The question used to be: Can Shakespeare’s plays be made into successful movies? With his film production of Henry V (TIME, April 8, 1946), Sir Laurence Olivier settled that question once & for all.

To play or not to play? This toy theatre was produced to help publicise Laurence Olivier’s Oscar-winning version of Hamlet. Ian McKellen remembers getting one for Christmas.

As a youth, the writer Floyd Skloot most admired Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy. “It showed a mind engaged with the fundamental question of existence,” he says in this special issue, which ...

(Originally published by the Daily News on Sept. 30, 1948. This story was written by Kate Cameron.) When Ben Jonson said of his fellow-playwright, William Shakespeare, that he “was not of an age, but ...

See Melina Matsoukas’s debut feature on HBO. Or watch Laurence Olivier’s 1948 “Hamlet” on TCM. By Gabe Cohn QUEEN & SLIM (2019) 9 p.m. on HBO. In the blink of an eye, a sputtering first date turns ...

What a comfort to the American theater the British actor used to be! Olivier, Gielgud, Richardson—the very names gave off a ring of quality. Sir Laurence, Sir John, Sir Ralph if one preferred, and one ...

Robert Hastie, deputy artistic director of the U.K.’s National Theatre, is juggling major productions on both sides of the Atlantic next spring, transferring his production of “Hamlet” to New York’s ...

Starring BAFTA and Olivier Award winner Andrew Scott (Sherlock, Birdland, Cock, Pride) as the Danish Prince, Juliet Stevenson* as Gertrude and Jessica Brown Findlay as Ophelia, Hamlet is brought to ...