Desdemona Desdemona Desdemona () is a character in William Shakespeare's play "Othello" (c. 1601–1604). Shakespeare's Desdemona is a Venetian beauty who enrages and disappoints her father, a Venetian senator, when she elopes with Othello, a Moorish man several years her senior. When her husband is deployed to Cyprus in the service of the Republic of Venice, Desdemona accompanies him. There, her husband is manipulated by his ensign Iago into believing she is an adulteress, and, in the last act, she is murdered by her estranged spouse. The role has attracted notable actresses through the centuries and has the distinction of being
Bianca (Othello) set in a contemporary high school. In the 2006 Hindi film adaptation "Omkara", the character was renamed "Billo Chamanbahar" and played by Bipasha Basu. In this variation, the Bianca character is not given a handkerchief, but a jewelled belt called a kamarbandh. On television, Betsy Blair played the character in a 1955 BBC adaptation with Gordon Heath as Othello and Rosemary Harris as Desdemona. Wendy Morgan played Bianca in 1981 in the critically acclaimed BBC complete Shakespeare series. The character was renamed "Lulu" and played by Rachael Stirling in an award winning modern English telemovie first broadcast on ITV on