14

CELLULOID CLEOPATRAS
or
DID THE GREEKS EVER GET TO EGYPT?

Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones¹

Poor lady, resting in her queenly tomb. All these ages and ages she had little idea her system of vamping men of her time would pass down the centuries and be preserved in moving pictures.

Louella Parsons, Chicago Herald, September 1917

The focus of this ‘new perspective’ on the hellenistic world is Hollywood’s filmic recreations of the life of Cleopatra VII. I begin by drawing attention to a scene which opens the second half of Joseph Mankiewicz’ 1963 epic Cleopatra: the setting is the royal precinct of Alexandria, where an Isis-crowned Cleopatra (Elizabeth Taylor), accompanied by her chief minister, the learned Sosigenes (Hume Cronyn), offers incense to a golden, veiled statue of the dead and deified Julius Caesar as she contemplates her future relationship with Rome (Fig. 1). She wears a necklace composed of gold coins stamped with Caesar’s image. The scene, as recorded in Mankiewicz’ shooting-script,² runs as follows:

CLEOPATRA: (looking at the statue) Would [Caesar] have approved, do you think?

SOSIGENES: Definitely. Perhaps the veil of Isis would have bothered him just a bit –

CLEOPATRA: Three years. And Rome remembers him only by the image on a gold coin.

SOSIGENES: (looking at her necklace) Are they those I brought back with me? (Cleopatra nods) After all, when Octavian had them struck off, it was to commemorate Caesar’s deification.

CLEOPATRA: So that he could inherit Caesar’s divinity together with all the rest. Even a dead god cannot rewrite his will.

SOSIGENES: Antony did present Caesarion’s claims to the senate. He kept that much of his promise.

CLEOPATRA: He will keep the rest of it . . .

SOSIGENES: (doubtfully) After almost three years since Caesar’s death – more than a year since Philippi?

CLEOPATRA: Antony will come. He will need Egypt.

SOSIGENES: Egypt is you.

CLEOPATRA: That’s what I meant, of course. Antony will need me.

In this scene both Sosigenes and Cleopatra propound the idea that the queen is intimately identified with her kingdom; indeed, the notion that Cleopatra is Egypt lies at the very heart of the movie. In this respect, the film follows the popular preconception that Egypt and Cleopatra are perpetually unified. In fact, it is a vision that Cleopatra VII Philopator herself seems to have endorsed: her use of Pharaonic religious imagery and the Egyptian artistic legacy, as well as her ability to speak the Egyptian language, were clearly intended to promote her as the natural heiress to an ancient and glorious civilization in the eyes of both her native Egyptian subjects and her foreign enemies. Most famously, on the exterior walls of the temple of Hathor at Dendera in Upper Egypt, Cleopatra VII commissioned twenty-foot high carved images of herself in traditional Pharaonic pose as the mother goddess Isis and her offspring and heir, Caesarion, as the divine son Horus.³

Fig. 1. Still from Cleopatra 1963. From the author’s private collection.

But when Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra is told, ‘you are Egypt’, no one thinks to correct the line to ‘you are Greek-Egypt’ or, better, ‘you are a Macedonian who through historical right of conquest now reigns in Egypt’. Cleopatra is Egypt; but Cleopatra is not necessarily hellenistic Egypt. The hellenistic world means very little to the average cinemagoer, simply because the hellenistic period has never captured the imagination of film-makers. In fact the hellenistic world has been all but ignored by Hollywood movie directors who have tended to cut off Greek history with the death of Alexander the Great (as portrayed by Richard Burton in 1956) and pick it up again (but this time in a decidedly Roman context) with the accession of Cleopatra VII.

Hollywood clearly has difficulty in defining what ‘hellenistic’ means. Since the period is characterized by a succession of inter-related Macedonian dynasties battling it out for space in a decidedly un-Greek world – Syria, Egypt, Asia Minor – Hollywood finds it difficult to classify the period both in terms of visualization and narrative. Hollywood does not know what to make of a hybrid culture. That is why when it does turn its attention to the late hellenistic period and attempts to retell the Cleopatra story, the queen is rooted, visually at least, not in the hellenistic world at all, but in the Pharaonic past, and in the Egyptian New Kingdom (c. 1550–1154 BC) to be more precise.

Cleopatra has been a very popular icon with moviemakers since the birth of film-making in the late nineteenth century. In fact, one of the earliest forays into epic film-making – the Italian Marc’ Antonio e Cleopatra (1913) – took the Cleopatra story as its theme and created out of it an Italian nationalistic spectacle of Roman moral probity versus Oriental decadence.⁴ In this chapter, however, I want to touch on several renditions of the Cleopatra story produced by the American Hollywood studios,⁵ namely: the Fox Film Corporation’s 1917 Theda Bara silent feature directed by J. Gordon Edwards, which unfortunately only survives today in movie stills;⁶ the 1934 Cecil B. DeMille motion picture staring Claudette Colbert produced by Paramount Pictures; and the 1963 Twentieth Century Fox epic staring Elizabeth Taylor and directed by Joseph Mankiewicz.

There are two aspects of the representations of Cleopatra that need to be addressed: first the question of the portrayal of the queen in film narrative and second her visualization in film design. These elements are interrelated and interdependent; both are fundamentally important aspects of the epic genre.

Hollywood’s ‘inauthentic authenticity’: Cleopatra in film narrative ⁷

How did the celluloid treatments of Cleopatra’s history reflect her race, origin, and identity? Cleopatra VII’s Macedonian ancestry and the importance of that lineage in the wide world of hellenistic politics were crucial to the queen’s public persona; the Greekness of Cleopatra VII, of the Ptolemies generally, and of their capital city, Alexandria, was of primary importance to the Ptolemaic system of government, to their culture, and to their ethics. No doubt the Pharaonic elements of kingship were important tools for the Ptolemies, but their Greekness was never completely subordinated to native Egyptian culture. Their Greekness allowed the Ptolemies to function in a world of Greek rulers, a series of dynasties spread throughout the Mediterranean and the Near East, which were united by a common Greek language, ideology, and culture.

Film narrative: Cleopatra, 1917

The loss of the 1917 Cleopatra film makes it difficult to reconstruct the plot outline or the treatment of Cleopatra’s identity within the narrative structure,⁸ but newspaper reviews of the period generally assert that the film attempted to depict a faithful retelling of Cleopatra’s life, noting, for example, ‘The story, true to the main facts of history, shows the ambitious and beautiful Queen Cleopatra using her sex to juggle with the political history of Rome and Egypt.’⁹ Maude Miller of the Ohio Board of Censors wrote enthusiastically that, ‘The producers have followed history in a remarkable way.’¹⁰

Fig. 2. Theda Bara as Cleopatra, 1917. From the author’s private collection.

Nevertheless, it would seem that the two love-affairs of the historical Cleopatra were not enough to satiate the lustful appetite of Bara’s vampish queen (Fig. 2):¹¹ another (fictional) lover was introduced into the plot, a young man named Pharon (Alan Roscoe), the son of the Priest of Osiris, and the rightful (i.e. non-Ptolemaic) heir to the Egyptian throne. In the plot he leaves the city of Abouthis and heads towards Alexandria in order to rid Egypt of the licentious siren and to take over the reins of government. But gradually Pharon falls in love with Cleopatra, who treats him cruelly and spurns his love until he offers her one final service as a display of his passionate devotion – for it is Pharon who hands Cleopatra the fatal asp.

The 1917 Cleopatra is the only film to suggest that political unrest and a growing nationalistic movement were features of late Ptolemaic history, although (admittedly) the plot seems to have utilized this political feature merely to play up Pharon’s (unrequited) love story.¹² The loss of the negatives makes any further discussion difficult.

Film narrative: Cleopatra, 1934

Despite the fact that the Alexandrian court is inhabited by persons with Greek names (Sosigenes, Pothinus, Apollodorus), the script for Cecil B. DeMille’s 1934 portrayal of the life of the queen entirely underplays Cleopatra’s ethnic origins. In fact, it is difficult to place DeMille’s Cleopatra in any kind of context, since we are told nothing of her background, and we are not even aware that she is from a long line of kings (of any race). Cleopatra is just Cleopatra. She does not need a history or a pedigree; for DeMille, the name speaks for itself and provides all the information necessary for this particular history lesson. As he wrote in his autobiography, ‘[Cleopatra] was the imperious Queen. She was the vivacious, alluring woman. She was Egypt.’¹³

The screenplay by Waldemar Young and Vincent Lawrence consciously underplays Cleopatra’s history prior to her meeting with Caesar (Warren William). The script informs the viewer that she has a brother named Ptolemy (an amalgamation of the historical Ptolemies XIII and XIV), but the audience does not see him and there is certainly no hint in the movie that she follows Ptolemaic precedent and is married to him. The screenplay makes it clear that the young Cleopatra is caught up in some kind of court faction, but it does not provide any details, although the figure of Ptolemy’s corrupt chief minister, the eunuch Pothinus (Leonard Mudie), looms large in the first quarter of the movie before he is killed off – not on the orders of Caesar though, but rather by the machinations of Cleopatra. The script is silent about the fate of the shadowy Ptolemy.

The first half of the film, the affair with Caesar, curiously condenses time and is plotted at breakneck speed. The proceedings suggest that upon landing at Alexandria, Caesar is ushered into the palace where he has a meeting with Ptolemy and Pothinus (although this is not portrayed on-screen). Then, following Plutarch and later legend,¹⁴ Cleopatra is delivered to him in a carpet and she begins to work her charms. That night she kills Pothinus and continues to seduce Caesar. It is made clear that the two rulers consummate their relationship there and then and so the next morning Cleopatra finds herself unopposed queen of Egypt.

The movie then cuts to Rome for the first time, approximately a fortnight after the events in Alexandria. Caesar enters Rome, together with Cleopatra, in triumph as the Roman plebs marvel at the queen’s beauty. The next morning, the Ides of March, Caesar and Cleopatra meet to discuss their plans for empire and marriage before Caesar leaves to declare his intentions to the Senate. However, ‘history’ intervenes and within hours Caesar lies dead in the Forum and Cleopatra, still in her wedding gown, is heading back to the Nile. A few days later, she is sailing up the Cydnus to meet Antony (Henry Wilcoxon) and her destiny.

The swift plotting of the screenplay means that DeMille’s treatment of the story has no room for the appearance of the child Caesarion, who, the historical Cleopatra claimed, was sired by Caesar; there is precious little time in the movie for his conception, let alone his birth. Needless to say, there is no mention of Cleopatra’s three children by Antony either. Accordingly, in DeMille’s vision, Egyptian history begins and ends with Cleopatra; she has no past, since she has no ancestry, and, because of her lack of children, she is denied a posterity. But Cleopatra is Egypt, and, in a Shakespearean-type motif, she is addressed as such throughout the film.

Fig. 3. Claudette Colbert as Cleopatra, 1934. From the author’s private collection.

The screenplay’s silence about Cleopatra’s lineage is actually reflected in the lines themselves (the script draws heavily on the Hollywood screwball comedies of the 1930s for its witty socialite dialogue, wisecracks and self-parody).¹⁵ A scene set at Calpurnia’s elegant Fifth-Avenue-style soirée in Rome, for example, has a group of nobles gossiping about the scandalous goings-on in Egypt (as they probably did in real life); the subject of Cleopatra soon arises and one young woman innocently asks, ‘Is she black?’ Her question is answered by peals of laughter.

There is an innate confusion about the queen’s appearance: coming as she does from Africa, the natural Roman (American) assumption is that she is a black queen ruling over a black people (the thought is still prevalent among feminist Afro-American scholars today).¹⁶ But in fact Cleopatra’s arrival within the city quells all rumours – for this Cleopatra’s white skin shines like alabaster and even surpasses the dazzling blond curls worn by her Egyptian handmaidens. DeMille, of course, does not think it necessary to provide his audience with an explanation of why, historically, Cleopatra cannot be black. Instead he follows the principle that if legend tells us that Cleopatra was the most beautiful woman in the ancient world, then it was obvious that she should be played by the most beautiful woman in the modern world; in 1934, that was popularly held to be Claudette Colbert (Fig. 3).¹⁷

Film narrative: Cleopatra, 1963

By 1963, however, tastes had changed, and it was the violet-eyed Elizabeth Taylor (Fig. 4) who embodied Egypt’s most famous monarch, and (it could be argued) the public image of Cleopatra has never been excelled or even equalled since Taylor first donned the famous eyeliner.

Fig. 4. Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, 1963. From the author’s private collection.

The film itself has received much critical comment, most of it hostile (Taylor herself reputedly referred to the picture as ‘a disease’); it is often regarded as a lumbering giant of a movie, which lacks momentum and drive.¹⁸ But that is to ignore the integrity of the piece; the producers, the director, and the lead players genuinely attempted to create an authentic retelling of the Cleopatra story, at least as far as narrative was concerned. In a letter to the head of Twentieth Century Fox, the film’s producer, Walter Wanger, articulated the film’s ethic:

The goal to achieve is not a compromise production or a film of expedience, but an original, exciting, romantic historical film that will enthral the audience … We are telling the amazing story of the most remarkable woman of all times, showing her entire life from the age of nineteen to her dramatic death at thirty-nine years of age. Covering for the first time in the theatre the contrasting lives of Caesar and Antony and the enmity of Octavian. All this against the greatest panorama of world conquest. The spectacular sequences, such as Cleopatra’s entrance into Rome, … the battle of Actium, and the orgies in Alexandria, will not be the stereotyped spectacles of the usual ‘big’ pictures, but overall dramatic concepts never before [seen] on the screen.¹⁹

The screenplay draws faithfully (if indiscriminately) on the histories of Suetonius, Appian and Plutarch as well as on the popular Italian novel The Life and Times of Cleopatra by C.M. Franzero. As Wanger noted, ‘it is [Mankiewicz’] plan to stay very close to history. The lives of the chief protagonists, as chronicled in Plutarch, Suetonius, Appian and other ancient sources, are crammed with dramatic event and structure.’²⁰ The influence of ancient writers on the film’s representation of the queen and her story is easy to find, to such an extent that the Greco-Roman sources are almost quoted verbatim. In one early scene set in the palace at Alexandria, Caesar (Rex Harrison) is briefed about the current state of affairs in the Ptolemaic family. His Admiral, Agrippa (Andrew Keir), and chief aide, Rufio (Martin Landau), read the details of Cleopatra’s early history from an intelligence document, a scroll purportedly written by Cicero:

AGRIPPA: (reading) ‘ … actually of Macedonian descent, no Egyptian blood – officially admitted – that is’. (He looks up) I wish Cicero would spare us his personal comments on these reports …

CAESAR: (his eyes almost shut with weariness) That’s all Cicero is. One endless personal comment …

AGRIPPA: (continues to read) ‘ … reputed to be extremely intelligent, and sharp of wit. Queen Cleopatra is widely read, well-versed in the natural sciences and mathematics. She speaks seven languages proficiently. Were she not a woman, one would consider her an intellectual.’ Nothing bores me so much as an intellectual –

CAESAR:Makes a better admiral of you, Agrippa …

RUFIO: (grins) Here’s something perhaps of more interest to the navy … (he reads now) ‘ … often arrogant in manner, and of a violent temper. Relentless, and utterly without scruple. In attaining her objectives, Cleopatra has been known to employ torture, poison, and even her own sexual talents – which are said to be considerable.’ (The men laugh)

RUFIO: (continuing) ‘ … Her lovers, I am told, are listed more easily by number than by name. It is said that she chooses, in the manner of a man, rather than wait to be chosen after womanly fashion.’

In this early scene, emphasis is laid on Cleopatra’s Macedonian ancestry as well as her considerable talents – sexual and intellectual; these, of course, are familiar themes in the ancient portrayals of the queen.²¹ The script also offers an explanation of the custom of Ptolemaic brother-sister marriage and the audience is left in no doubt that the young Cleopatra is brother-loving in the fullest sense of the term. In fact, during an early meeting, Caesar confronts Cleopatra with a tirade of abuse concerning her unorthodox family history and the dynasty’s relationship to Egypt as a whole:

CAESAR: (He strides towards Cleopatra) You, the descendant of generations of in-bred, incestuous mental defectives – how dare you call me barbarian?

CLEOPATRA: Barbarian!

CAESAR: Daughter of an idiotic flute-playing drunkard who bribed his way to the throne of Egypt –

CLEOPATRA: Your price was too high, remember?

CAESAR: You call me barbarian? … I’m fed up to the teeth with the smug condescension of you worn-out pretenders! Parading on the ruins of your past glories. Keep out of my affairs and do as I say!

CLEOPATRA: Do as you say? Literally? As if I were something you had conquered?

CAESAR: If I choose to regard you as such.

In this scene, Mankiewicz manages to put Cleopatra firmly into her historic and dynastic locale; he alludes to the Ptolemaic practice of brother-sister marriage and its possible long-term genetic effects, to the fact that the dynasty rules Egypt without historical authority (Caesar calls the Ptolemies ‘pretenders’), and to the dubious financial dealings of Cleopatra’s father, Ptolemy XII ‘Auletes’, undertaken with the Romans in order to secure his unstable throne.²²

Interestingly, without going into such lurid detail herself, Mankiewicz’ Cleopatra also confirms her non-Egyptian ancestry in a remarkably witty and self-depreciating remark thrown to Antony during their meeting on her lavish barge at Cydnus. The subject centres around philhellenism, as Cleopatra compliments Antony (Richard Burton) on his elaborate leopard skin-trimmed Greek armour (seen on the right in Fig. 9):

CLEOPATRA: I find what you are wearing most becoming. Greek – isn’t it?

ANTONY: I have a fondness for almost all Greek things …

CLEOPATRA: As an almost all Greek thing – I’m flattered.

Cleopatra’s statement of national identity is short and swift, and rather derisory; blink and you might miss it, but it is there, captured on celluloid, and a tribute to the production’s quest for historical precision, at least in the story-line.²³

In addition, unlike the 1934 treatment, Mankiewicz’ version of Cleopatra’s history (which is far more factual and weighty) lays considerable emphasis on the Caesarion story, for, contrasting with DeMille, Mankiewicz is keenly aware of Cleopatra’s Greek pedigree and Hellenic persona and is concerned that Cleopatra should not stand divorced from her past or future, or from her family-line, or from the international politics of the hellenistic world at large. In this movie Egypt is assimilated into the bigger picture. Mankiewicz is also keen to make Cleopatra a mother figure, fertile and bounteous; envisioning herself as Egypt, in one scene Cleopatra declares herself to be the life-giving Nile. She tells Caesar of her rounded thighs, that her hips are set well apart and declares, ‘such women, they say, bear sons’. The son that the 1963 Cleopatra does indeed bear knows his lineage and knows that he is set to continue the royal line of the Ptolemies, a fact endorsed by his prominent entrance into Rome seated at the side of his goddess-mother. There is, even so, still no mention of the queen’s children by Antony; instead all of Cleopatra’s maternal feelings and aspirations for empire are focused on the son of Julius Caesar.

Nevertheless, it would seem that as far as public awareness of Cleopatra’s ancestry goes, the Ptolemies are pretty well served by the 1963 epic treatment. The Greekness of Cleopatra is not hidden away like some shameful family secret, despite the dynasty’s interpersonal shortcomings.

Designs on the past

Turning now to the subject of film set and costume design, it should be noted at the outset that, in general, Hollywood presents a very conservative view of the ancient world. The epics’ art direction does not take risks. Their sense of the past is largely based on visual conventions inherited from Victorian historical paintings and early-twentieth-century stage designs, so that the presentation of ancient life varies little in Hollywood film-making. Hollywood’s coordinated conception of epic backgrounds was clearly a function of finance, because the studio heads believed that big budget films could not risk challenging popular notions of ancient life with revisionist (or even accurate) visual depictions of the ancient world as foreign, or perilous, or savage, or even dirty. Experienced moviegoers knew what Rome, or Persia, or Greece, or Egypt was supposed to look like, and any film that seriously challenged these traditional preconceptions was not likely to gain popular acceptance or do well at the box office.²⁴

Hollywood’s penchant for the grandiose was anticipated by the late-nineteenth-century Academic Painters – Long, Alma-Tadema, Gérôme, Leighton, Poynter and others – who cleaned up history and overlaid it with a Victorian love of fussy detail.²⁵ The ancient world as conceived by these nineteenth-century artists is incredibly lavish – far grander, probably, than the original ever was. D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille were certainly familiar with the work of these painters, and it is clear that the Academic paintings of ancient life heralded the way for the filmic recreations of the twentieth century. Effectively, Victorian artists created the stereotypes of what the Greek, Roman, or Egyptian past should look like.²⁶

Even though the Hollywood studio art departments had at their disposal the lavish resources of the research departments, the photographs provided by the travelling research teams, and the illustrated texts available in the vast libraries of MGM, Warner Brothers, Paramount, and Fox, the pursuit of archaeological accuracy was not necessarily guaranteed; Hollywood’s view of the antique past is based on historical reality but tends, nevertheless, to be heavily glamorized. The immaculate palaces, temples, forecourts, arenas, barges, and marketplaces of the epic milieu, the burnished gold, the marble, the silks and the draperies, look inescapably like opulent movie fantasies rather than faithful depictions of ancient reality. Amazed at the visual magnificence of The Ten Commandments (1956), the movie mogul James Thurbur allegedly exclaimed, ‘Jeez, it makes you realize what God could have done if He’d had the money.’²⁷

The dazzling beauty of the epic sets, with their rigorous denial of dirt, suggests a conspiratorial revision of historical truth: the typical mise en scène of the Hollywood epic was too elaborate and systematic to pass off as an artistic vision of the past, and so the directors’ claims of authenticity were often beside the point. John Cary goes some way towards explaining the dichotomy: ‘If authenticity is brought into our conscious too laboriously’, he notes, ‘the drama suffers. DeMille, perhaps unconsciously, understood this and, unlike Marie Antoinette, if bread was what people wanted, bread – and lots of it – was what he gave them.’²⁸

Cleopatra’s palace: problems in set design

When it comes to representing Ptolemaic Alexandria, Hollywood clearly finds itself in something of a dilemma. The Production Designers of the three Cleopatra films studied here found it difficult to visualize a major hellenistic city that merges traditional and well known Egyptian architectural motifs with elements of, equally familiar, classical Greek architecture. What can Hollywood do with a hybrid culture? Archaeological finds at Alexandria and investigations into the literary sources suggest that the vast palace of the Ptolemaic monarchy was principally Greek in design and construction, although it included notably impressive and often monumental Pharaonic structures. These were either built by the Ptolemies themselves in imitation of ancient building styles or else they were genuine ancient buildings pilfered from their original locations by the Greek-speaking rulers.²⁹

The sets in DeMille’s 1934 Cleopatra ignore the hellenistic aspect entirely, as much, indeed, as the script overlooks Cleopatra’s Macedonian lineage. Much of the film’s action takes place on a studio set representing a high and airy hall that overlooks one of the palace courtyards (Fig. 5). The set is decorated with a lotus-pillar colonnade, with pylon gateways, rooftop terraces, and pediments, all of which are borrowed from New Kingdom Egyptian temple designs. The hall itself is hung with curtain swags with tasselled borders and large marble pediments, on top of which sit proud granite statues of Pharaonic lions, actually copied from a pair of lions erected in Nubia by Tutankhamun and now housed in the British Museum.³⁰ It is interesting to note that just as DeMille’s Cleopatra is eternal Egypt, so her palace is eternal Egyptian, Pharaonic Egyptian at that, and New Kingdom Egyptian to be specific. There is no call for a genuine hellenistic Alexandria here, with its unique and fascinating mixture of Greek and Egyptian styles. A vision of eternal Egypt will suffice.

Fig. 5. Still from Cleopatra 1934. From the author’s private collection.

However, on a preliminary viewing, the opening ten minutes of Mankiewitz’ 1963 Cleopatra seem to contradict the notion of a timeless Egypt and confirms Fox’s publicity announcement that,

Untold effort has gone into the over-all design of the physical production for ‘Cleopatra’ … [The] detailed, authentic craftsmanship of the film’s production designers, costume designers, and set decorators … establish the style and taste of the settings, and help provide the proper mood and atmosphere for the story that is told.³¹

The film opens on the bloody spectacle of the aftermath of the Battle of Pharsalus as the bodies of the dead are burned on funeral pyres, and then cuts to the first of the movie’s many ‘spectacle’ scenes, the wharf-market and royal palace at Alexandria. The establishing panorama-shot along the coastline provides the audience with an unrivalled recreation of the ancient city and includes such landmarks as the Pharos lighthouse. The film’s Art Director, John De Cuir, had only three months to rebuild the ancient city on the production’s Cinecitta lot, although two previously thwarted attempts to build the set on locations in England and California had given him plenty of time to perfect his designs and consult his research notes. The architectural elements designed by De Cuir alert the viewer to the fact that the story is set in a hellenistic city (Figs. 1 and 6). The palace façade itself looks authentically hellenistic enough; there is certainly no hiding the fact that its inspiration is Greek, for it is embellished with Doric columns, sculpted pediments, and painted metopes. But the set design neatly incorporates some Egyptian elements too: human-headed sphinxes, a huge scarab beetle, a seated statue of Isis, an Egyptian-style kiosk and, of course, a giant sphinx guarding the entrance to the harbour itself all help the viewer to locate the Egyptian spin on the essentially Hellenic design. Interestingly, recent (underwater) archaeological investigation at Alexandria supports De Cuir’s vision: the later Ptolemies utilized large-scale Egyptian architecture on a more routine basis than was once supposed. Alexandria, and especially the royal quarter, would have been an eclectic mixture of Greek and Egyptian building styles.³²

However, upon stepping inside the palace, the cinema audience enters another world; here the hellenistic elements of the façade give way to a riot of Egyptianizing motifs (although the occasional piece of classical sculpture is allowed to creep in). Cleopatra’s palace is vast; its throne rooms, reception rooms, dining rooms and private chambers gleam with alabaster columns. Caesar’s massive guest-chamber, for example, has a highly-polished marble floor and a papyrus-effect wall-mural that depicts a variety of Pharaonic religious scenes more fitting for a New Kingdom tomb or temple than a palace. The tomb-like decoration of the palace is made even more obvious in other sets, such as a corridor leading into the queen’s apartments which is decorated with raised golden bas-reliefs, winged pediments, and gilded guardian statues. It is interesting to note how frequently well-known images of earlier Egyptian artworks are utilized within the set design to create this image of timeless Egypt: one of Cleopatra’s private chambers, for example, is furnished with chairs and tables modelled on those found in the tomb of queen Hetepheres of the Egyptian Old Kingdom,³³ while her barge is hung with expensive ‘Grecian’ drapes but also includes copies of the famous black-skinned guardian (or Ka) statues discovered in the tomb of Tutankhamun.³⁴ The queen’s palace bedchamber, however, is more reminiscent of a Napoleonic boudoir than anything that a Greek, Roman, or Egyptian noblewoman would have recognized. The double bed itself is pure Dorchester Hotel, 1963.³⁵

The idea that the ancient past also contains traces of the fashionable present is a very important element of the Cleopatra films: Theda Bara’s 1917 Cleopatra lives in a world of plush oriental rugs and potted palms, a reflection of the late Edwardian taste for busy and fussy interior design. The wall paintings of her palace are cod-Egyptian and the hieroglyphs are gobbledygook, but they do reflect the popular taste in Orientalism prevalent at the time. Claudette Colbert’s Cleopatra, on the other hand, lives in a splendid clean-line art-deco palace, an hommage in itself to the Egyptomania that was sweeping through Europe and America in the 1920s and 1930s (Fig. 5).³⁶ In actuality, as cinema audiences first wondered at Cleopatra’s gleaming palace and its fixtures and furnishings, they would have realized that it was not at all dissimilar to the art-deco movie theatres in which the film was originally played.³⁷

Fig. 6. Still from Cleopatra 1963. From the author’s private collection.

Cleopatra’s wardrobe: epic costume design

Without fail, Hollywood visually represents the queen as pure Egyptian; in all three films, the design of Cleopatra’s wardrobe rejects authentic hellenistic or Greco-Roman fashions in favour of a fantasy Pharaonic look. As far as the film-makers are concerned, the justification for these creations is always the giant Egyptian-style relief of Cleopatra carved into the wall at the rear of the temple of Dendera. It is never the sculpted portrait busts of the queen in hellenistic mode, nor is it ever her Roman-type coin imagery that becomes the basis of her filmic designs. The Dendera relief satisfies the image of Cleopatra as eternal Egypt and is used to qualify the Art Directors’ claims that Cleopatra’s look is based on her authentic ancient representations. Film-makers do not acknowledge that the Egyptian costume worn by the queen at Dendera is only part of the story.

It is doubtful that the real Cleopatra wore anything like the costume depicted on the Dendera relief outside public ceremonial events. One has the feeling that the Ptolemaic rulers saw the advantage of, and even enjoyed, being portrayed in traditional Pharaonic dress, and they were no doubt accustomed to wearing a wide array of Egyptian crowns, regalia and costume at ceremonial events; certainly, temple reliefs show an enormous range of headgear that seems to have been ‘invented’ by or for the Ptolemies.³⁸ But for the Ptolemaic kings and queens, Egyptian dress was fancy dress, albeit a masquerade costume that could have a political resonance. Ptolemaic sculpture, coinage, and other artefacts, together with literary texts, strongly suggest that on a daily basis the Greek rulers wore Greek-style clothes, or, by the late Ptolemaic age, even Roman-style clothing.³⁹ Hellenic dress helped the Ptolemies to function in the hellenistic world. Thus, on her coinage, Cleopatra VII’s Roman stola and Roman coiffure demand that she be taken seriously by Rome.⁴⁰ Egyptian clothing was probably reserved for priestly, civic, or even national ceremonials.

In her excellent study of the use and abuse of Cleopatra’s imagery in past centuries, Lucy Hughes-Hallett has demonstrated how Cleopatra has been made into a contemporary model, with each successive generation anxious to claim her as their own.⁴¹ The growing taste for the neoclassical in art inspired a gradual increase in the representation of the queen as a noblewoman of the Greco-Roman era,⁴² but in the early years of the nineteenth century the popular perception of Cleopatra as a hellenistic queen began to change.

Fig. 7. Line drawing of an Egyptian queen, after Denon, c. 1818.

Following the invasion of Egypt by Napoleon and the subsequent publication of Baron Denon’s mammoth Description d’Égypte, public perceptions of Cleopatra quickly began to alter as the detailed drawings of the Description allowed for the first time an understanding of how ancient Egyptian queens looked and dressed (Fig. 7).⁴³ This information proved too tempting to be ignored and it was not long before new images of Cleopatra began to appear in Pharaonic costume. Since it was popularly assumed that Cleopatra was Egypt, it was natural to re-dress her as a native ancient Egyptian; consequently her Greek imagery was quickly set aside and ultimately forgotten.

It was also at this time that theatrical portrayals of Cleopatra picked up on the new knowledge of her Egyptian surroundings and similarly began to portray her as an Egyptian queen.⁴⁴ By the latter half of the nineteenth century, and with the discipline of Egyptology firmly established, stage designers commissioned to illustrate the Cleopatra story concentrated more of their efforts on producing authentic reproductions of Pharaonic Egypt and a Cleopatra who was firmly located in the New Kingdom.⁴⁵

Designer history: Cleopatra in high heels

By the mid-nineteenth century the familiar representation of Cleopatra as a sexy, bejewelled, breast-exposing Egyptian queen was firmly established. It was this type of imagery that inspired the early film-makers. But films themselves are products of their time and, even in the earliest silent pictures, in order to make the remote ancient world a little more palatable and familiar to the movie audience, elements of contemporary living were frequently incorporated into the ‘look’ of the film. In fact, one of the most interesting dilemmas in designing ancient spectacles was how to reconcile a modern perspective with the historical horizon of the period described, and how to conciliate the ‘look’ of the past with the ‘look’ of the present day without committing serious anachronisms.

The art director of an epic film is particularly aware of the process of creating historical authenticity which at one and the same time appeals to contemporary taste. As C.S. Tashiro suggests, more than anything else, make-up, hairstyles, and costumes in the typical epic are often adjusted to the period when the film was made to become the primary focus of Designer History.⁴⁶ This is never more noticeable than in the Cleopatra movies; it is no surprise to see Cleopatra in high heels. These particular movies were, after all, major vehicles for important and influential female stars, and the Hollywood star-system allowed major actresses like Bara, Taylor, and Colbert a say in how their film wardrobes would look.⁴⁷ Consequently, there is an undeniable contemporary emphasis for the Egyptian-style costumes of Hollywood’s Queen of the Nile.

There is no known designer for the 1917 Cleopatra, and it is possible that much of the costume design, hairstyling, and make-up may have been done by the performers themselves. Theda Bara’s Cleopatra looks rather ample by modern standards, but in 1917 her Cleopatra-look was a wow with the fans. Europe and America were in the grip of a wave of exotic and erotic orientalist fantasies such as the Ballet Russe’s Scheherazade, Richard Strauss’ opera Salome, and the erotic dance-performances of Mata Hari and Little Egypt, and thus, with her hair set in contemporary ringlets, and her eyelids shaded in heavy make-up, Bara’s Cleopatra was crafted in the classic vamp-mode, and perfectly in accord with the times. Today one might think her costumes (and there were over 55 of them) rather amusing, but Hollywood publicity claimed that they were immaculately researched copies of Cleopatra’s originals; in fact, it was claimed that Bara herself ‘worked for months with a curator of Egyptology at the Metropolitan Museum in New York’⁴⁸ where she studied ancient items of clothing and jewellery and, more generally, the lifestyle of the ancient Egyptians.⁴⁹ Her months of ‘research’ were later endorsed by the actress’s poses and tableaux. In fact, so imbued was Bara with a feeling for the period, that she was quoted as having declared that she ‘felt the blood of the Ptolemies coursing through [her] veins.’⁵⁰

The publicity material mixed elements of historical authenticity together with notions of eroticism, and in a Motion Picture News review of November 1917, the reader was encouraged to reflect on the reactions of a man leaving a cinema where he has just witnessed Bara’s Cleopatra in full vamp:

His mind will drift back to the first half of the picture where Miss Bara wore a different costume in every episode. Different pieces of costume rather; or better still different varieties of beads. His temperature will ascend with a jump when he recalls the easy way in which the siren captivated Caesar and Pharon and Antony … He might suddenly realize that his mother back in Hohokus would shut her eyes once or twice for fear that the beads might break or slip, but then – mother never did understand Egyptian history after all.⁵¹

In fact, the suggestive peek-a-boo nature of Bara’s costumes (Fig. 2) became a major feature of film reviews. The film critic of the New York Dramatic Mirror, for example, noted, ‘Those who like to see Theda Bara should not fail to take advantage of the opportunity afforded in Cleopatra, for certainly you will never see more of her.’⁵²

So while Bara’s pearl-encrusted costumes were thrilling to see on the screen, and while they certainly did not entirely look like everyday wear of the period, they could not be labelled as serious attempts to recreate Cleopatra’s wardrobe.

DeMille’s 1934 film is filled with the lush exoticism that was his trademark: feathers, gold, glittering jewels, and scantily clad young women fill the screen of his Cleopatra. Colbert’s Cleopatra make-up was the pure 1930s glamour formula, with thin, plucked brows, heavy lashes, dark shadow on the eyelids, and full, rounded lips. Couture dresses in the 1930s were often cut on the bias, and this smooth, clinging style seemed particularly well suited for this particular re-telling of the story. The bias-cut gowns created for Colbert by the designer Travis Banton were immaculately tailored constructions that skilfully emphasized every curve of her slim body; in effect, the ravishingly simple costumes were carefully designed and made to act as a ‘second skin’ for Colbert, who insisted that Banton bare as much of her bosom as possible, believing that drawing attention to her breasts would divert attention from her short neck.⁵³ The result was a series of daring but elegant designs, perfectly in accord with art-deco fashion, which were both up-to-the-minute and pleasing as recreations of a fantastic Egyptian past. Colbert’s Cleopatra-look both exploited the contemporary mode of Egyptianization in dress, and accelerated its popularity overnight (Fig. 3).⁵⁴ The silhouette of Colbert’s costumes is not the straight, vertical line of ancient Egypt, but a 1930s figure-hugging cut that skims the hips and flares out elegantly below the knees to form a ‘fish tail’ trailing onto the floor. This contemporary treatment of the skirt, together with the halter necklines (one of Banton’s hallmarks), was at the cutting edge of fashion in 1934.

Fig. 8. Publicity still for Cleopatra 1963. From the author’s private collection.

When Mankiewicz’ Cleopatra first went into production at Pinewood studios in England in 1959, the theatre designer Oliver Messel was hired to design Elizabeth Taylor’s costumes. He came up with a series of designs that reflected both ancient Egypt and late 1950s couture, and, interestingly, also spoke of the queen’s Greek heritage.⁵⁵ In one rare wardrobe test-photograph, Taylor wears a Greek style chitoniskos (short belted tunic) and has her hair dressed in a Greek-style topknot. From the few stills and costume-shots that survive, it would appear that Messel was keen to assimilate Cleopatra with the original Greek palace that had been designed and built for her by John De Cuir on the wet and windy Pinewood lot; but with the relocation of the shoot to the Cinecitta Studios in Rome, Messel was dismissed (or refused to sign a new contract – the evidence is sketchy)⁵⁶ and the task of creating Taylor’s costumes was given over to leading Hollywood designer Irene Sharaff.⁵⁷ The rest of the costumes were designed by Italian designer Vittorio Nino Novarese and Hollywood’s Renie Conley;⁵⁸ Rex Harrison’s outfits, however, also became the responsibility of Sharaff.⁵⁹ Her published memoirs for this period make an important contribution to understanding the decisions about the production of the 1963 film. In a typical piece of confident Hollywood rhetoric, Sharaff assures the reader that her designs were based upon months of research in Egyptian museums, and draws attention to her use of the ancient literary and visual sources. When, for example, she designed Taylor’s famous gold Isis gown – worn by Cleopatra for her lavish entry into Rome and, ultimately for her suicide (Fig. 8) – she sensibly noted that,

The bas-relief at Dendera … shows the elaborate crown and collar of an Egyptian goddess … [but] it did not mean that during her life [Cleopatra] dressed like that, except for sacred ceremonial occasions. The few photographs I found of sculpture and coins … suggest only that she was plump, had a large nose, and that her hair was dressed much like any other Roman matron of her times. The trade relations between the two countries must have carried continual mutual influences. Cleopatra, as a Macedonian, as a ruler, and as a woman, was undoubtedly astute and surely delighted in anything novel from Rome or ports on the trade routes to add to her personal adornment. The script called for 60 changes of costume for Cleopatra, from a girl of seventeen to a woman of thirty-seven. One tends to think of Cleopatra looking the same through her relatively short life, but of course the maturing had to be indicated. I found this was easiest to handle by dividing the costumes into three groups … All the ceremonial costumes were based on Egyptian tomb paintings; the second group were clothes such as a Roman woman of the upper classes might have worn; and the last group made use of one of the oldest garments, the djellabah.⁶⁰

Yet when one views the film, Sharaff’s three categories are hard to identify: there is nothing in the design of Cleopatra’s wardrobe that suggests the clothing of a Greco-Roman noblewoman; the look is purely Egyptian, but with a reflection of early 1960s aesthetic, in particular the tightly clinched corseted waists and Christian Dior-style tailoring techniques, so perfectly suited to Elizabeth Taylor’s voluptuous figure (Fig. 4). Walter Wanger’s reminiscences for July 26th 1961 record that, ‘Liz is on a diet again … She likes her clothes to fit skin tight. One or two pounds can make all the difference, and Liz is always concerned about looking her best, naturally.’⁶¹

Sharaff found justification for squeezing Taylor into her corseted bodices and tight skirts from her naïve analysis of ancient Egyptian sculptures which completely failed to take into account the ancient artistic requisites and preoccupations concerning the ideal female body.⁶² Her memoirs note,

I was lucky enough to find a photograph of a small headless statue in the Cairo Museum, whose dress gave me a clue to designing Cleopatra’s costumes. The tight-fitting bodice showed fine lines of tarunto or, as it is more commonly called, quilting, one of the oldest forms of decoration.⁶³

Under the banner of historical authenticity, Sharaff was able to create a series of breathtaking costumes which somehow managed to be 1964 chic, displaying full and uplifted breasts to set off minute clinched waistlines. Moreover, capitalizing on a contemporary 1960s trend towards more conspicuous eyes, Taylor’s Cleopatra make-up incorporated the historical Pharaonic fashion of brows and eyes thickly outlined with black kohl and heavily shadowed lids and sockets (Fig. 9). Wanger’s journal claims that the elaborate make-up creations were invented by Taylor herself:

Elizabeth’s make-up, conceived and designed by her, consists of one of the most glamorous eye-dos I have ever seen. To achieve the effect she wanted she stuck a lot of spangles on her lids, which created a wonderful appearance, but it took two hours just for her to put on her make-up.⁶⁴

So much for historical authenticity, or the boast of the film’s academic research pedigree! What is interesting in these reports, though, is the apparent dichotomy between the official rhetoric, which stresses historical precision via painstaking research, and a rather slapdash attitude whereby the female star is allowed to design her own makeup without the aid of any ‘specialist’. ⁶⁵ The attitude pervades the entire production design; at one point in her notes even Sharaff admits that, ‘Although silk-jersey is a modern fabric, when it is softly pleated it hangs like the material we see on Roman statues. As silk-jersey drapes wonderfully well, many of Cleopatra’s costumes were made from it.’⁶⁶

The efforts of the designers and the Hollywood publicity machine as a whole to stress the film’s historical authenticity were often undercut by the stars themselves. Elizabeth Taylor, in a Photoplay article of 1962, for example, noted that,

The day the picture is over, I’ll come over in a truck and carry my entire wardrobe of sixty dresses off. You may call it a slight case of pilfering, but these gowns are too gorgeous to be left behind … They’ll make the most wonderful ball gowns and party dresses. This one I’m wearing now is pure 22-carat gold. All of them are precious. But what is more important, they’re as modern as tomorrow. I think I’ll set a new trend. Not only with the dresses but the hairdos and such – the Cleopatra look.⁶⁷

Fig. 9. Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra and Richard Burton as Antony, 1963. From the author’s private collection.

No sooner said than done, the catwalks of all the major fashion houses for 1963 were crammed with black-wigged models wearing variations on the Cleopatra theme as a new wave of Egyptomania swept over another generation of fashion lovers. In the summer of 1963, Cleopatra was chic.

Conclusion

What then is the purpose of using Pharaonic costumes and predominantly Pharaonic sets to tell the motion picture story of a Greek ruler living in a Greek city? It would appear that the design teams of all the Cleopatra movies were concerned to separate the two main players in the story: the Egyptians and the Romans, and so each of the two peoples are given design characteristics which stereotype their ancient nationalities. In the Cleopatra films, the Ptolemies inhabit a vast gold palace resembling the Karnak temple and wear clothing dating back to the New Kingdom. The Romans live in splendid white marble villas and they habitually wear togas or full armour. The Greek Ptolemies cannot be dressed like Greeks because in popular imagination Greek and Roman clothing are one and the same, a variety of white drapes disported around the body in various ways or, alternatively, anatomical military cuirasses. Egyptian dress, however, is very different: the use of wigs, headdresses and make-up distances the Egyptians from the Romans, sets them apart, and highlights their national identity, however misguided that notion is in historical reality. The design elements used for the Cleopatra films are used as visual clues that help the audience locate a scene and recognize the nationality of a character.

Sometimes film-makers were aware of Cleopatra’s Macedonian lineage and played on this in the film narrative, but the desire to make her into an Egyptian monarch was too potent a force, and so she was always visualized (in costume terms) as a Pharaonic ruler. But the designed image of Cleopatra is in itself a product of history in which the nineteenth-century rediscovery of Ancient Egypt played a key role. Moreover, the parameters laid down by epic film design (based as it is on Victorian Academic painting and theatre design), demands that Cleopatra inhabits a fantastic, larger-than-life world that is at one and the same time distant and contemporary, alien and desirable. As Cleopatra, Theda Bara, Claudette Colbert and Elizabeth Taylor each in their own way evoked the ancient past while incorporating the stylistic influences of the day. Despite the digressions from history, movie audiences found their portrayals convincing; not many seem to have questioned whether the Greeks ever got to Egypt. What really mattered for the average moviegoer was the chance to experience the intermingling of the glamour of Hollywood with the legend of Cleopatra.⁶⁸

Notes

¹ Versions of this paper have been delivered at Edinburgh University, The Open University, Lampeter University and Leicester University, as well as at the Hay-on-Wye conference on The Hellenistic World. I am grateful to all those individuals who commented upon this chapter. In particular, though, special thanks go to Steven Griffiths, Dr Lorna Hardwick, Dr Paula James, Prof. Graham Shipley, Kim Shahabudin, Dr Karen Stears and Dr Maria Wyke. I am especially grateful to Jeffery Spencer for obtaining original movie stills for me from Los Angeles and for allowing me to share in his Cleomania. I am thankful for the kind support and professional advice offered by Dr Daniel Ogden and Dr Anton Powell.

² The final shooting script for Cleopatra is dated September 18th 1961, although in reality a definitive shooting script did not exist even after filming had ceased and the picture was being edited. Joseph Mankiewicz was occupied with major re-writes daily throughout the filming of the movie. The process is chronicled in Wanger and Hyams 1963, and Brodsky and Weiss 1963.

³ For Cleopatra VII’s building constructions at Dendera see Arnold 1999, 211–24. For a good image of the Dendera relief, showing scale, see Hughes-Hallett 1990, pl. 1. More generally for Cleopatra VII’s use of Pharaonic imagery and her identification with Egypt see Chauveau 2000, 102–6, Hölbl 2001, 271–93. Recently, several Egyptian-style statues of Ptolemaic royal women have been re-identified as Cleopatra VII, although the arguments appear highly suspect. See Ashton 2001a and 2001b.

⁴ See Wyke 1997. 84–6.

⁵ Therefore, I reluctantly eliminate the sublime British-made Caesar and Cleopatra (1946), starring Vivien Leigh, from this study. However, for a discussion see Hamer 1997.

⁶ The American Film Institute lists Bara’s Cleopatra among its top ten most important missing films. For a discussion see Thompson 1996, 68–78.

⁷ ‘Inauthentic Authenticity’ was coined by Solomon 2001, 31.

⁸ An attempt at reconstructing the plot is made by Thompson 1996, 68–70.

⁹ Motion Picture News. January 5th 1918, 102.

¹⁰ Motion Picture News. January 5th 1918, 102.

¹¹ For Bara’s femme fatale Cleopatra see Hughes-Hallett 1990, 267–72 and Genini 1996, 39–41.

¹² For anti-Ptolemaic uprisings see, for example, Hölbl 2001, 307–9.

¹³ DeMille 1960. 309.

¹⁴ Plut. Caesar 49.

¹⁵ A clear example of self-parody of epic film dialogue occurs during a passionate moment between Antony and Cleopatra:

ANTONY: Together we could take over the world!

CLEOPATRA: Nice of you to include me.

¹⁶ See Foss 1997, 82. He notes, ‘[Cleopatra’s] mother is not known for certain. Given all the uncertainties of her ancestry … her blood is estimated as 32 parts Greek, 27 parts Macedonian and 5 parts Persian … If she was black, no one mentioned it.’

¹⁷ On Colbert and her screen style see Tapert 1998, 166–85.

¹⁸ Time (exact date not stated) noted, for example, ‘as drama and as cinema, Cleopatra is riddled with flaws. It lacks style both in image and action. Never for an instant does it whirl along on wings of epic élan; generally it just jumps from scene to ponderous scene on the square wheels of exposition’ (cited in Vermilye and Ricci 1993, 156). For an overview of the filming process and its aftermath see Medved and Medved 1984, 97–105. See also Brodsky and Weiss 1963.

¹⁹ Wanger 1963, 77.

²⁰ Wanger 1963, 63.

²¹ Plut. Caesar 48, 49; Antony 26; Propertius Elegies 3. A collection of ancient and modern sources on Cleopatra is provided by Flamarion 1997 and Lovric 2001.

²² On Ptolemaic inbreeding see Ogden 1999, 97. On the financial dealings of Ptolemy XII with the Romans see Hölbl 2001, 222–4, and Sullivan 1990, 229–34.

²³ One of the best accounts of the web of incest and murder spun by the Ptolemies is provided by the American poet Barbara Chase-Riboud (b. 1949) in her 1987 poem Portrait of a Nude Woman as Cleopatra, in Lovric 2001, 20–1.

²⁴ The 1954 film The Silver Chalice, set in late-first-century AD Syria and Judaea, radically altered the standard epic design formula. The film’s set and costume designs are a blend of the semi-abstract and the impressionistic. Because of its experimental design (coupled with a poor script) the movie was a box office flop. See Hirsch 1978, 34–6, and Elly 1984, 117–18.

²⁵ For the Academic Painters and their recreations of antiquity see Liversidge and Edwards 1996; Ash 1989, 1995 and 1999; Wood 1983. The Hollywood debt to the nineteenth-century artists is still felt today. See Landau 2000, 64–5. For the influence of Victorian theatre design on cinema art direction see Finkel 1996 and Mayer 1994.

²⁶ See Dunant 1994, Robinson 1955 and Christie 1991.

²⁷ MacDonald Fraser 1988, 5.

²⁸ Cary 1974, 91.

²⁹ See discussions in Grimal et al. 1998, 86–104; Green et al. 1996, 127–41, 191–203.

³⁰ See Russmann 2001, 130–1.

³¹ Cleopatra Souvenir Brochure 1963, 16.

³² For the architecture of the royal quarter see Foreman 1999.

³³ IV Dynasty, reign of Khufu, c. 2585 BC.For details see Reisner and Smith 1955, 33–4, pls. 27–9; Lehner 1985.

³⁴ XVIII Dynasty, reign of Tutankhamun, c. 1347–1337 BC.See Saleh and Sourouzain 1987, no. 180.

³⁵ A section of the 1963 souvenir brochure entitled ‘The Designer’s Contribution’ includes 15 full colour illustrations of various sets used throughout the film. A section of Life International magazine May 20th 1963 is devoted to the filming of Cleopatra. One particular segment (pp. 72–3) is entitled ‘Heroic Settings Designed for Larger-Than-Life Heroes’ and includes good images of the Alexandrian set.

³⁶ See in particular Ziegler et al. 1994, 506–51.

³⁷ See Curl 1994, 212–20 and Montserrat 2000, 89.

³⁸ See Forbes 1996.

³⁹ For the famous description of the Greek-style clothing of Ptolemy VIII see Athenaeus XII 549e. See further, Gambato 2001.

⁴⁰ See illustrations in Walker and Higgs 2001, 144, fig. 4.3 and (arguably) fig. 4.2, etc.

⁴¹ Hughes-Hallett 1990. The process began early, in the reign of the Roman emperor Augustus; see Wyke 1992.

⁴² See Ziegler et al. 1994, 568–72 and Walker and Higgs 2001, 346–7, fig. 368.

⁴³ Ziegler et al. 1994, 562. For the Description see Curl 1994, 114–16.

⁴⁴ Ziegler et al. 1994, 398–9.

⁴⁵ The French School in particular (especially the likes of Gérôme, Rixens, Cananel and Moreau) played up the eroticism of the ancient Egyptian Cleopatra in oil paintings dated from 1860 to 1900. See Ziegler et al. 1994, 574–80; see also Foreman 1999, 94, 100–1, 152.

⁴⁶ Tashiro 1998, 95–118.

⁴⁷ On the role of fashion and the star system see Davis 1993, 205–32 and Gaines and Herzog 1990.

⁴⁸ Genini 1996, 39.

⁴⁹ The idea that Bara, like other stars of early cinema, designed her own costumes is endorsed by her own memoirs of the filming of her 1918 movie, Salome: ‘I wanted to be a different Salome, so I ordered the wig-maker to send me a wig of tawny, blond hair. It was almost to be like a lion’s mane, wild, unruly and weird. But the man had no imagination. He sent me one with Pickford curls. So I’m a brunette Salome after all.’ Quoted in Golden 1996, 167.

⁵⁰ Wagenknecht 1962, 179. Bara claimed, ‘It is not a mere theory in my mind. I have a positive knowledge that I am a reincarnation of Cleopatra. I live Cleopatra, I breathe Cleopatra, I am Cleopatra.’ See Golden 1996, 130. The 1917 souvenir brochure accompanying Cleopatra contained an article asking, ‘Is Theda Bara a Reincarnation of Cleopatra?’ Several arguments in favour of the proposition were advanced: ‘(1) The character of Cleopatra and the character of Theda Bara are similar in many respects. (2) In appearance, so far as can be definitely ascertained, Miss Bara and the Siren of the Nile were similar. (3) Miss Bara’s last name is similar to an Egyptian word meaning “Soul of the Sun”. (4) The prophecy of Rhadmes fits Cleopatra as easily as Miss Bara.’

⁵¹ Motion Picture News 3rd November 1917. See further Wyke 1997, 89–90.

⁵² October 27th 1917.

⁵³ One of Banton’s original costume designs, together with a surviving lamé gown worn by Colbert, is illustrated in McConathy and Vreeland 1976, 146–7. See further Bailey 1983, 280–1; Tapert, 1998, 166–85; Annas, La Valley and Maeder 1987, 48–9; LaVine 1981, 141.

⁵⁴ On Egyptomania in the dress of the 1920s and 1930s see Ziegler et al. 1994, 526–8, and Montserrat 2000, 85–7. For the influence of the 1934 Cleopatra on female fashion see Montserrat and Wyke forthcoming.

⁵⁵ In this respect, Messel’s designs were in keeping with those he created for Vivien Leigh’s Cleopatra in the 1945 Caesar and Cleopatra. Interestingly, British publicity rhetoric shared much in common with that of Hollywood. In a Picture Post report dated December 15th 1945, it was noted that, ‘envoys [were] sent to all the museums to check up the right way of putting a band of silk on one of Caesar’s togas … Miss Leigh’s black wigs had to be plaited into 80 strands each night so that they were properly crinkled the next day … 2,000 costumes were made … they used a hundredweight of dyes … more than 500 pieces of jewellery were used’.

⁵⁶ The relationship between Messel and the American producers was obviously strained from the beginning of the project. See Wanger and Hyams 1963, 48. Wanger writes, ‘Oliver Messel, the costume designer, is complaining about his position and authority.’

⁵⁷ Wanger and Hyams 1963, 73. Wanger recalls, ‘April 29 1961: Irene Sharaff agreed to design Elizabeth’s costumes … I first approached Miss Sharaff, who is one of the top Broadway designers, to do the costumes for Cleopatra in 1958. Irene, who is tall, sharp-eyed and candid [although Tom Mankiewicz, the director’s son, later labelled her as ‘not very pleasant’], brushed it off with, “It wouldn’t be possible to do Cleopatra without making it look like Aida.” ’ The relationship between star-designer and Hollywood star appears to have been good. Wanger 1963, 83 writes, ‘June 12 1961: Brought Liz together with Irene Sharaff for the first time. An important meeting because I want them to like each other. Thank heavens, it came off well.’ A report in Life International October 23rd 1961 has Sharaff calling Taylor a ‘dreamboat’. Sharaff later went on to design Taylor’s wedding outfit for her (first) marriage to Richard Burton.

⁵⁸ An original design for a priestess by Renie Conley is illustrated in Annas, La Valley, Maeder and Jenssen 1987, 18.

⁵⁹ Wanger and Hyams 1963, 93; Sharaff 1976, 112–13.

⁶⁰ Sharaff 1976, 106.

⁶¹ Wanger and Hyams 1963, 85.

⁶² On the depiction of the clothed female body in Egyptian art see Robins 1993, 180–5.

⁶³ Sharaff 1976, 106, 108.

⁶⁴ Wanger and Hyams 1963, 139–40.

⁶⁵ On the use of make-up in period films see Annas 1987. She notes (p. 63), for example, that ‘Spartacus (1960) was quite simply a film about brown eyeshadow.’

⁶⁶ Sharaff 1976, 106.

⁶⁷ Photoplay April 1962, 30.

⁶⁸ At the time of writing, Hollywood is allegedly going into production on a new version of the Queen’s life. Called Kleopatra, it is a reworking of the best-selling two-part novel by Karen Essex, who chose to explore her subject’s absolute dedication to the political intrigues of her time, and her strong connection to Greek culture (hence the supposedly more ‘Greek’ spelling of her name). It will be interesting to see if Essex’s hellenistic heroine keeps her Greek identity on the big screen too.

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