The Queen Elizabeth

The Queen Elizabeth

(Fiction, France, 1912, 54’, B/W, silent)

by Gaston Roudès, Henri Desfontaines, Louis Mercanton

The Queen Elizabeth

Synopsis

Queen Elizabeth anxiously awaits news of the fighting between the English fleet and the Spanish Armada. Only the count of Essex, the queen’s favorite, is optimistic. To celebrate the victory, he had “The Merry Wives of Windsor” performed, introducing the playwright Shakespeare. A fortune teller presented to Elizabeth predicted great sorrow and Essex’s death on the scaffold.

Credits

Gaston Roudès, Henri Desfontaines, Louis Mercanton

Director

Film Author :

Gaston Roudès, Henri Desfontaines, Louis Mercanton
Gaston Roudès, Henri Desfontaines, Louis Mercanton

Born in Béziers in 1878, Gaston Roudès was a French actor and director. Between 1911 and 1939, he made over 60 flms and became famous for his flms made at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s such as Le Dédale (1927) or L’Assommoir (1933).

Gaston Roudès, Henri Desfontaines, Louis Mercanton
Gaston Roudès, Henri Desfontaines, Louis Mercanton

Born in Paris in 1876, Henri Desfontaines was a French actor, screenwriter, and director. He began his career in legitimate theater. He directed his first flm Hamlet in 1908 for Eclipse Studio before specializing in period films. After the First World War, he began directing popular films such as detective flms, melodramas, comedies, and adventure flms like Belphégor (1927). In 1928 he gave up directing to return to his first profession as an actor.

Gaston Roudès, Henri Desfontaines, Louis Mercanton
Gaston Roudès, Henri Desfontaines, Louis Mercanton

Louis Mercanton was a French actor, screenwriter, director, and producer born in Nyon in 1879. He began his theatrical career in 1904 in South Africa. Then, he worked with Henri Desfontaines on literary adaptations and historical flms such as La Dame aux Camélias (The Lady of the Camellias) or L’Assassinat d’Henri III (The Assassination of Henry III). Their collaboration on the flm Queen Elizabeth with Sarah Bernhardt in the leading role was a huge success both in France and abroad. During the First World War, he and René Hervil co-directed Mères françaises (French Mothers); an anti-German propaganda flm released in 1917, again with Sarah Bernhardt in the lead role.

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