In the production of the film about the Egyptian queen, everything happened: there was a change of directors and actors, inappropriate locations, also, infidelities.
In 1963, Elizabeth Taylor starred in the movie Cleopatra. Everything happened, yes. The shooting was so eventful that the actress was about to die. A case is similar to that of César Pierry, the Argentine actor who lost his life when a prop grenade exploded on him during a recording of the strip My Impossible Partner.
In Cleopatra, Liz Taylor, who died in 2011, wore plunging necklines and earned a salary befitting who she was: a Hollywood star. A first figure.
Also, 16 years before Bo Dereck in Girl 10, he wore braids that became very famous and he had eyes painted up to the temples. And she wore a dress made of 24-carat gold pieces. She too, like the real Egyptian queen, ended up staying with Mark Antony.
The first director who took charge of Cleopatra - the idea was to tell the story of the woman who committed suicide by letting herself be bitten by a poisonous snake - was Rouben Mamoulian.
But he could not specify what he intended. Following the departure of actors Peter Finch and Stephen Boyd, Mamoulian also left the set. The material that had been filmed was discarded. Mamoulian was succeeded by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. For his mega-production, considered one of the most expensive in movie history, he hired Rex Harrison as Julius Caesar and Richard Burton as Mark Antony.
The work of Mankiewicz, who had already filmed Letter to Three Wives and Eva N, was not easy either: among other issues, they made him cut several scenes so that the film went from the initial six hours to the final 243 minutes. Due to setbacks, the cost of the film rose to 44 million dollars, as defined by specialists, as an "excessive" budget.
It was not for less, of course. The lavish wardrobe, for example, had more than 26,000 costumes, 65 of which the protagonist wore (some of them were worth $200,000). “It was a film conceived in a state of emergency, shot in confusion, and ended in blind panic,” the exhausted director commented after the premiere. Another headache, as explained by the Spanish newspaper ABC, was the locations that were chosen to carry out the film.
The glitzy project began shooting at Pinewood Studios in London, England. There, evidently, the climate was inappropriate to emulate that of Ancient Egypt. So several scenes were botched.
The cold, in addition to ruining the sequences, wreaked havoc on the purple-eyed diva, who, despite being born in the London neighborhood of Hampstead, had to be hospitalized urgently for severe pneumonia. To prevent her death, she had a tracheotomy that kept her away from the movie for half a year. "In some scenes, you can see the scar from the intervention," explained José Fernández López in the book With Boots On The Soldier's Story Through Cinema.
Illness interrupted filming on Cleopatra for six months, but that didn't stop the lead, known as "One Shot Liz" for her ability to shoot scenes in one take, from having a cheating/romance with Richard Burton.
Outside the set, both had their respective partners. For this reason, when the idyll came to light, a phenomenal scandal broke out, the subject of newspaper covers and, especially, gossip magazines.
For Fox, the producer, it was a nightmare. Taylor, her great diva, was accused of "stealing her husband" from Debbie Reynolds, another very famous actress of the time.
Of course, the curiosity of seeing Liz and Burton together on the screen increased the interest of the public.
Beyond the economic waste, Cleopatra was the highest-grossing film of 1963, adding some 24 million dollars in revenue.
Still, Fox was about to go bankrupt. “When everything pointed to the disappearance of the production company, a film with a budget of barely eight million dollars saved it from ruin: Sonrisas y lágrimas. It raised 286 million dollars in a few months and made it possible to correct Cleopatra's excesses," added Fernández López.
