While every Denzel, Leo and Keanu – not to mention all the British actors worth their salt – have suffered the slings and arrows of playing a Shakespearean hero or villain on the big screen, very few big-name stars have been brave enough to cinematically step into the buckled shoes of the Bard himself. Are they too vain to sport a receding hairline and pointy beard, or have there just not been enough juicy biographical screenplays focused on the world’s most powerful storyteller? Certainly, we know very little about the life of Will, the glovemaker’s son, from Stratford-Upon-Avon. No letters or manuscripts exist. And some stand by the notion that he didn’t even write the plays. So, why bother?

But one thing is certain: when a movie about Shakespeare pops up in Hollywood, people take notice. Who could forget when Shakespeare in Love surprised everyone by beating out Saving Private Ryan, Elizabeth, Life Is Beautiful and The Thin Red Line for Best Picture in 1999? And Hollywood insiders claimed producer Harvey Weinstein employed dirty tricks to pull off the win. This year, director Chloé Zhao’s dramatically gut-wrenching Hamnet (about the death of Shakespeare’s titular son) is an early favourite in the awards race after premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival – and winning the festival’s People’s Choice Award – yet some cultural tastemakers are writing it off as a cloying tearjerker. When it comes to telling any kind of story about Shakespeare, it’s always one battle after another  – which happens to be the title of this year’s other Oscar frontrunner.

Hark, hark, below are the four major motion pictures that have dared to put Shakespeare’s life on display – and the well-pedigreed band of players who have donned Elizabethan refinery and done their best to convey all the various versions and theories of the Bard’s history, genius, peccadillos and controversies. Here’s looking at you, Shakespeare…

Hamnet (2025): a somewhat autobiographical tragedy set in the mid-1580s and early-1590s, as Shakespeare was starting his family and launching his career

Shakespeare in Love (1998): a fictitious comedy built around the first staging of Romeo and Juliet in the mid-1590s

Anonymous (2011): a history – or better yet historical fantasy – which weaves the power grab for Elizabeth I’s throne in the early-17th century with the mounting of a series of plays, which were either written by William Shakespeare or Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford 

All is True (2018): a biopic imaging the last three years of Shakespeare’s life, 1613 to 1616, as he returns to Stratford to reunite with his estranged wife and daughters.

 

 

If you’re a fan of Shakespeare, London theatres like the Globe (as it looks today), Paul Mescal or even falconry, there’s something for you in Hamnet; Agata Grzybowska/© 2025 Focus Features LLC (Mescal)
Paul Mescal, Hamnet

The Irish actor has been slowly making his way into the upper echelon of Gen Z leading men (starting with a Best Actor Oscar nomination for the 2022 film Aftersun). With his portrayal of Hamnet’s hunky, doe-eyed William Shakespeare – a Stratford Latin tutor-turned-aspiring London playwright – Mescal plays the man as a romantic and a tortured soul, who’s torn between his family and his destiny. And after wooing the world with stories, next up the actor will do it with songs – he’s set to play Paul McCartney in Sam Mendes’ four interconnected Beatles biopics. Prepare yourself for Mescalmania.

 

 

Shakespeare in Love actors Joseph Fiennes and Gwyneth Paltrow at the London premiere – and yes, that’s Juliet’s iconic balcony in Verona, Italy – a busy tourist attraction. | Getty Images
Joseph Fiennes, Shakespeare in Love

The younger brother of Ralph spent two seasons with the Royal Shakespeare Company in the mid-’90s before winning the title role in Shakespeare in Love. Fienne’s lithe and rakish Will is just an average playwright pumping out schmaltz until he meets his match/muse in Lady Viola (Gwyneth Paltrow), a young woman of the court. Fiennes makes the most of the period wardrobe, from fitted leather jackets to ruffled shirts unbuttoned to his navel, and keeps his hair and beard closely cropped, making him far handsomer than his real-life subject.  Alas, as fine as Fiennes is, he’s upstaged by a heavyweight supporting cast – Paltrow, Judi Dench, Ben Affleck and Geoffrey Rush – who made the film a success.

 

 

Rafe Spall looks dashing at the 2011 London premiere of Anonymous. In the background is an artist’s rendition of London’s Globe Theatre (right) and the Bear Garden (left) in Elizabethan times. | Getty Images

This British character actor (who played the author Yann Martel in the film Life of Pi and currently stars in the TV series Trying) makes a spectacularly hilarious Will Shakespeare in Anonymous – that is, if you’re not offended by the fact that he portrays him as an utter fraud. Leaning into the balding pate with ridiculously long locks in the back, Spall’s Shakespeare is a mere actor who claims authorship of a series of plays written by the Earl of Oxford (Rhys Ifans), a nobleman who can’t reveal his identity. In this tense political thriller, in which Oxford hopes to steer the course of England and the passions of its Queen with hidden messages in the plays, Shakespeare is the comedic relief – an untalented yet opportunistic buffoon who goes down in history, according to fellow playwright Ben Jonson, as “the soul of the age.”

 

Shakespeare aficionado Kenneth Branagh plays the Bard in All is True; an image of the childhood home of Anne Hathaway. |  © Sony Pictures Classics / courtesy Everett Collection / Canadian Press; Getty Images (cottage)
Kenneth Branagh, All is True

When it comes to Shakespeare, no one gets it right like superfan Branagh. Playing a fifty-something Bard, the actor/director uses heavy makeup and distractingly sculpted facial hair – not to mention a middle-aged paunch – to most resemble the Will we know from Elizabethan drawings. While Branagh earned more acclaim for his film roles as Hamlet and Henry V, he’s in his element in this biopic, embodying the tortured, regretful and aged artist behind the soliloquies.

 

 

Clockwise from top: An 1865 edition of Shakespeare’s collected works; Jacobi Jupe as Hamnet; Ben Affleck at the 1998 premiere of Shakespeare in Love; Paltrow and Affleck win outstanding cast honours at the SAG Awards, 1999; Vanessa Redgrave promoting Anonymous in Germany, 2010; Judi Dench as Anne Hathaway in 2018’s All Is True. | Getty Images; Agata Grzybowska / © 2025 FOCUS FEATURES LLC (Hamnet)
Jocobi Jupe, Hamnet

As the titular character, this 12-year-old actor’s portrayal of Hamnet is sweetness and soulfulness personified, practising his stage-fighting in the hopes of joining his father one day at the London theatre. And just try keeping a dry eye during his anguished deathbed scene.

Ben Affleck, Shakespeare in Love

The Hollywood charmer plays real-life actor Ned Alleyn – who was remarkably tall and had a powerful voice. Affleck grabs most of the film’s laughs, thanks to Ned’s rapier wit and an ego in endless need of stroking.

Vanessa Redgrave, Anonymous

The veteran Shakespearean actress dons the robes of Elizabeth I, giving a vulnerable performance as a weary (and by no means virgin) Queen who is tired of politics but forever enchanted by theatre.

Judi Dench, All Is True

This is the Shakespeare movie Dench should have won an Oscar for as she brings a sarcastic intensity to the role of Anne Hathaway, the playwright’s much-neglected (or as Ophelia would say, “more deceived”) wife.

 

 

Ian McKellen makes Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 sing as Henry Wriosthesley in All Is True; Hamnet‘s child actors Jacobi Jupe, Bodhi Rae Breathnach and Olivia Lynes are fair and foul in a homemade production of Macbeth. | © Sony Pictures Classics / courtesy Everett Collection / Canadian Press (Wriosthesley); Agata Grzybowska / © 2025 FOCUS FEATURES LLC (Hamnet); Getty Images (sonnet)

Hamnet: The film ends with an emotional staging of Hamlet, but more joyous is Shakespeare’s young children acting out the three witches scene from Macbeth.

Shakespeare In Love: While the movie’s debut Romeo and Juliet brings it’s audience to tears, little did they know it was initially titled Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter

Anonymous: Snippets from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Henry V, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Hamlet, Julius Caesar and  Richard III are all performed in the film – giving you the most bang for your Shakespearean buck.

All Is True: No plays are staged in the film, but Branagh as Shakespeare and Ian McKellen as the Bard’s one-time patron Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, recite Sonnet 29 to each other – which ends with the lines, “For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings / That then I scorn to change my state with kings” – in a scene as heartbreaking as any found in the tragedies above. 

 

 

All the world is a stage for Jupe and Mescal in Hamnet. | Agata Grzybowska / © 2025 Focus Features LLC; Getty Images (sword and quill)

Hamnet: Will uses a homemade sword to bond with his son and the quill to deal with grief – both of which pack a mighty emotional punch. 

SIL: This Bard is a lover and a fighter – and a writer – using both the quill and the sword with one goal in mind: to get the girl.

Anon: While the Shakespeare in Anonymous is useless with both a quill and a sword, many inkpots and much blood are indeed spilled during the course of the film. The pen is used to stir up the masses in Elizabethan England, and daggers are drawn in response to would-be revolters – just as Rosencrantz says in Hamlet, “Many wearing rapiers are afraid of goose-quills.” 

All is True: A retired Shakespeare no longer has the energy for quills or swords. Instead, he turns to gardening tools to find some peace later in life.

 

 

Jessie Buckley is a powerhouse as Agnes in Hamnet; Paltrow is overcome as she receives the Oscar for Best Actress in 1999; Judi Dench in Shakespeare In Love looks as close as one possibly can to the real Queen Elizabeth I. | Agata Grzybowska / © 2025 FOCUS FEATURES LLC (Hamnet); Getty Images

Hamnet: While the nominations for the 2026 Academy Awards have yet to be announced, expect to see Hamnet pop up in the Best Picture and Best Director categories, as well as in the technical ones. Mescal has been submitted for Best Supporting Actor and may get a nom, while Jessie Buckley, who plays Shakespeare’s wife, Agnes, is a lock for Best Actress. Her searing performance – as Agnes identifies her husband’s genius and makes sacrifices for his art, only to lose her only son – brings audiences to their knees.

Shakespeare in Love: Besides its Best Picture Oscar, the film also won six other Academy Awards, including Best Original Screenplay for Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard (who died in November) and Best Actress for Paltrow (who tearfully accepted her award in a memorable cotton-candy-pink Ralph Lauren princess dress). And yet, it was the film’s award for Best Supporting Actress that people remark upon to this day: Dame Judi Dench earned her first and only Oscar for her eight-minute performance as Queen Elizabeth I. But no one made too much of a fuss. After all, Dench had been robbed the year before when her exquisite portrayal of Queen Victoria in Mrs. Brown was bested by Helen Hunt’s ho-hum portrayal of Jack Nicholson’s waitress in As Good as It Gets. 

Anonymous: While this film only earned one Oscar nomination for Best Costume Design, it won seven Lolas (the German Film Awards). And what it lacked in accolades, it made up for in controversy, with its no-holds-barred argument for the Oxfordian theory of authorship causing film critics and Shakespearean scholars to lose their minds. “To remain silent in the face of stupidity this blatant is to acquiesce to a kind of culture-destroying ugliness,” wrote Ron Rosenbaum, the bestselling author of 2008’s The Shakespeare Wars, in a review. “So let me say it: Columbia Pictures should be ashamed to spread this intellectual pollution. What’s next, a birther epic about a Black president who wasn’t really born in Hawaii?” When all was said and done, both sides doth protest too much.

All is True: While Branagh’s film didn’t receive any attention from the Academy, AARP Magazine’s Movies For Grownups Awards gave All Is True seven nominations, including Best Supporting Actor for McKellen (who is partly responsible for making the Bard’s resurgence in the U.S., thanks to his one-man show, Acting Shakespeare, which he toured across the country in the 1980s). AARP also gave Judi Dench her due with a Best Supporting Actress Award. The legendary stage and screen performer who has played almost all of Shakespeare’s leading women – including Ophelia in a 1957 Liverpool production, an Olivier-winning Lady Macbeth opposite McKellen’s Macbeth in 1976 with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and a run as Paulina in a 2015 production of The Winter’s Tale in London opposite Branagh as King Leontes. No wonder Dench called her 2024 book, Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays The Rent. “The whole raft of human feelings – about love, about envy, about idolatry, about sadness, about death, about the afterlife,” she says, “there’s nobody who has written like that and who still remains with us in our, as I say, everyday expressions.”

 

 

Top photo: Portrait of William Shakespeare, oil on canvas by Louis Coblitz, 1847; Paul Mescal as William Shakespeare in Hamnet. | DeAgostini/Getty Images (Shakespeare); Agata Grzybowska / © 2025 Focus Features LLC (Hamnet); beast01/Getty Images (clapper)