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 in at least six productions. His Othello was called by Harold Hobson of the London Sunday Times "the best Othello of our time," continuing: "...nobler than Tearle, more martial than Gielgud, more poetic than Valk. From his first entry, slender and magnificently tall, framed in a high Byzantine arch, clad in white samite, mystic, wonderful, a figure of Arabian romance and grace, to his last plunging of the knife into his stomach, Mr Marshall rode without faltering the play's enormous rhetoric, and at the end the house rose to him." Marshall also played Othello in a jazz musical version, "Catch