Oliver Parker's 1995 adaptation of one of William Shakespeare's most tragic of tragedies is surprisingly loyal to the Bard's original plot, but leaves out much of the verbiage, replacing it instead with silent scenes that are not featured in the play; perhaps this is not surprising since the Elizabethan playwright was best known as a wordsmith, telling stories with language rather than with visual display or insinuation. Parker also adds several sex scenes between Othello and Desdemona, and scenes that show Othello's tortured dreams about his wife and Cassio in flagrante delicto.
Parker's film is the first big screen version of the play to cast an African American actor as Othello; Laurence Fishburne was cast alongside Royal Shakespeare Company's golden boy Kenneth Branagh, Nathaniel Parker and Irene Jacob. Despite what might be considered a stellar cast in thespian terms, the movie was a box office disaster. It grossed just over two million dollars, barely twenty per cent of its budget. The one bright spot in the movie was the acclaim that Branagh received for his portrayal of Iago, for which he received a Screen Actors' Guild Award nomination. Laurence Fishburne's performance was also universally praised, although he was passed over for most of the major awards in the movie calendar, receiving just one nomination for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Motion Picture at the Image Awards, where the film itself was also a surprising nominee in the Outstanding Motion Picture category.
