pangea's video: Cleopatra - A Life

Stacy Schiff interview http://www.stacyschiff.com/index.html Her palace shimmered with onyx and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Above all else, Cleopatra was a shrewd strategist and an ingenious negotiator. Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world. She was married twice, each time to a brother. She waged a brutal civil war against the first when both were teenagers. She poisoned the second. Ultimately she dispensed with an ambitious sister as well; incest and assassination were family specialties. Cleopatra appears to have had sex with only two men. They happen, however, to have been Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, two of the most prominent Romans of the day. Both were married to other women. Cleopatra had a son with Caesar and—after his murder—three more with his protégé. Already she was the wealthiest ruler in the Mediterranean; the relationship with Antony confirmed her status as the most influential woman of the age. The two would together attempt to forge a new empire, in an alliance that spelled their ends. Cleopatra has lodged herself in our imaginations ever since. Cleopatra is known to have been the first in the family of the Ptolemies of Egypt to have learned to speak the local tongue. She is said to have also spoken: Greek (native language), the languages of the Medes, Parthians, Jews, Arabs, Syrians, Trogodytae, and Ethiopians (Plutarch, according to Goldsworthy in Antony and Cleopatra.Cleopatra was the last pharaoh of the Macedonian dynasty that had ruled Egypt since Alexander the Great left his general Ptolemy in charge there in 323 B.C. Angelina Jolie Cleopatra movie: Rudin told Jolie: "The only thing standing between us and this movie is your learning ancient Egyptian. Could you be ready by January 5?" Jolie, however, wanted to proceed with caution. "I think we have to clean up the script and then enhance. I have crossed out many things and made adjustments," she wrote in an email to Pascal in January. "I would like to strip the things that lead it off track first. We need to be clear and efficient in order to get this done in a decent time. I started to re read the book [2010 bestselling book Cleopatra: A Life, written by Stacy Schiff] and I am talking to philosophy teachers ect." For Jolie, she wanted the focus of the story to be a historically accurate one about Cleopatra herself without Hollywood-style embellishments. In a private email, Pascal wrote to Rudin: "[Angelina] will like it CUZ there is barely any vulnerability left in her character and she now seems responsible for everything that ever happened," but turning the film into a commercial success was also a concern. "We are gonna have to lean on her to make it a love story [with Marc Anthony]," Pascal wrote.