Original subtitles

He'll make a good king.

He'll be ready.

That's the way.

Come on, my son!

The Oscar-winning 1968 historical epic, The Lion in Winter,

starring Peter O'Toole, and a sublime Katharine Hepburn,

ranks as a psychological thriller, a dark love story,

and a crucible of devious plotting.

There are few family Christmas gatherings to rival it.

How would you describe the family gathering

at the centre of The Lion in Winter?

Well, Henry II, who is the King of England

and vast parts of France,

well, he owns the territory in vast parts of France,

has decided the time has come to appoint his successor,

and this is accurately in the days before the assumption was

the oldest son inherited,

so he can choose who he wants to take his crown.

So he has sort of the arrogance to bring these people together,

bring his wife and his mistress together,

bring the King of France together,

it's a massive power play really,

a huge display of arrogance and power, to say,

"Right, come on, all of you who I know at various different times,

apart from my mistress, have conspired against me,

I'm going to get you in here and I'm going to tell you what to do."

So it, and that's really essentially what happened.

Have you found religion, Henry? Eh?

Will you look down from heaven and see who is sitting on your throne?

I must know before I die.

There's a legend of a king called Lear,

with whom I have a lot in common.

Both of us have kingdoms and three children we adore,

and both of us are old, but there it ends.

He cuts his kingdom into bits, and I can't do that.

I built an empire and I must know it's going to last.

All of Britain, half of France,

I'm the greatest power in 1,000 years, and after me comes John.

The year is 1138, and O'Toole's Henry II

calls his three disappointing sons to join him at Christmas.

Anthony Hopkins' intemperate Richard, is the eldest.

John Castle's cold Geoffrey, is the forgotten middle child,

and Nigel Terry's ignorant rube John, the youngest,

has somehow become the favourite.

Unexpectedly, Henry also decides to temporarily

release his estranged wife from prison.

Manipulative, aggrieved, and very vocal,

Hepburn's Eleanor of Aquitaine, is the star of the show.

Your majesty?

There is to be a Christmas court.

Yes, madam.

Where?

At Chinon.

The Lion is Henry II, surely he is in the winter of his life.

He has reached 50, which is a ripe old age

for a man in the 12th century, and he has three sons,

who are apparent heirs and successors to the throne,

and he must decide whom he favours amongst them.

He and his estranged wife,

who he has locked away in a prison for a decade,

due to their political scheming and disagreements with one another,

which have led to various revolts across the country.

Henry is 50.

He says actually, I'm the oldest man I know,

which for medieval times, is a pretty good age.

So he knows that, you know, he's in his twilight years,

and that he has to do something fairly quickly.

What he decides to do is to invite everyone to the castle in Chinon.

for Christmas Day and for a festivity,

and also to decide who will succeed him on the throne.

This will involve negotiations with the French King, Philip II,

whose sister Alice, is currently Henry's mistress,

but is promised to the person who will become king,

i.e. in his eyes, John.

This is the background to it.

It's a kind of complicated family saga,

involving politics and succession.

None of this is exactly festive.

Henry has a scheme in mind, as do they all.

Secrets will emerge, layers within layers,

wounds that run as deep as history.

There's already a lot of problems with this whole situation.

and it does not get better from then on, basically.

All of the decisions and choices that everyone makes,

whether we can trust them or not,

whether they're allegiances or decisions or alliances, work,

they all largely seem to be looking for the main opportunity

to turn each other over and get what they can.

So this is a very, very vicious bout of politicking.

So is it fair to say the film is pretty historically accurate?

Yes, I mean, it is because Henry II's reign

was really largely dominated by the rebellions of his sons against him,

who formed various allegiances with and without the King of France.

Finally, after this film is over, Henry loses a rebellion

between- where Philip and Richard rise against him,

he has already had a rebellion

where Geoffrey and his previous son had risen against him.

All the time the sons' ambitions are rising up

and they're trying to take tracts of land or overall power.

I mean it's just constant seething, turmoil.

This is not like Succession,

where there's a father who has absolute control.

Henry does have a lot of control,

but he keeps being faced with these enormous allegiances against him.

So he wants to try and sort this out because it's, you know,

he has built this enormous empire.

I mean historically at that point,

the amount of land he was in control of, thanks to the weddings,

thanks to the wars, is vast, and he's, you know- so the Pope

has to take him seriously, you know, he's a real player.

But he wants to make sure that that survives after he's gone.

Director Anthony Harvey, stirs up a great thunderstorm of a film,

a reminder of the forgotten art of theatricality.

Descend your story to the rafters.

The fate of a nation is at stake,

as torrents of pent-up emotion crash upon the castle walls.

Eleanor of Aquitaine was a very important and quite remarkable woman

from medieval history, who in spite of circumstances often

being stacked against her, was courageous and a survivor,

born into immense wealth with a great amount of land to her name,

which sort of then came into Henry II's holdings after their marriage.

She bore him several heirs.

For a while she only had girls, so that created some complication,

but she was always kind of her own person,

who was very much responsible for her own political decisions,

and sometimes acted completely independently of Henry II,

which eventually led to her being locked away

in increasingly small towers and prisons.

And so she faced a great deal of hardship throughout her life,

but ultimately she survived, which was no small feat in those days.

In marrying Eleanor, he claimed her land of Aquitaine,

which is a huge section of France,

And of course, he had other sections in Northern France as well,

which he had conquered basically.

So as a ruler, he ruled not only England, but also quite a- quite

a large proportion of France, more so than the King of France, Philip.

Given it was such a complicated piece of European history,

why do you think they thought there was a film in it?

Well, it started as a play, and the playwright, James Goldman,

looked at this period and he thought well what if these warring,

this incredibly complex, violent warring family, was just like us,

it was a 20th century family in a sense, that they, they were sulky

and they were moody and that they were in and out of love,

and everything followed the dynamics of a very, very brittle,

brutal family Christmas in a sense.

And that's the humour and the tragedy and the drama of it, is to-

they don't really behave like medieval characters,

they behave like 20th century characters,

with enormously flowing medieval text

and ambitions and arguments over land deals.

But they are together as a family

in the way that we would recognise them.

The Lion in Winter is a testament to how the power of performance

can fill a cinema screen like a landscape.

Ah, Christmas.

Warm and rosy time, the hot wine steams, the Yule log roars,

and we're the fat that's in the fire.

She'll be here soon, you know? Who?

Mother. Does she still want you to be King?

While fictional, the story offers an accurate portrayal

of the Angevin dynasty in the 12th century.

Essentially, Henry II is plagued by the question of succession,

with his three surviving sons, Richard, Geoffrey, and John,

all manoeuvring to be named heir.

The drama circles which parent is backing which son.

Eleanor is pushing for Richard, and Henry, for John.

But they are both hiding deeper motives.

And so therefore it's incredibly easy to watch them

going through their misbehaviours,

and understand them in a way that-

I mean as when we look at even Shakespeare sometimes, we struggle

to understand the motives of some of the characters,

and he is making them very much like us.

And Shakespeare is an interesting point, isn't it?

Because, in a sense,

Goldman is playing to the Shakespearean tradition,

he even references King Lear in the film,

but also he's rising,

or doing something slightly different from it.

Yes. He has, at one point, Henry II

talks about this man he knew called Lear,

who had a similar problem but with daughters instead of sons,

and how he came to an unsatisfactory conclusion over that.

Adapted by the Chicago-born James Goldman from his own Broadway play,

the script is a thing of wonder.

This mix of poetry and sarcasm, historical detail,

and snappy frisson of Hepburn's Hollywood classics.

Backed by independent producer Joseph E. Levine,

director Anthony Harvey does a remarkably confident job

in enlarging the scope of the play for the big screen.

So The Lion in Winter was a stage play in New York originally,

and it wasn't actually very successful when it first ran,

but it was seen by some influential people who saw the promise in it.

And one of those people was Martin Poll, a film producer,

and he, along with the influential producer Joseph E. Levine,

decided that it would be a great project

to be adapted into a screenplay.

Poll was already working on another film,

written by Goldman's younger brother, William Goldman,

and he had taken that to Joseph Levine who was going to produce it.

That fell apart,

and Peter O'Toole, who was involved in the other project,

said well perhaps we should look at The Lion in Winter.

They looked at the screenplay that James Goldman had produced

and they said right, OK, we'll do this one.

Levine liked the idea of it and that's how the project started.

They had Harvey involved because Peter O'Toole,

who of course made a huge contribution to this,

because he was a big star and therefore he could call a few shots,

said I want Harvey, I think he could do this really well.

Harvey came on board as a director, which was a great thing

because not only was Harvey a great editor,

and proved to be a great director,

but he also got on very famously with everyone.

It is a work of rare beauty,

a foundation stone for a collection very much alive today.

Shakespeare's first folio was published in 1623 by two

of his friends, fellow actors in his King's Men group.

Half the plays had never been printed before,

making Ben Johnson's prefatory poem all the more apt.

Thou art a monument without a tomb,

and art to lie still while thy book doth live.

Goldman was knowingly playing on Shakespearean tradition.

Henry even has the line,

"There is a legend of a king called Lear,

with whom I have a lot in common,

though he is frustrated by sons rather than daughters."

There are even touches of Hamlet in his circling doubts.

But Goldman injects a modern sensibility

between the fluent lines.

The story of a broken marriage anyone can relate to.

Goldman uses Shakespeare in a very interesting way.

The language, although it is not actually Shakespearean,

uses the Shakespearean rhythms.

There are even, if you listen really carefully, there are some

couplets in there, which sort of we can usually come out

of the mouth of Katharine Hepburn, and so she- some- he somehow manages

to make it sound Shakespearean, but also with a contemporary edge.

And it's that balance of language

and that balance of something that is archaic and contemporary,

that he manages to pull off extraordinarily well.

You don't feel that there's any anomaly there at all.

Goldman will pull together phrases which sound almost Shakespearean,

and then he will undercut them with sort of 20th century sarcasm,

or you know, screwball comedy lines.

At one point, Katharine Hepburn says "Hush boy, Mummy is fighting,

which is the kind of thing that clearly is very much of our time.

So the game is to take a potentially Shakespearean concept,

mention Shakespeare, pay tribute, play with his language,

but also kind of not rip it apart, it's not a satire,

it's just playing with it, it's a playful piece.

It always strikes me as a very unusual variety of historical epic

because it's claustrophobic, it's incredibly talkie,

it's about family dynamics.

They get the kind of big battle scene over and done with

in the first sequence.

Yes, I mean it's an epic in reverse in a sense.

A lot of epics will build up to the climactic violent confrontation.

This film starts with a joust and a battle on a beach,

and then actually the scenery gets closer and closer and closer,

until the final scene really, is the entire cast in single cellar,

having the sort of the final confrontation.

So the space just diminishes

and the conversations become ever more important

and that's all they have left,

is the rows that they have with each other.

Secretly, Henry has a plan to disinherit his offspring

and annul his frozen marriage.

But Eleanor is more than a match for his plotting.

The question is, what do they really want?

They may not even know.

Meanwhile, Timothy Dalton plays Philip II, King of France,

who has arrived to discuss peace,

only to be swept up in the family squabble.

My Lord!

Your Grace!

Welcome to Chinon.

Ah, that's better.

There is the historical perspective on the complexity of kings

choosing their children, between their children, for who should

inherit the throne, and we all know now of the sort of palace intrigue

story, whether that's in film or on television, of children and nieces

and nephews backstabbing one another in order to get access to power.

And this is a film which very much trades in this family,

kind of constantly selling each other out,

for lack of a better way of putting it, constantly tricking each other,

constantly using emotion as, as a weapon and using

emotional blackmail as a weapon, but then also sometimes there

being real genuine feeling in what that, you know, behind that emotion.

And so it becomes a very complex game that's being played

between all of these characters for succession to the throne.

It also puts the O'Toole character, Henry II, in the position

of having to give away some of his power, to accept that he is ageing,

to accept obsolescence and that is a real problem for him

because he is such a proud, arrogant man, and he does not want

to give up his power really, and he is not one to accept his mortality.

Well, what should we hang?

The holly or each other?

Would you say, Father, that I have the makings of a king?

Splendid king.

And would you expect me, Father, to give up without a fight?

Of course you fight, I raised you to.

The film is an unusual epic

in the sense that it's set in medieval times,

it has an unbelievable authenticity to it,

which means that you don't have a lot of sort of great shining armour

and knights and God knows what.

It's very, very intimate, and you get a real sense of what it

must have been like to actually live in those times.

It's fairly sort of grubby, but and it's obviously incredibly cold,

which is something that comes across very well, so you've got

a sense of discomfort, just personal discomfort, of all these people.

The great thing about it is that it also shows these people to be very

articulate and witty, and educated, as indeed they would have been.

Most previous historical epics are of course full of cod sort of

Shakespearean, semi-Shakespearean language that doesn't ring true.

Goldman really nails this, and so the banter between them all

and the intellectual sort of manipulation,

is not only incredibly interesting to listen to and very funny,

a great deal of it, but it's also quite authentic because these people

at this level, would have had a very, very good education.

By 1968, Peter O'Toole was 35, and a complicated star.

He was celebrated for the edginess he found in characters,

a physical actor with a penetrating voice.

He had done Hamlet with Olivier, won hearts as Lawrence of Arabia,

and was born to play soured kings.

His Henry II is a man trapped by duty, titanic ego,

and the buried emotions he might yet have for his wife and sons.

Peter O'Toole, who is this incredibly talented and famous actor

at this point, was known for having been in Lawrence of Arabia,

but also for being in Becket in 1964, where he also plays Henry II.

So it's funny that O'Toole should want to play the same role again,

but he was personally very drawn towards the historical figure.

He felt that he was witty and literate, who was capable of

many war-like acts and you know, decisiveness, but also was somebody

who preferred diplomacy, if possible, and was very clever.

So O'Toole appreciated the contradictions of this character,

and wanted to return to it, and he also proved instrumental in choosing

a director, the director Anthony Harvey,

for eventually embarking on this project.

Peter O'Toole is perfect for the role of Henry II,

yet he was quite a lot younger than the character, he was 35 playing 50.

But what is it? What is the meeting of minds here?

You know, what is it about O'Toole

that makes him fit this spoiled king?

I mean he rises, I think, to this in a way- if you look at his film

career, he has spent a lot of time playing very beautiful men,

very few beards for a start, and he's got these cheekbones,

I mean if you think of Lawrence of Arabia,

which is a good few years ago, earlier,

he has got these piercing blue eyes in that film.

David Lean shoots him as a very beautiful man.

And "What's New Pussycat?" he had just been in,

and that was a very, again, he played a sort of a sixties fop.

So he's quite often played these elegant, beautiful people.

So to see him don the beard and the animal skins and to roar

and stomp around the place, it's a big jump.

But it's not a big jump because he's so skilful at it.

He inhabits that role wholeheartedly.

How was your crossing?

Did the channel part for you?

It went flat when I told it to.

I didn't think to ask for more.

How dear of you to let me out of jail.

Arriving by barge on the River Rhone,

there is no doubt that Katharine Hepburn is a Hollywood superstar.

After Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, she was flourishing in later career,

finding emotionally fraught roles that played on her legacy.

Eleanor is a wronged woman set aside by Henry for a succession of lovers.

Hepburn's clipped mid-Atlantic accent,

adds a delicious self-awareness to the Queen.

"I am not one of the ones who gives a damn",

she sneers, a line straight of her forties' heyday.

Katharine Hepburn, by the late 1960s,

had this already remarkable legacy from her screwball days

in the great comedies opposite Cary Grant, Bringing Up Baby, et cetera,

in the 1930s, and was hugely respected as a political,

intelligent, sort of self-contained, and independent woman of that era,

when many of those women from her kind of contemporary star stable,

were a little bit more made out to be glamour girls.

And she, whilst very glamorous in her youth,

had a certain kind of strength of character that really shone through,

and I think she had great respect from all different walks of life.

Certainly Peter O'Toole

and all the rest of the casting crew on the set of The Lion in Winter,

to hear tell of it, were pretty much in awe of her.

There is no doubt that the casting of Katharine Hepburn

is absolutely crucial as Eleanor of Aquitaine.

She brings with her, her own sense of being Hollywood royalty.

She is a veteran now, she is a survivor,

she has survived a- Hepburn herself of course, survived, you know,

the rises and falls and rise again of a career in Hollywood,

much like Eleanor herself, who sort of rose, fell, rose again finally.

So they're both survivors.

But what I think is really important is that she can-

she's got the right kind of spirit.

She has that indomitable female spirit that is half masculine,

but she's still a woman.

So she can, you know, she can argue against Henry with the best-

She's Henry's equal in terms of just intelligence, and wit.

And that's what makes the battle between them so interesting.

It also allows her to show at some stage, her own vulnerability

and Hepburn was vulnerable at the time of the casting,

because she hadn't long lost the love of her life, Spencer Tracy,

and it was Peter O'Toole who had to persuade her to take this role.

Where is Henry? Upstairs with the family at home.

That's a mean and tawdry way to talk about your fiancee.

My fiancee.

Whosever fiancee, I brought her up and she is dear to me and gentle.

He still plans to make John king. Of course he does.

My, what a greedy little trinity you are.

King, king, king.

Two of you must learn to live with disappointment.

Ah, but which two?

Next to nigh them all and live forever.

Tusk to tusk through all eternity.

In only his second film, Anthony Hopkins demonstrates

the intensity that has marked out his career.

As the story has it, constant soldier Richard,

is a guarded homosexual, desperate for his father's attention.

John Castle gives the most intriguing performance

as discounted Geoffrey,

a young man made of wheels and gears as his father puts it.

Nigel Terry's guileless John is clearly the wrong choice.

A whingeing brat, desperate for his inheritance.

Richard, played by Anthony Hopkins, is obviously the warrior, and he's

obviously the man who loves going to war and fighting in battles.

You see him at the beginning having a duel with somebody,

and he's about to sort of kill him,

and it's not actually supposed to be a lethal battle,

but you see his face and you realise that he could be psychotic.

I mean his face is sort of like frenzied with bloodlust,

and you think, whoops, he's a guy you want to keep an eye on.

Geoffrey, the second one, John Castle, is the most mysterious,

because he's the one that you can't read, he's obviously clever,

he's obviously sort of slightly sidelined by the other two,

being the middle brother, but you can tell just through his eyes,

that he's constantly scheming,

that he will, you know, he will scheme and plot

and it doesn't matter who with, as long as it will be to his advantage.

He's a total strategist.

John, played by Nigel Terry, is a bit oafish,

probably a little too oafish.

But the three of them naturally form this kind of little cabal.

Weirdly enough, that sets up a tension,

not just between the three of them,

but also between them and their parents.

And I think that's real smart work. I think that's very, very clever.

A nation is a human thing, it does what we do for our reasons.

Surely if we're civilised, we can put away the knives,

we can make peace?

We have it in our hands.

I have tutors of my own.

- Will that be all? - Oh, think.

You came here for a reason.

Don't you want to ask me if I've got an offer?

Have you got an offer? Not yet, but I'll think of one.

Oh, by the way,

you're better at this than I thought you would be.

I wasn't sure you'd noticed.

Timothy Dalton is such a revelation and a surprise in this film.

When he turns up, he's the new king of France, his father has passed,

he's young, he looks young, he's this very pretty,

almost teenage looking young man,

and he keeps being called boy and lad, and given advice

by the much older King Henry and this infuriates him to no end.

So it's a, you know, there's no love lost here between these two rulers,

and Henry, because he has such large holdings of land

across all of France, has far more power than young King Philip.

So Philip is keen to get the upper hand wherever he can.

This is a study of the mind games played between all the characters.

And the acting is boldly dramatic, to match the occasion,

often to the point of hysteria.

The voluble chemistry between the leads was helped by the fact

that O'Toole and Hepburn, were close friends.

They are clearly thrilling

to the dance of this love-hate relationship.

Now we should, before we get into the actors themselves,

we should talk about acting.

Because I imagine modern audiences might look at it

and think this is over the top, this is too much, everybody is

shouting, everyone is collapsing in a heap, there's a lot of hysteria.

But to my mind, it's a particular skill, this kind of theatricality,

this kind of power that it has, and the actors really go for it.

Yes, and I think partly perhaps because of the scenery,

it's shot on location in, well a castle-style abbey in France,

and then they reconstruct that in the studio as well.

The backdrop is vast and stone, so in a way, the backdrop absorbs

some of the excessive drama of the actors, and you don't

feel quite as much as if you're watching an over-the-top episode

of a TV programme where people are blasting away over-loudly.

You know, they are bearded and they are shouting "Boy!"

But it doesn't- it just manages to stay

within what I think is a fully acceptable modern film.

They, partly because they,

they slide very quickly into very close, very small,

very despairing emotions, loving emotions, moments of silence.

So it's not as if the whole thing is performed at the bluster

and, you know, corny sort of take on what a medieval epic would be,

they are able to move into these very tight,

very intimate performances, almost on the turn of a heel.

Filmed in Ireland, Wales, and at the Abbaye de Montmajou in France,

the look is wonderfully evocative.

The use of natural light and shadows,

the flickering candles, and how the walls bear down upon the characters.

It may be the most claustrophobic epic ever made.

The director escapes the script's theatrical roots,

via astonishing close-ups.

Eyes are a central motif, gateways to troubled souls.

The studios were in Ardmore in Ireland,

but the film locations were in Wales, and France,

and especially Carcassonne, so anywhere that there was sort of mid-

still had sort of medieval looking places and walls,

so he went around a bit.

I think that's probably what gives it its great, its great

sense of atmosphere and history, without sort of overdoing it.

They didn't have to build too many sets,

all the interiors are done, but that's fine, they're all

sort of stone corridors and walls and steps and things like that.

But the exteriors are the real thing.

So I think the whole design of the film and the way that it was

sort of, they, the actors use those sets, is very important.

It all adds to the idea that you are in a different world,

you're in a different era.

There is nothing fake about it.

I mean you know, the fact that you've got live animals

running around all over the place.

When King Henry sort of walks into the market place,

he kicks a couple of chickens out of the way.

And there's even in the corner, there is a bear, a real bear,

who is being fed.

It's obviously one of the bear-baiting you know, bears,

but he seems to be perfectly happy.

And you think God, this is a tiny little detail, I mean you can hardly

see it, but it's there, and I think that that's what's important.

It gives the idea that this is, this is life as it really was.

Costumes by Margaret Furse deserve special mention.

The characters are robed in their personalities.

Eleanor in regal colours, but confining her like a nun's habit.

Henry in a drab peasant tunic, as if rejecting his very station as king.

Richard with hints of armour, Geoffrey in featureless robes,

and John an unkempt street urchin.

And Philip as dapper as a peacock.

Meanwhile, John Barry's glorious fanfares

remind us that this is royalty at war.

The costuming of The Lion in Winter, is really important,

not only in the fact of Peter O'Toole's costuming being rather

understated, or the John character, the youngest son, looking you know,

kind of scruffy and like a peasant, and Anthony Hopkins with typical,

the typical wit, of the screenplay, calling him a walking pustule.

There is a real kind of earthiness to a lot of it,

but then on the flip side,

you get the way that Furse dresses Katharine Hepburn.

And Eleanor of Aquitaine, in spite of her kind of imprisonment,

is somebody who commands great dignity,

and you see that in her sweeping clothes.

There's a beautiful red dress that she wears,

and all this jewellery that she kind of almost plays dress up with

because she's confined and bored and left to her own devices, and lonely,

and sort of thinking about the past and what she's achieved within it.

And she's looking at her crown,

she's looking at all of her grand jewels,

and so the role of costuming and jewellery

to the Eleanor of Aquitaine character,

I think, is particularly important because she's still so queenly,

in spite of her being in this marginalised position.

Ah. There you are.

My comfort, and my company.

We're locked in for another year.

Four seasons more.

What a desolation.

What a life's work.

There is something of Edgar Allan Poe's House of Usher

in The Lion in Winter's warped family dynamics.

It is the story of the ruin parents can bring upon their children.

It is about language, power, and manipulation,

and finally, about the turmoil of love.

The film is seeking to grasp what this raging couple actually

mean to one another, ending on the delightfully light-hearted note.

"You will let me out for Easter," urges Eleanor,

as if all this was simply a family tradition.

Now one thing theatre can't do that movies can, is the close-up.

And you've mentioned how good the close-ups were,

but what do they give this film, the idea of studying faces?

Well there's a lot of silence in this film.

Even though it's people speak loudly and powerfully,

there's an awful lot of silence, and this is one of the things

I'm sure we'll come onto the score, one of the things about the score

is it's absent, critically, for very, very long periods of time.

There will be periods of time where all you have

is a close-up on a face, reacting to what they're observing,

or to what they are understanding to be true.

There's quite a lot of people understanding something and weeping,

but not because they're obviously royal family,

not bursting into tears, there's just the tears pouring from their

eyes as yet another of their great dreams and hopes has been dashed.

And these are, these are moments where the camera just stays

painfully long on faces.

They rehearsed a long time.

So he would get the cast to go through the scene,

go through the scene,

and then he would plot out where the camera would be, to make sure

that he would get the faces, and hold them for as long as possible.

There is one 11-minute sequence where the camera only cuts twice,

and the final cut is at the end when he,

when the camera leads them downstairs.

But most of the time, there can be quite, can be long,

single shots, and you don't even notice they're long, single shots,

because the passion and the drama on screen,

you don't need to cut away from it.

Following the events of the film,

Henry had to deal with yet another revolt, which he lost, and so he

basically retired to a castle, and spent his last days there.

He died about two years later.

Eleanor actually was freed from her incarceration.

Eleanor of Aquitaine got her wish.

Her son Richard, ascended to the throne

and became known as Richard the Lionheart.

However, he left on the Crusades, and did not return,

so his youngest brother, John,

who in the film is very much the idiot son,

then becomes King John,

and he is actually the famous King John of Robin Hood.

So we see the, the line go forward,

and it's very interesting to me that Eleanor of Aquitaine,

not only outlives her husband,

but then outlives her imprisonment.

She is freed upon his death

and gets to return to the corridors of power in many ways.

So it does feel, as great as Peter O'Toole is in the film,

that history shows that he was bested in some ways, by Eleanor.

The Lion in Winter would be a great success both critically

and at the Box Office.

It would be nominated for seven Oscars, including Best Film,

and Best Director.

Goldman would rightly win for Best Adapted Screenplay,

and Hepburn would receive her third Oscar for Best Actress.

Eleanor is one of the great achievements

of an extraordinary career,

standing out in a film that is all performance.

How do we now look back on The Lion in Winter?

Why has it lasted so long?

I think it's lasted so long

partly because its quality was so impressive,

that Hollywood has never forgotten it.

So you will find, for instance in the West Wing,

they are constantly referencing that Bartlett,

that's his favourite film, and he,

they just, you know, there are these teaser lines about

The Lion in Winter as being the best way to understand the presidency.

Succession really, is of course essentially The Lion in Winter,

but without the level of cunning and manipulation, you know,

the kids are not as clever.

They're wimpy compared - to Lion in Winter. - Yeah.

There are so many of those films.

I mean Game of Thrones is essentially this film just

played out over a long period of time.

They have been constantly going back to and referring to this idea,

and what happens if you take this struggle for power

and you play it out in a contemporary era.

So it's changed- it changes our understanding

of what it is to be powerful.

It takes the medieval concept of power,

and it makes it completely accessible.

But it still holds back

because we are talking about absolute power of life and death.

And so every time someone sets out on another project to discuss

the power of life and death, they will back-reference Lion in Winter,

and you'll see it in almost any film in which there is someone who is

with, unless it's a pastiche or it's poorly written, someone desperately

trying to engage with the concept of how you would struggle for power.

There's The Lion in Winter somewhere, it's an eternal film.

It's a gangster movie, it's a, it's a space epic, it's just,

it's the story that Hollywood constantly back-references.

But also I think you could almost say that it's the first film

that makes us as a viewing public, think our royal family,

they are like us, they are human beings too.

It comes at that point in the sixties where there's

a beginning of a breakdown of a certain kind of deference,

and that's when we start to think about our rulers as the British

and the Americans start to think about our rulers and say well maybe

they're not born to rule, maybe they're not destined to be elected.

Maybe all these people are just like us.

So it's part of a social change as well as a filmic change.

And so therefore it echoes on and on and on and on, just that one movie.

The thing, the ripples it sets up, are still going.

The legacy of The Lion in Winter,

is that all subsequent historical films,

could not get away with sloppy historical detail.

They needed to be slightly more forensic,

they needed to be slightly more authoritative.

Also, they, it showed that you could put two older stars together

and make it Box Office.

In fact, this went on to say Richard Leicester's Robin and Marian,

where you had an ageing Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn,

and they were wonderful,

also written as it happens, by James Goldman.

So this gave, it sort of opened up the idea of films,

historical films that were A, not boring, B, very witty,

and incisive, C, funny, and yet still authentic.

So the legacy of The Lion in Winter was, was kind of huge immediately,

it was a great success internationally, it was nominated

for all of these Oscars, and rightly celebrated for its performances.

It is a film that I think maybe younger viewers might hesitate to

come to because if you look it up and you see that it's about

the political complications of choosing a king in 12th century

England and France, that seems intimidating, or maybe a bit stodgy.

But if you watch Jesse Armstrong's TV show Succession,

and you like the talkie, complicated, nasty, funny characters

of that show, then you should look no further than The Lion in Winter

as one of its huge influences.

There's a beauty, isn't there, because finally it's about a man

who realises he can't, whatever the power play may be,

he can't kill his son, he can't destroy- he loves his family.

Although he's driving him mad, he loves them.

And also, he realises it's his fault, that's the thing,

is that he, at the end, he realises what he's done.

It's not quite that he ever says anything as obvious as, "Oh my God,

what have I done, what has my life become,

what have I done with my life?"

But we have this story constantly told that the person in a position,

who looks back on what they've done with their life, and they realise

that they've just done everything wrong.

It's Arthur Miller, you know, it's so many writers

trying to explore the idea that at that moment in your life

where you look back and you realise you have broken everything good.

And that's, that's a story that we never tire of.

Television drama Succession has nothing on The Lion in Winter.

What is so powerful, is the unshakeable humanity

that runs through it, and how wholly entertaining it remains.

This glorious film invites us

into a visceral and witty psychological battleground that

few other films have even dared.

You'll let me out for Easter?

Come the Resurrection, you can strike me down again.

Perhaps next time I'll do it.

And perhaps you won't.

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