Stage-to-film adaptation

Stage-to-film is a term used when describing a motion picture that has been adapted from a stage play. There have been stage-to-film adaptations since the beginning of motion pictures. Many of them have been nominated for, or have won, awards.

The following stage-to-film adaptations have won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Actors and actresses who won Oscars for re-creating stage roles on film include:

Most stage-to-film adaptations must confront the charge of being "stagy". Many successful attempts have been made to "open up" stage plays to show things that could not possibly be done in the theatre (notably in The Sound of Music, in which the Alps and the city of Salzburg were displayed, in Frost/Nixon, and in Franco Zeffirelli's and Kenneth Branagh's respective films of Shakespeare plays). Many critics claim to notice the origins of stage-to-film adaptations when the characters speak. A play depends mostly on dialogue, so there is supposedly more of it in a play than in a film, and more of a tendency for the characters to make long speeches and/or soliloquies. Writers, directors and critics often claim that film makes more use of short, abrupt sentences, realistic ways of speaking, and physical action than the stage does. Another supposedly "dead giveaway" that a film is based on a play is confining great chunks of the action to one room, as in the faithful 1962 film version of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, or as in Laurence Olivier's Richard III. Olivier deliberately emphasized the fact that his Henry V (1944) was based on a play by having the film begin at what was supposed to be Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, then moving into deliberately fake scenery and having the scenery gradually become more and more real until finally the viewing audience is looking at a real location, finally gradually switching back to the Globe Theatre.

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