The Hollywood Romance of the Century
On rare occasions, sparks between two people fly so far they ignite the public’s imagination. During the creation of the 1963 film Cleopatra, there was such a courtship, during which two people couldn’t be apart, despite difficult circumstances. Their courtship created controversy, curiosity, condemnation, and a community of admirers. Intense fascination with this bred change.
A Disastrous Start
On 19 June 1959, Twentieth Century Fox greenlit a Cleopatra film project, with a somewhat modest shooting budget of $2,955,700 and a projected 64 day schedule (Kamp 1998). Later that year, on the 1st of September, Elizabeth Taylor received a phone call from the project’s producer, with an offer of the role of Cleopatra, and she jokingly demanded a million dollars. The studio acquiesced. At this stage, no one knew it would become the most hotly discussed movie ever made (Shinners 2016).
England became the shooting location for the ancient Mediterranean epic, since the British government offered generous subsidies to certain projects in 1959, but the cold weather played…
