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 and failed at the box office. Reconsidering, Kubrick's financiers pulled funding, and he turned his attention towards an adaptation of Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel "A Clockwork Orange". Subsequently, Kubrick showed an interest in Thackeray's "Vanity Fair" but dropped the project when a serialised version for television was produced. He told an interviewer, "At one time, "Vanity Fair" interested me as a possible film but, in the end, I decided the story could not be successfully compressed into the relatively short time-span of a feature film ... as soon as I read "Barry Lyndon" I became very excited about it." Having