Spotlight On...Shakespeare

SHAKESPEARE
TELL THEM WILLIE BOY IS HERE
LAST YEAR, THE HOT NEW WRITER IN Hollywood was Jane Austen, who has been dead 179 years and whose entire oeuvre consists of six comic novels with similar plots. No wonder Shakespeare is the one to adapt in '96: He has been dead two centuries longer, and he left a legacy of some 37 rattlingly good plays with terrific dialogue. And certainly he's as relevant to modern audiences as the Sense and Sensibility sisters. Oliver Parker, who directed Laurence Fishburne and Kenneth Branagh in Othello last year, describes archvillain Iago as "a rational monster. You could see him in a cell with Hannibal Lecter." When it comes to storytelling, says Ian McKellen, who cowrote and starred in '95's Richard III, Shakespeare "invented it all. Even The Lion King is Shakespeare." Thus endeth our prologue. But, hark! What movies approach?

* WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S ROMEO AND JULIET

As with Bram Stoker's Dracula, the name goes above the title. This is gen-X bard, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes (My So-Called Life). The setting has been moved to a mythical, modern city. Due this fall.

* HAMLET

Kenneth Branagh directs and stars as the mopey prince. This is at least the 13th film version but the first to use the full script. With Kate Winslet as Ophelia and Billy Crystal as the First Gravedigger. Due this Christmas.

* MACBETH

This was once going to be a black Macbeth, with Laurence Fishburne as the Thane of Cawdor and Angela Bassett as ambitious Lady M., but Fishburne has dropped out. Still casting.

* TWELFTH NIGHT

Helena Bonham-Carter, Nigel Hawthorne and Richard E. Grant star in Trevor Nunn's planned adaptation of the tangled, bittersweet comedy.

* TITUS ANDRONICUS

Director Julie Taymor has barely begun preproduction on her movie of Shakespeare's strange, gory tragedy about a Roman general, but she has the right idea. Titus, she says, "was the Pulp Fiction of its day."

By  F.X. FEENEY-Peolple Magazine