Othello (1995 film) Othello (1995 film) Othello is a 1995 film based on William Shakespeare's tragedy of the same name. It was directed by Oliver Parker and stars Laurence Fishburne as Othello, Irène Jacob as Desdemona, and Kenneth Branagh as Iago. This is the first cinematic reproduction of the play released by a major studio that casts an African American actor to play the role of Othello, although low-budget independent films of the play starring Ted Lange and Yaphet Kotto predated it. This film is an adaptation of William Shakespeare's "Othello". Othello is a Moor who has secretly married his native Venetian lover
Othello his actions and leaves to tell the others what has happened. "Othello" is an adaptation of the Italian writer Cinthio's tale "Un Capitano Moro" ("A Moorish Captain") from his "Gli Hecatommithi" (1565), a collection of one hundred tales in the style of Giovanni Boccaccio's "Decameron." No English translation of Cinthio was available in Shakespeare's lifetime, and verbal echoes in "Othello" are closer to the Italian original than to Gabriel Chappuy's 1584 French translation. Cinthio's tale may have been based on an actual incident occurring in Venice about 1508. It also resembles an incident described in the earlier tale of "The