December 13, 1955: The film Richard III premieres. Having previously directed and starred in a film version of Henry V, who has been called "Shakespeare's only true hero," Laurence Olivier takes on the role of the most villainous character that William Shakespeare ever depicted.
When the play, which premiered in 1594, and film begin, it is 1483, and it appears that the Wars of the Roses are long over, and that the House of York have defeated the House of Lancaster for good. King Henry VI is dead. King Edward IV, of York (played in the film by Cedric Hardwicke), is on the throne. He is happily married to Elizabeth Woodville (Mary Kerridge), although he cheats on her endlessly.
The succession seems to be secured: Edward and Elizabeth have 2 sons, Edward (Paul Huson) the 12-year-old Prince of Wales, and Richard of Shrewsbury (Andy Shine), the 9-year-old Duke of York. After those boys in the line of succession is King Edward's brother, George (John Gielgud), Duke of Clarence, and then the youngest brother, Richard (Olivier), Duke of Gloucester. In other words, in spite of his heroism in the Wars of the Roses (which is backed up by actual history), the Duke of Gloucester is nowhere near ever receiving the crown.
And he begins the play and film with one of the most famous opening lines in literature:
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visaged war hath smooth'd his wrinkled front;
And now, instead of mounting barbed steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.
Sounds good, right? Ah, but in spite of his wealth and privilege, Richard is not happy. Shakespeare followed the legend that Richard was ugly, and a hunchback with a withered arm. So Richard continues, whining that even his wealth and privilege doesn't give him the kind of way with women that his brother Edward has, and vowing revenge upon the world that made him this way:
But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinish'd, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.
Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,
By drunken prophecies, libels and dreams,
To set my brother Clarence and the king
In deadly hate the one against the other:
And if King Edward be as true and just
As I am subtle, false and treacherous,
This day should Clarence closely be mew'd up,
About a prophecy, which says that 'G'
Of Edward's heirs the murderer shall be.
So Richard points out that "George" begins with a "G" -- even though it could also be "Gloucester," his title. George is executed for treason, even though he's innocent. (This actually happened in 1478.) So now, Edward the King, Edward the Prince of Wales and Richard the Duke of York are ahead of Richard the Duke of Gloucester.
In spite of his physical form, Richard manages to win the hand in marriage of Lady Anne Neville (Claire Bloom), despite his having been on the side that led to the deaths of her father, Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick (a.k.a. "Warwick the Kingmaker"); and her previous husband, Edward of Westminster, son and would-be heir of Henry VI. (No age issue if the play is to be believed: Richard was 28 at the time, and Anne was 27. In real life, though, the wedding was in 1472, when he was 19 and she was 18.)
And then, on April 9, 1483, Edward IV dies -- only 40 years old (Hardwicke was 62, a great actor but much too old for the role), from a cause still debated today. He lived through his illness long enough to legally make his brother Richard "Lord Protector" of England, and guardian of his sons Edward and Richard, until Edward reaches his majority and can rule on his own.
King Edward V and his brother Richard were at Ludlow Castle, over 150 miles northwest of London, and it took 5 days for them to receive word of their father's death. They are taken back to London, and Uncle Richard meets them along the way. He convinces them that, with plots all around, they will be safest in the Tower of London. So far, this matches what history tells us.
And Edward and Richard are never seen in public again. Richard gets Parliament to declare the wedding of Edward IV and Elizabeth null and void, because Edward had secretly married someone else before that. (Which is still in dispute, over 500 years later.) Therefore, Edward and Richard are stricken from the line of succession, and the Duke of Gloucester is crowned King Richard III.
History still hasn't answered what happened to "The Princes In the Tower," but Shakespeare's play forever embedded in the public imagination that Richard had them killed. In the play, it is done by Sir James Tyrell, a knight loyal to Richard (played in this film by Patrick Troughton, later to star in Doctor Who). Some sources have said that Richard literally took matters into his own hands, and smothered the boys with their pillows. Other sources suggest that they merely died of illnesses, which, given the damp air of castles and the state of medicine in the late 15th Century, would hardly have been shocking -- except that one was a king and the other was his heir.
Richard reigns for 2 years, during which Queen Anne dies, and history doesn't make it clear how, though Richard's enemies thought he poisoned her so that he could marry Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV -- and thus his own niece, and she was just 19 at the time -- to strengthen his claim on the crown. Which he does.
Richard and Anne had a son, Edward of Middleham, but he died on April 9, 1484, at the age of 10, possibly of tuberculosis. The King's enemies called it divine retribution. After this, Richard named a new heir, his nephew, John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, son of Elizabeth of York, sister to Richard III and Edward IV. He died in 1492, though apparently not of suspicious causes.
Richard III also had an illegitimate son, John of Gloucester; and an illegitimate daughter, Katherine, who later married the Earl of Pembroke. She died of an illness in 1487, and John died in 1499, possibly executed on the order of Richard's successor. There is no record of him cheating on Anne, or his 2nd wife, Elizabeth, and, since this makes him an outlier among Kings of England (especially in comparison to his brother Edward), historians have doubted the claims of illegitimate children, and Shakespeare's portrayal of him as a lascivious man, suggesting that he had little interest in sex.
Richard's opponents find someone with a claim to the crown: Henry Tudor (Stanley Baker), Earl of Richmond. Well, his claim wasn't all that strong: Through his mother, Margaret Beaufort, he was a great-great-great-grandson of King Edward III; through Margaret's husband, Edmund Tudor, he was a martilineal nephew of Henry VI, and a step-grandson of Henry V; which made him, by marriage, his own 4th cousin, and a 3rd cousin once removed of Richard III. In other words, he was, like Richard III, a member of the House of Plantagenet, but of the Lancaster branch, and now of the House of Tudor as well.
Stronger than Henry's claim was his army. And the night before the Battle of Bosworth Field, 13 miles west of downtown Leicester, and over 100 miles northwest of London, Richard is visited in his dreams by the ghosts of men he has killed, or has had killed: Henry VI (or "Harry the Sixth," as he calls himself), and his son, Edward of Westminster; his wife, Lady Anne; his brother, George; his nephews, Edward V and Richard of Shrewsbury; his brother-in-law, Anthony Woodville, Lord Rivers; Richard Grey and Sir Thomas Vaughan; his nephew, Richard Grey, half-brother of Edward V; Sir Thomas Vaughan, a knight who was loyal to Edward IV but opposed to Richard III; Sir William Hastings, a friend whom Edward IV had appointed Ambassador to France, but stood in Richard's way; and Henry Stafford (Ralph Richardson), Duke of Buckingham, who had been first an ally of Richard's, then an enemy. Every one of these men (and boys), one after the other, places his hand on the head of the sleeping Richard, and says, "Despair and die!"
Richard is shaken by this dream, but composes himself, and, trying to copy Henry V at Agincourt, 68 years earlier, gives his troops an inspirational speech. It doesn't work: In the battle, on August 22, 1485, Richard is knocked off his horse, and loses his cherished crown. He claims that there must be "six Richmonds in the field," because he's already killed five of them. He yells, "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!" He doesn't get the horse, and he is hacked to death with swords. History does not record him yelling the famous line, but it does say his last word was the word "Treason!" over and over again.
The film's premiere was attended by Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. Producer Alexander Korda sold the American film rights to NBC, which broadcast it on March 11, 1956. It got great reviews from TV critics. But its subsequent theater release was a box-office failure, killing Olivier's chances of getting funding for a version of Macbeth, although he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor. And yet, upon re-release in 1966, it was a hit.
Richard III remains the last King of England to be killed in battle His defeat, and Henry VII taking the throne, beginning the reign of the House of Tudor, is considered the end of both the Wars of the Roses and the Middle Ages in Britain. He was buried without ceremony in Leicester, and his remains were long believed uncovered and dumped into a river.
However, construction of a parking lot in 2012 found a skeleton, and DNA testing showed it was him. It also showed that he wasn't a hunchback, but he did have severe scoliosis. As doctors and military historians, familiar with the armor of the time, were able to prove, it would not have stopped him from being able to ride a horse in battle. The bones were properly reburied in Leicester Cathedral.
The best-known portrait of the real Richard III
An addition to Olivier, actors who have played Richard III include William V. Ranous in a silent film in 1908, John Barrymore in The Show of Shows in 1929, Basil Rathbone in Tower of London in 1939, Vincent Price in a remake of the preceding in 1962 (having played the Duke of Clarence in the earlier version), William Windom on NBC's Masterpiece Playhouse in 1950, Paul Daneman in BBC's An Age of Kings in 1960, Ian Holm in War of the Roses in 1965, Ron Cook on the BBC in 1983, Peter Cook in the pilot episode of the 1983 BBC sitcom Blackadder, Andrew Jarvis on the BBC's The Wars of the Roses in 1989, Ian McKellen in 1995, Al Pacino in Looking for Richard in 1996 (a documentary that served as an examination of the character and the play), Paul Mohan on the comedy-educational BBC series Historyonics in 2004, Aneurin Barnard in The White Queen in 2013, and Benedict Cumberbatch in The Hollow Crown in 2016.
In Blackadder, Cook's Richard is treated as a kind, benevolent monarch, who defeats Henry Tudor at Bosworth Field, but is then accidentally killed by the bumbling Edmund, Duke of Edinburgh, known as The Black Adder (Rowan Atkinson). Richard is replaced by his nephew, who becomes King Richard IV, and is, surprisingly in each case, still alive, an adult, and the father of Edmund. (His mother, Gertrude of Flanders, and her other son, John, Prince of Wales, were completely fictional characters.)
McKellen's Richard III is moved forward to the 1930s, and depicts Richard as a Fascist dictator, in the mold of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco. His "winter of our discontent" speech is at a victory banquet, but its followup, about his deformities and plots, is a fourth-wall-break in a restroom. The final battle is at Battersea Power Station, which was under construction at the time the film takes place, and Richard crashes his car, leading him to offer his kingdom for a horse.
In 1984, the BBC aired "The Trial of King Richard III," at Britain's most famous courthouse, the Old Bailey in London. Presided over by former Lord Chancellor Lord Elwyn-Jones, the prosecutors and defense attorneys were played by real-life Queen's Counsels, and historians and forensic experts served as witnesses. Richard was found not guilty -- not that he was innocent, but that the prosecution's case could not be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. In other words, nothing was settled.
That said, in 2022, the BBC series Lucy Worsley Investigates showed Worsley, a prominent British historian, looking into the case. While a letter was found suggesting that Richard, Duke of York, survived, his accused uncle by many years, she also saw evidence linking Richard III directly to the men previously suspected of carrying out the murders. She rejected arguments by modern apologists claiming Richard's innocence, stating that assertions of his non-involvement fail to stand up to logical scrutiny.
She said, "Another thing that often surprises me is that historians say, 'Well, there's no evidence that Richard III murdered his nephews', and I think that there wouldn't be, would there? When Lenin killed the Romanovs, he made sure that there was no paper trail. I think it's very good practice if you're going to carry out political murder to make sure people can't pin the crime to you. So had evidence been discovered, Richard the Third would have just been making a rookie error!"
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December 13, 1955 was a Tuesday. Baseball was out of season. Football was in midweek. no games were scheduled in the NHL.
There were 2 games in the NBA, a doubleheader at what would eventually be called "the old Madison Square Garden." The Philadelphia Warriors beat the Boston Celtics, 109-108. Then the New York Knicks beat the Minneapolis Lakers, 98-91.
