Barry Lyndon Barry Lyndon Barry Lyndon is a 1975 British-American period drama film by Stanley Kubrick, based on the 1844 novel "The Luck of Barry Lyndon" by William Makepeace Thackeray. It stars Ryan O'Neal, Marisa Berenson, Patrick Magee, Leonard Rossiter and Hardy Krüger. The film recounts the early exploits and later unraveling of a fictional 18th-century Irish rogue and opportunist who marries a rich widow to climb the social ladder and assume her late husband's aristocratic position. Kubrick began production on Barry Lyndon, after his 1971 film, A Clockwork Orange. Kubrick had originally intended to direct a biopic on Napoleon, but lost
Barry Lyndon the spas and parlors of Europe, profiting from their gambling with Barry forcing payment from reluctant debtors with sword duels. Seeing that his life is going nowhere, Barry decides to marry into wealth. At a gambling table in Spa, he encounters the beautiful and wealthy Countess of Lyndon. He seduces and later marries her after the death of her elderly husband, Sir Charles Lyndon. Because Lyndon is frail, sickly, and old, Barry's goading and verbal repartee ultimately send him into a fit of convulsions that ends with his death. Barry's coup-de-grace is the assertion that "he who laughs last, wins".