His tales are all-encompassing sagas, tragedies or comedies or histories, illustrating the human condition through metaphor, allegory -- or just plain action.
It's never been a surprise that Bollywood's frequently pillaged plotlines from the Bard.
In fact, Rituparno Ghosh's upcoming The Last Lear, starring Amitabh Bachchan and Preity Zinta, goes meta by being about a staging of King Lear.
We take a look at the most memorable movies with the Shakespeareian touch.
Omkara
Let's start with the finest of the lot. Vishal Bhardwaj transposed the Bard's Othello into the badlands of middle India, and the result was fantastic.
Treated with the dust and grime of a spaghetti Western, the film is a dark and gritty action movie that constantly delves into the human mind and its proclivity to cast shadows of doubt.
Ajay Devgan played Othello as Omkara, Kareena Kapoor was a revelation as Dolly (urf Desdemona), but -- just like in the play -- the show belongs utterly to the bad guy, Iago, played here by a fantastic Saif Ali Khan as Langda Tyagi.
Text: Raja Sen
Also Read: Saif and Shakespeare do no wrong
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