Word: ophelia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Artist's Ophelia...
Chaliapin's cover portrait of Jean Simmons as Ophelia is tremendous but improbable. No one could be so beautiful...
...Ophelia's Feet...
Jean Simmons was only 18 when she played Ophelia. She plays the sane scenes with a baffled docility, a faint aura of fey, and a tender suggestion of nascent maturity. All this may go a long way toward persuading 20th Century audiences that a young girl really could so sedulously obey a meddlesome old father, and really could lose her mind when her estranged lover killed him. She plays the mad scenes as if she had never heard that Ophelia is one of Shakespeare's most shameless tearjerkers, and as if her lovely language and her cracked, ribald little...
...father's spirit in arms! and communicates and is worthy of their towering poetry. He can toss off lines like For every man hath business and desire in a way to make Shakespeare congratulate himself in his grave. His inflection of Hamlet's reply to Ophelia's You are keen, my lord, you are keen (It would cost you a groaning, to take off my edge) is enough to make the flesh crawl with its cruelty, the complexity which leaps into view behind the cruelty, and the brilliance of the actor who hides behind that...