Othello in popular culture for Best Director for their work on the film. "Omkara" is a version in Hindi set in Uttar Pradesh, starring Ajay Devgan as Omkara (Othello), Saif Ali Khan as Langda Tyagi (Iago), Kareena Kapoor as Dolly (Desdemona), Vivek Oberoi as Kesu (Cassio), Bipasha Basu as Billo (Bianca) and Konkona Sen Sharma as Indu (Emilia). The film was directed by Vishal Bhardwaj who earlier adapted Shakespeare's Macbeth as "Maqbool". All characters in the film share the same letter or sound in their first name as in the original Shakespeare classic. It is one of the few mainstream Indian movies to contain
Othello seeing interracial marriages as "aberrations" that could end badly. Given this view of "Othello", the play become especially controversial in apartheid-era South Africa where interracial marriages were banned and performances of "Othello" were discouraged. The first major screen production casting a black actor as Othello did not come until 1995, with Laurence Fishburne opposite Kenneth Branagh's Iago. In the past, Othello would often have been portrayed by a white actor in blackface or in a black mask: more recent actors who chose to 'black up' include Ralph Richardson (1937); John Gielgud (1961); Laurence Olivier (1964); Anthony Hopkins (1981), and Orson