Jolson in The Jazz Singer. She described Olivier's performance as "high camp", and said "I was certainly in tune with the gentleman sitting next to me who kept asking 'When does he sing Mammy?" Film critic Pauline Kael gave the production and Olivier's portrayal one of her most glowing reviews, shaming the major movie studios for giving Olivier so little money to make the film that he and the public had to be content with what was almost literally a filmed stage production, while other films received multimillion dollar budgets. John Simon, while disagreeing with the approach the production's interpretation took, declared that, "Olivier plays this misconceived Othello spectacularly, in a manner that is always a perverse joy to behold". One particular thing which has caused distinctive amounts of offense, and a device which primarily works in film rather than on-stage, was Olivier's rolling of his eyes: a mannerism often shown in early depictions of black people in blackface films. This device specifically links to Al Jolson and is unconnected to any Shakespearean-era stage direction. It remains the only Shakespeare film in which all the principals were nominated for Oscars. Finlay (Iago) was nominated for Best Supporting Actor despite having the role with the most lines in the play: 1117 to Olivier's 856. Olivier does, however, appear on screen three minutes longer than Finlay. In 2021 music professor Bright Sheng stepped down from teaching a University of Michigan undergraduate musical composition class, where he says he had intended to show how Giuseppe Verdi adapted William Shakespeare's play Othello into his opera Otello, after a controversy over his showing the movie, allegedly without giving students a warning that it contained blackface. The World Socialist Web Site called the matter a "right-wing, racialist attack" on Sheng, adding that Laurence Olivier's blackface, far from being racist, was actually a deliberate rejection of earlier "semi-racist approaches" that had portrayed Othello as light-skinned, and of "commentators appalled at the thought of the white maiden Desdemona falling head over heels in love with a black man." Cast Laurence Olivier as Othello Maggie Smith as Desdemona Joyce Redman as Emilia Frank Finlay as Iago Derek Jacobi as Cassio Robert Lang as Roderigo Kenneth Mackintosh as Lodovico Anthony Nicholls as Brabantio Sheila Reid as Bianca Edward Hardwicke as Montano Michael Gambon as Senator/Soldier/Cypriot See also Shakespeare on screen 1965 in film References External links British drama films 1965