Film
A film adaptation of the play was released in 1966. It was directed by Mike Nichols and starred Elizabeth Taylor as Martha, Richard Burton as George, George Segal as Nick and Sandy Dennis as Honey.
Jack Valenti identifies the film as the first controversial movie he had to deal with as president of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). The movie was the first to use the word "screw" and the phrase "hump the hostess" on screen. As he says, "In company with the MPAA's general counsel, Louis Nizer, I met with Jack Warner, the legendary chieftain of Warner Bros., and his top aide, Ben Kalmenson. We talked for three hours, and the result was deletion of "screw" and retention of "hump the hostess," but I was uneasy over the meeting."
Read more about this topic: Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?
Famous quotes containing the word film:
“The average Hollywood film star’s ambition is to be admired by an American, courted by an Italian, married to an Englishman and have a French boyfriend.”
—Katharine Hepburn (b. 1909)
“Film music should have the same relationship to the film drama that somebody’s piano playing in my living room has to the book I am reading.”
—Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971)
“The woman’s world ... is shown as a series of limited spaces, with the woman struggling to get free of them. The struggle is what the film is about; what is struggled against is the limited space itself. Consequently, to make its point, the film has to deny itself and suggest it was the struggle that was wrong, not the space.”
—Jeanine Basinger (b. 1936)