If you didn’t know this about me already, I happen to be a white girl. But the year that Ella Fitzgerald died, I wanted to be her for Halloween, so I went out and got some dark brown theatrical make-up and slapped it on. I made a few mistakes that year:

1. I wore a sleeveless, backless dress, so I had to make up a lot more than just my face and hands.
2. I went to a party and drank enough trashcan punch to make me bump into my host’s freshly painted walls, throw up on the drive home and pass out in my bathtub.
3. I wore a dress I had planned to wear again.

Now, there have been more than one white actor who played Othello in the movies, but let us compare the two big ones — Lawrence Olivier and Orson Welles.  Olivier got all dressed up in dark brown paint like me and my Ella Fitzgerald fiasco, but Welles did it right.

If you’ve never seen this movie, it’s pretty cool from a cinematic perspective.  Orson Welles both starred in it and directed it, and while his acting was always phenomenal, it’s the way he directed the movie that’s so amazing. He had himself filmed in shadow, so he looks darker than he really is. Every scene is set up perfectly, so the white man turns black.

So, this got me thinking about the board game, which I used to play when I was kid, before I even knew what Othello was. The white disks turn black and the black disks turn white, and in the end, you’re just deadlocked. Play now.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 5th, 2008 at 1:32 pm and is filed under Shakespeare in the Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.