I Claudius 1976

It was only 13 episodes, seemed like double that, it was so densely plotted.

R1, no shit.

It's easy to see how John Hurt came up with the way he played John Merrick in the Elephant Man.

Yes, the production values are shaky (sometimes literally), but, my God, the acting and the scripts are fantastic (educational, too!).

John Hurt seemed quite HOMOSEXUAL on I Cladius

I like that there's a thread on this.

I just started watching this a few days ago - an episode per day - and I'm really enjoying it a lot.

I've had the DVD of it for about a couple of decades and never watched it.

The DVD is sort of a restored version so it looks a whole lot better than I was expecting.

Read the books. I Claudius and Claudius The God.

For drama the miniseries is more enjoyable, but as you’d expect, a lot more detail in the books.

No matter how often I rewatch or reread I enjoy it just as much as I did the first time.

The best parts were (1) the theme music and (2) Alistair Cooke's introductions telling you what happened so far and what to expect in tonight's episode.

I love I Claudius but I found John Hurt annoying.

I watched the series and then bought and read the books right afterwards. I ended up drawing family trees on the endpapers because there were so many characters and generations but it was a fantastic read.

My favorite scene with a great series of line readings by John Hurt. I still love the way he says “god-DESS.”

I hate figs!

This video is all about the blocking in the series and how the camera was used to help tell the story.

This should be required viewing in all schools along with Elizabeth R. For no other reason than the history and the showing kids what acting is really all about. I Claudius is based on the writings of Suetonius who was the Enquirer of his day. He'd have made a great DL'r for sure!

It was a masterpiece. Like Pennies From Heaven. Why can't we have things like this anymore?

They should remake it with Timothe Cathlamet as Caligula and Taylor Swift as Livia. Add lots of video game CGI . Less talking English people. Make it 90 minutes long then we may watch for 5 minutes .

[R16] I get your point, but I wonder, do we have anyone today who could play those parts?

I can’t think of anyone that would measure up to Jacobi, Phillips, Blessed, Hurt, Stewart and the rest. Even the most minor of supporting players were stellar.

[quote] family trees on the endpapers

Never Horace those family trees or let anyone Suetonius you to dispose of the endpapers on which they’re written.

It didn't have the huge budget that shows do today, but it had a big impact and helped lay the groundwork for shows like "ROME", "The Borgias", "The Tudors" and "Game of Thrones".

Incredible cast and acting was masterclass. I only watch the original BBC production. Not the PBS which was edited. After reading Robert Graves books I Claudius and Claudius The God I couldn't wait to see this. As a historian it was a total delight. THE ACTING!!!!!

Every few years I still will re read Graves books. And I see Jacobi as Claudius as I read. Lol. For me I was in the front row of a play watching this on TV. Seeing the makeup that had been applied(badly) made it all the more fabulous.

Every time I see another IQ45 fuck up I say “Let all the poison that lurks in the mud, hatch out.” And laugh.

My favorite: "Uncle Claudius, I wasn't the Messiah after all, would you believe that? Could have knocked me over with a feather when they told me that." I loved that whole scene.

This should be required viewing in all schools along with Elizabeth R.

Both are on Britbox. Brian Blessed and Sian Phillips stole the show.

I watched Claudius several months ago and Elizabeth is in queue when I finish its prequel the Six Wives of Henry VIII.

As mentioned the novels are both quite good and worthy of reading. This is slyly hinted at in the final episode when dying Claudius laughs that in 1900 years people would "open graves" and learn about his life.

Before the miniseries the Brits once tried to make a movie. Only a few scenes were filmed.

Charles Laughton as Claudius

Merle Oberon as Messalina

Flora Robson as Livia

Emlyn Williams as Caligula

Robert Newton as Cassius

My chum was a big I Claudius fan . He went as Claudius one Halloween. He was also a London theatre groupie in the 90's. He waited back stage for Siân Phillips as she was sighing his program he had to say to her..." THE LINE". She chuckled and said 'That's all they'll remember of me!"

The there are worse ways to be remembered.

Brian Blessed is so quiet.

Siân Phillips won a well-deserved BAFTA, as did Derek Jacobi.

She is now a Dame and he is now a Sir.

Derek Jacobi had a short comeback on the stage

R26, yeah, Jacobi plays a bad Shakespearean actor in that guest spot on Frasier. He won an Emmy for it.

Lots of German bashing there. Ja, ja.

As I have said before Blessed as Augustus does not look the part but he really pulls it off.

Who could be more evil than Derek Jacobi

R8: Rose

Patrick Stewart getting to second base with Patrician Quinn who just the year before had played Magenta - A Domestic, in the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

In their careers they both had great experience with time warps.

When Patrick Stewart had hair.

I Claudius is my all time favorite. I've watched it many times. I know it says it's all true, and for the biggest part of it it is but there are only a few I think very small discrepencies (of which I forget all of them) except they don't think Incitatus, Caligula's horse, really was made Consul. They think now it was Caligula being sarcastic'. 'my horse is a better Consul than you'.

But then they did not believe Pliny the Younger's first hand witnessed report of Vesuvius' pyroclastic flow, which they had never heard of. (Get out!)He was only 17 so well, what do 17 year olds know?

I love this youtube video of John Hurt describing how it went when they did that scene where Caligula asks Claudius, do you think I'm insane.

Btw; "Corpsing" (also called "breaking") is actor-speak for having an unscripted fit of laughter onstage, so-called because the worst time to have the giggles is when one is playing a corpse. (tvtropes.org)

I love Patrick Stewart. His recent interview in the NY Times book review was great.

I posted @ R6 re my just watching this series for the first time.

I'm now up to the episode where Livia dies.

Everyone in the series so far has been excellent, but Siân Phillips' performance in particular is truly amazing.

I can see why her line reading about the figs has become a classic, but there are a lot of other moments that are almost as striking.

I especially loved the way she reacted to Claudius giving her a gift - a vase from India:

"Very pretty and such a distant place. It's a pity we never got that far. So many fine things we could have picked up for cheap."

Thanks to the above posters for recommending the books on which the series is based; clearly I'm going to have to read them.

One final comment: some of the actors have really nice legs.

Goodness has nothing to do with it.

John Hurt knew how to play gay.

Poor Phillips asked by Mary Beard to repeat the figs line yet again. If John Candy had made it to 83 he might have been a bit like Brian here.

Thanks to this thread, I hauled out my I, Clavdivs DVDs and watched the first four episodes yesterday in one sitting. (SF is having its annual autumn heat wave, so best to stay inside with a whirring fan, barring a slave with an ostrich fan). I've seen the series many times but not for a decade or more. The scenery wasn't as wobbly as I remembered, but the aging makeup is still awful. Who cares? The scripts and the acting -- from hambone to sublime -- are superb.

It's interesting that there are no exterior establishing shots, say, of Augustus's palace or the Colosseum or walk-and-talk shots of two characters strolling along the Tiber; viewers are expected to keep up without having their hands held. Also there are no crowd scenes and very few extras. Everything in inside and centered solely on the characters. That saved money at the time, but it also keeps the focus on the story and the actors. (And episode four has Livia's delicious "No pussyfooting around" speech to the gladiators' guild and ends with Claudius's humiliating marriage.)

If you're looking to get the DVDs, the 35th Anniversary edition is what I have. They cleaned up the visuals, but the sound can be spotty, making it occasionally difficult to hear a character standing at the back of a set, nothing they could do about that, given the original tapes. But it has a whole disc of extras, so there's that.

The entire series is free on DailyMotion

The stuffy BBC's first gangbang.

R42, although it's tame compared to what we would later see in "ROME", "The Tudors", "The Borgias" & "Game of Thrones", the series pushed the boundaries at the time in its portrayal of sex and violence. PBS had to edit some scenes for American viewers.

Point that seems to be missed by many is that whilst in the mid 1970's cost was a large factor when it came to studio sets, don't forget that most of us sat at home watching this would be doing so on a 22" 4:3 625 line TV in the corner of the living room. You would barely be able to tell what the set was doing, what the make up looked like (never mind on US sets with even lower quality Never The Same Colour Twice standards), and hence a lot of tight shots on the actors. Watching the cleaned up Blu-ray version on your 100" 4k 16:9 home cinema screen it's going to look ropey as fuck.

The theme music was ominous.

R39 I finally got to watch this video you put up! I had some pain in my shoulder and at a very early hour (5am) I had to get up and have a glass of red wine. Believe me I do not do this ever but it was so bad I could not rest all night. So I came here, a little wined up, and watched this finally. It is wonderful. WONDERFUL. I love Mary Beard anyway, what a great historian she is and her docs are so well done but to see all these great players from Claudius discussing and re-doing those great lines, it really is a treat. Thank you. Thank you.

GOAT "pep talks"

Bit of a favor...

^ Did Lilibet ask it of Charlie?

Just last week I was in London and who should I see one morning in the beautiful Whitehall Gardens adjacent to my hotel but Ms Sian Phillips, sitting on a park bench? With that sculptured out of marble face, even in advanced old age and heavily made up, she was totally recognizable. Beautifully dressed and coiffed.

I assumed she must live nearby. She was reading a hard cover book but looking up and mouthing the words she read, as if she might be memorizing them. I wish I'd had the nerve to approach her and tell her how much I appreciated all of her performances.

^ Wow..one hell of a Dame.

I with there were a similar series about Commodus-Pertinax-Didius Julianus-Septimius Severus-Caracalla/Geta-Macrinus-Elegabalus-Alexander Severus, with the Emesan women as central figures

Hadrian & Antinous is a love story for the ages that cries out to be told on screen. Unfortunately all the equally fascinating degenerates and loons of the later Roman Empire are never portrayed by Hollywood (exception Commodus).. How many bloody Julius Caesars and Cleopatras do we need.

^ I wish there were...

Agree I Claudius had a magnificent cast but they were saying dialogue from Jack Pulman's brilliant script.

Why did John Hurt play Caligula as an albino? Caligula wasn't albino in real life.

R55, yes, Jack Pulman did a great job adapting Robert Graves's novels. Pulman, Graves & Suetonius made a great combination.

Livia is EVERYTHING!

Claaaa, Claaaa, Claudius.

r58 ..... and, IIRC, the purposeful namesake of Tony Soprano's mother, on "The Sopranos." Those two were cut from the same cloth. ✂️

I'm a pretty serious reader and yet I've never been able to get into I, Claudius. And I even had a cherished YA book by author Robert Graves about the gods and goddesses of Mt. Olympus and various Greek myths, but I, Claudius has stumped me every time I've tried to read it.

Is the beginning just challenging to others here who've read it? I don't think I ever got past the first few pages.

That’s what the tv series is for…^^

I read it when I was 12-13 and I don't remember it stumping me.

The scene I remember best is when Messalina, condemned yet refusing her mother's plea to stab herself to death, cries out, "My little head!" as a soldier lops it off.

"You find me utterly repulsive but you try anyway. I like a trier!"

She says “Not my head,” when he lops it off.

Thank you, r66. I tried to find the scene on YouTube, to no avail.

In any case, I remember the lopping!

R64 see R41

I found the actress playing Messalina very distracting because her nose looked partially amputated to me.

R56, Caligula had a skin condition that he masked with lead paint (as did many wealthy Romans).

Hot scene between Sejanus (Patrick Stewart) and Livilla (actress who Magenta in Rocky Horror). But they got caught and executed.

IIRC the Lady Messalina was severely misrepresented by history. In reality she was little more than a child and evidently not very bright. Certainly not the infamous tart of popular legend.

Messalina was a whore, darlin'!

Messalina was a murderous whore, darlin'! She tried to get Nero killed, if only she had succeeded.

Of course, by DL standards she was practically a Girl Scout.

What about a series about Biggus Dickus and his wife Incontinentia? Incontinentia Buttox?

Phillips bitch stole my act.

R65, Darien Angadi and Sian Phillips have some good scenes together. He was very pretty. It's a shame he took his own life a few years later.

Wasn't the very hot young John Castle in this? I became I rather obsessed with him several years later when he starred in the British series Lost Empires and a couple (and the best) of the Joan Hickson Miss Marples.

He played Postumus, the exiled grandson.

John Castle as Postumus and the gorgeous Simon MacCorkindale as Lucius

I was a teenager when I watched I Claudius in 1976. PBS was one of my favorite stations and Masterpiece Theatre was one of my favorite shows. I was hooked after the first episodes and good lord, the characters were mind blowing. So many excellent performances, and yet, I was so surprised, years later, to find that it didn't garner any acting nominations; just Art Direction and Outstanding Limited Series. The fact that Derek Jacobi and Sian Phillips didn't even get nominations is a mystery within.

R78 I did not know that. Apparently he was a quitter.

Yikes, I didn't know MacCorkindale died of bowel cancer in 2010.

He was sex on a stick in his early days…sigh.

[quote]The fact that Derek Jacobi and Sian Phillips didn't even get nominations is a mystery within.

They didn't win awards in the US, but they both won BAFTA's. Sian Phillips also won the Royal Television Society Award.

Did those early PBS shows like I Claudius, Upstairs/Downstairs, Poldark and Elizabeth I really win a lot of Emmys? I thought they were generally ignored by the Emmys back then.

Elizabeth R and U-D won multiple Emmys

Upstairs Downstairs and I Caudious were so popular in NY that when they’d been broadcast twice by PBS, one of our independent tv stations (channel 9 or 11) rebroadcast then twice (with ads, since they were not PBS).

Channels 11 and 9 broadcast a lot of UK shows in those days after the popularity of Onty Python as well as U/D and I Claudius. I remember watching Dr Who (Tom Baker), The Two Ronnies, Open All Hours, Two’s Company (with Elaine Stritch), Kelly Monteith, Dave Allen. Oh God we loved Dave Allen in my Catholic family. We called his show lap”The Uncle Jimmy Show” because my Northern Irish uncle Jimmy was a storyteller just like Allen was. He should’ve had a longer career but omg, he said “fuck” and caused a scene over there.

Christ I’m sorry.I accidentally hit send when pasting the link and hadn’t proofread yet.

Clearly 😵‍💫

;)

Has anybody in Rome not slept with my daughter!

Siân Phillips/Age

90 years

Born

May 14, 1933

It's great that Siân Phillips is still with us. As are Derek Jacobi, Brian Blessed and Patrick Stewart. They are all survivors.

And Margaret Tyzack lives in our hearts!!!

The Lady Antonia. The real Antonia was always considered a true Roman woman—greatly admired.

[quote] greatly admired.

Not counting that minor contretemps of locking her daughter in a room until she died from lack of food and water

Well, it was deserved. 🤷🏻‍♂️

That's my girl!

Great women get what needs doing done, R97

I Claudia 1981-86

Crazy Claudia! crazy claudia!

I Claudia 1938-

The Lady Antonia

You know if there's nothing else to say on the subject, I say close the thread and remember the good times.

Patrick Stewart deserves praise for his portrayal of the calculating & sadistic Sejanus. Very different from the role of Captain Picard he would become famous for a decade later.

[quote] …most of us sat at home watching this would be doing so on a 22" 4:3 625 line TV in the corner of the living room.

R44 However they looked in the UK, they looked worse in the US. The transfers from PAL (UK) to NTSC (US) format made all the British imports look grainy in the US. We just had to accept it.

The first time I was in England in the late 1980s, I was shocked by how much better British TV looked because of the higher resolution of the PAL format. Once digital HDTV came in, it was amazing how much better my old British favorites looked.

Someone mentioned John Hurt as Caligula. Two scenes that have stuck with me all these years:

There was a child in one scene who had a nagging cough and it was really annoying Caligula as he was speaking. At the end of the episode, Claudius found the kid's head on a stick.

Claudius was confused as to why Livia allowed her grandson, young Caligula to molest her. "My body fascinates him.'

"Bye-bye, Clau-Clau"

Gemellus was supposed to be a co-ruler of Rome, which was impossible after the age of emperors had begun. Tiberius had to know Caligula would kill Gemellus. Gemellus’ brother, father and male cousins were all eliminated. Why Tiberius thought Gemellus would survive is beyond comprehension. Maybe he did it as a joke.

Not that I know anything, but …..

^

Don’t tell anyone that the episodes are there. We don’t want them taken away.

Although John Hurt was very entertaining as Caligula, I think his portrayal lacked a sense of menace.

I think Jay Robinson was more scary as Caligula in the 1950's films of "The Robe" and "Demetrius and the Gladiators".

I think the most frightening version of Caligula I have seen is the one by Ralph Bates in "The Caesars" (1968) -- a black & white predecessor of 'I, Claudius'.

Hot summer day. A knock on my door. I opened it. Was two Jehovah's witnesses. So hot out I let them in the house and they began to talk to me of the Bible.

Suddenly all conversation just begun stopped and their eyes go to my tv, on which I had been watching I Claudius. Caligula bounded out to the sound of cymbals.

And he began doing his little dance.

Suddenly they were in a hurry to leave. I think they thought I was some kind of satanist or something. Was truly funny.

^ It wasn't what you had on.TV it's what you had on. You were wearing Hurt's ensemble dear.

[quote] Ralph Bates

George Warleggen. Died fairly young

R115 😆

I loved at the end of R114's link Claudius goes "Oh shit! We need to clap!"

And R114 I was a 14 year old JW when I Claudius was broadcast and loved every episode.

George RR Martin said there was a lot of George Baker’s portrayal of Tiberius in his character Stannis Baratheon.

[quote] I never felt Baker got nearly enough attention for his Tiberius... a thankless role, since the character was so unlikeable, but one that he performed brilliantly. There's a lot of his Tiberius in my Stannis, fwiw.”

One of my favorite ones in Claudius was Tiberius. King of the sulks, his looks as he did it were more than amusing. Baker was great.

Translate that back to the Latin—it may make more sense.

Tiberius was fifty years old, absolute ruler of a huge chunk of the world, and his mommy still ran his life. You'd sulk too.

I agree that George Baker was great as the dark, brooding Tiberius. Very much in keeping with the historical record. Baker may not have won a BAFTA like Sian Phillips and Derek Jacobi, but he held his own.

Baker went on to have his own series as Ruth Rendell's Inspector Wexford. He guest-starred on lost of shows -- from 'Doctor Who' to 'Midsomer Murders'.

He can also be seen on the DVD extras in the audition tapes for 1959's "Ben-Hur".

lost = lots