IMDb 6.8 / 10
IMDb 6.2 / 10
9 / 10
IMDb 6.5 / 10
IMDb 1.2 / 10
Cleopatra VII has been filmed more often than almost any other historical figure, and the results range from one of the great Hollywood epics to a documentary that a national government publicly called a falsification of its history.
Five versions are covered here: Cecil B. DeMille’s 1934 film, the 1945 British adaptation of Shaw’s play, the 1963 Elizabeth Taylor production that nearly destroyed 20th Century Fox, the 1999 television miniseries, and Netflix’s Queen Cleopatra in 2023. Only the 1963 film carries a rating from me. It’s a 9 and it holds up. The rest show their IMDb scores, because the crowd’s number is more use to you than a guess from somebody who hasn’t watched them.
Cleopatra (1934): IMDb 6.8
Cecil B. DeMille’s version arrived in the last months before the Production Code was enforced, and it shows. Claudette Colbert plays Cleopatra as a quick, funny, openly seductive operator, and the famous barge sequence is as close to an orgy as a studio film of that era got.
Warren William plays Caesar and Henry Wilcoxon plays Antony, and the film’s interest is squarely in how a clever woman manages two Roman men. Victor Milner won the Academy Award for the cinematography, and that’s the element that still impresses. It’s fast, it’s silly, and the Art Deco Egypt on screen has more to do with 1934 than with the first century BCE. IMDb has it at 6.8, and that seems about right for a handsome pre-Code entertainment.
Caesar and Cleopatra (1945): IMDb 6.2
This one adapts George Bernard Shaw’s play instead of the history, and Shaw’s Cleopatra is a teenage girl being educated in statecraft by an aging Caesar. Vivien Leigh plays her, Claude Rains plays him, and it’s talk from start to finish.
It was the most expensive British film made to that point, shot during the war, and it lost a fortune. Technicolor sets in wartime Britain were an act of bravado nobody thanked the producers for.
IMDb has it at 6.2. Leigh and Rains are both worth watching, and the film is a long way from the sweeping romance the other versions sell.
For Writers
Shaw wrote his Cleopatra as a student and Caesar as her teacher, a completely different story from the seduction every other version tells. The same historical figure supports opposite arguments depending on what the writer wants to say. When you write about a real person, decide what you’re arguing before you research, then say plainly that your version is one reading among several. Write one sentence naming your interpretation. Then find the strongest evidence against it and deal with that in the text. A reading that ducks the counter-evidence isn’t an argument, it’s an advertisement.
Cleopatra (1963): 9/10
This is the one. Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s production is four hours long, cost about $31 million in 1963 money, and came closer to killing 20th Century Fox than any film before or since. It’s also magnificent.
Elizabeth Taylor is formidable in it. She was paid a million dollars, the first actress to reach that figure, and she’s worth every cent: her Cleopatra is intelligent, imperious and frightening when crossed, and it’s dumb that the gossip gets remembered before the performance. Rex Harrison’s Caesar is the best performance in the film, and I’d happily watch another hour of him. Richard Burton’s Antony collapses in the second half in a way that suits the part.
The scale is real. The entry into Rome, with the sphinx carried through the crowd, was staged with thousands of extras and no digital assistance. It won four Academy Awards and it’s a 9 from me: a great film with an hour of slack in the middle.
The Cost of the 1963 Film
Production started in England, lost its star to illness, shut down, restarted in Rome with a new director and a new script, and ran years over schedule. Taylor’s illness and the affair between her and Burton, both married to other people at the time, made the shoot a global news story.
The final cost was the highest in film history to that point. It was the top-grossing film of 1963 and still lost money, and Fox sold off its backlot to survive.
That history is part of why the film is remembered as a disaster when it isn’t one, and that reputation is unearned. Watch it without the headlines and you’re looking at one of the last true Hollywood epics. The sphinx coming into Rome through thousands of real extras is the shot I’d show anybody who thinks the film is just a famous flop.
For Writers
The 1963 Cleopatra is remembered as a catastrophe and it’s a good film, because the story of the production overwhelmed the story on screen. The narrative around a work can bury the work itself. When your book has a story attached, a long delay, a controversy, a bad launch, make sure the finished thing can be judged on its own. Ask what a reader who knows nothing about how the book was made would see. That’s the only version most people will ever read, and it’s the one that has to stand up.
Cleopatra (1999 miniseries): IMDb 6.5
ABC’s four-hour version, based on Margaret George’s novel The Memoirs of Cleopatra, gave the role to Leonor Varela and surrounded her with Timothy Dalton as Caesar and Billy Zane as Antony. Franc Roddam directed. It’s television-scaled: smaller crowds, brisker pacing, more emphasis on the romance than on the politics. It picked up several Emmy nominations for its costumes and design. IMDb has it at 6.5, a fair placement for a competent miniseries nobody remembers a month later.
Queen Cleopatra (2023): IMDb 1.2
Netflix’s four-part docudrama, produced and narrated by Jada Pinkett Smith, cast Adele James as Cleopatra and presented the series as documentary instead of drama. That framing is the whole problem.
Cleopatra was a Ptolemy, from a Macedonian Greek dynasty that ruled Egypt for nearly three centuries and married within itself.
Her ancestry is documented, and the identity of her mother is the only real uncertainty. A drama can cast anyone it likes and say so. A documentary that makes a deliberate change and presents it as history is doing something else.
Egypt responded formally. The Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities issued a statement rejecting the portrayal as a falsification of Egyptian history, Egyptian scholars objected publicly, and a lawyer filed a complaint seeking to block the series in Egypt. Viewers delivered their own verdict: the IMDb score sits at 1.2, among the lowest ever recorded on the platform.
For Writers
Queen Cleopatra failed because it took a deliberate creative choice and labeled it documentary. The label you attach to a work is a promise about what kind of truth it contains. When you write, be clear whether you’re presenting history, interpretation or fiction, and never let marketing blur the line for you. Put the category on the page: a note, a foreword, a subtitle. Readers will forgive an argument they disagree with. They won’t forgive you for telling them invention is fact, and the correction will outlive the work.
What the Versions Share
Every one of these productions tells the same story, and every one of them uses Cleopatra to argue about its own era. DeMille’s is about a sexually confident woman at the end of the pre-Code period. Shaw’s is about education and empire. The 1963 version is about spectacle and Taylor herself.
The 1999 miniseries is about romance for a television audience, and the 2023 series is about who gets to claim ancient Egypt. None of them is interested in the political operator who held off Rome for twenty years. That’s the gap in the filmography. The most interesting thing about Cleopatra is that she ran a kingdom in an impossible position, and the movies keep making her a love story.
That’s the Cleopatra film I’d most like to see, and none of these five made it. A ruler with no army worth the name keeping Rome at bay for twenty years is a better story than any of the affairs, and I’m tired of the screen settling for the romance every time.
Which One to Watch
The 1963 film, without question. It’s long, it sags in the middle, and Taylor, Harrison and Burton are all doing real work inside a production that nobody could afford to make today.
The 1934 version is worth ninety minutes if you like pre-Code Hollywood. The Shaw adaptation is for people who want Shaw. The miniseries is fine and forgettable.
Queen Cleopatra is the one to skip, and its 1.2 on IMDb is the public’s own summary.
Craft Note
Craft Note
The screen keeps turning Cleopatra into a love story because romance is easier to structure than statecraft. The harder and better version is the one where a ruler with no army worth the name keeps the most dangerous power on earth at arm’s length for two decades. When you write about a historical figure, find the problem they spent their life solving, and build the story around that instead of around who they slept with.
Which Cleopatra film is the best?
The 1963 Elizabeth Taylor version, and it’s a 9 from me. It’s four hours long, it nearly bankrupted a studio, and it’s still one of the great Hollywood epics, with a lead performance that deserves more respect than the gossip around it ever allowed. The rest carry their IMDb numbers on this page: 6.8 for DeMille in 1934, 6.2 for the Shaw adaptation, 6.5 for the 1999 miniseries and 1.2 for Netflix’s Queen Cleopatra.
The 1963 film gets a 9 from me because Taylor and Harrison are that good and the scale is real, and it misses a 10 only because that hour of slack in the middle wears on me. The Netflix series fails for a different reason: it sold invention as documentary and got exactly the verdict that label invites.
