’ he told the Guardian in 2013. ‘I was trying to find a way of inspiring myself to play a role that had so famously been played by Olivier: the bastard had gone and put it on film as well, so people all round the world could do impressions of Olivier’s Richard III.’Photograph: Reg Wilson/Rex/Shutterstock
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In a 1995 film of Richard III, directed by Richard Loncraine, Ian McKellen played the scheming king and frequently addressed the camera directly. ‘The action takes place in a dystopian, Mosleyite version of abdication Britain,’ wrote Peter Bradshaw. ‘His “winter of discontent” soliloquy is cleverly split into public speechifying for the first half, suddenly descending into mutinous secret muttering in the gents.’Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive
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Kenneth Branagh (seen here with Claire Price) returned to the stage after an absence of 10 years to play Richard at the Sheffield Crucible in 2002. ‘Richard III can be seen in one of two ways: as the culmination of an epic cycle or as an isolated vehicle for a virtuoso star,’ wrote Michael Billington. ‘It is very much the latter in Michael Grandage’s new production.’Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian
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Henry Goodman played Richard III for the RSC in 2003. Goodman had recently been sacked from a high-profile production of The Producers. He told Jay Rayner how this had informed his take on the role: ‘One of the things that happens to Richard is that as soon as he becomes king he falls to pieces. It all goes wrong. Maybe as a result of what happened to me I understand what it is to be someone who wants something really, really badly but is better equipped to fight for it than to have it.’Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock
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Kevin Spacey as Richard III at the Old Vic in 2011, directed by Sam Mendes. Michael Billington wrote: ‘Spacey doesn’t radically overthrow the Olivier concept of Richard the satanic joker, as Sher and McKellen did. What he offers us is his own subtle variations on it: a Richard in whom instinctive comic brio is matched by a power-lust born of intense self-hatred.’Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian
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Mark Rylance as Richard with Samuel Barnett as Queen Elizabeth at the Globe in 2012. Michael Billington gave the production four stars: ‘This is not the usual Richard: a symbol of active, energetic evil in the tradition of Olivier and Spacey. Instead Rylance comes before us as a withdrawn, slightly apologetic figure as halting in speech as he is in gait.’Photograph: Alastair Muir/Rex/Shutterstock
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Martin Freeman (seen here with Lauren O’Neil) played Richard in a Jamie Lloyd production at Trafalgar Studios in 2014, which set the play in an office after a coup has followed Britain’s 1978-79 ‘winter of discontent’.Photograph: Marc Brenner
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Benedict Cumberbatch played Richard in the BBC’s Hollow Crown history cycle The Wars of the Roses. Michael Billington praised his ‘superb’ performance: ‘Cumberbatch is especially good in the eve-of-battle soliloquy, where a character who might simply be a murdering monster pathetically realises “there is no creature loves me”.’Photograph: Robert Viglasky/BBC/Carnival Film & Television Ltd
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