Cultural Depictions of T. S. Eliot - Film, Television and Theatre

Film, Television and Theatre

• The musical CATS by Andrew Lloyd Webber (1981) is based on Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats.
• The 1994 film Tom & Viv is a dramatization of the strained relationship between Eliot and his first wife. The movie was adapted by Michael Hastings and Adrian Hodges from the 1984 play of the same name by Hastings.
• In the movie Apocalypse Now, based on the Joseph Conrad novel Heart of Darkness, one of the side-characters, a photographer obsessed with the life of the elusive Colonel Kurtz, quotes "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," specifically the lines, "I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas." Marlon Brando's character Kurtz later reads Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men": "We are the Hollow Men, / We are the stuffed men..." Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men" quotes Heart of Darkness in its epigraph — "Mistah Kurtz—he dead." The American photojournalist (Dennis Hopper) also refers to the end of "The Hollow Men" when speaking to Willard.
• The T.V. movie of Stephen King's The Stand begins with the quotation of Eliot of "This is the way the world ends, This is the way the world ends, This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang but a whimper."
• "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is referenced in Hill Street Blues.
• The title of the film I've Heard the Mermaids Singing is derived from a line from "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
• In the Doctor Who episode "The Lazarus Experiment" both the Doctor and Lazarus quote T. S. Eliot's poem The Hollow Men. The Doctor completes Lazarus' quotation with the line, "Falls the Shadow" — which has been used as the title of a Doctor Who novel. The Doctor later tells Martha that Eliot got it right in saying that it all ends "not with a bang, but a whimper". The Doctor also alludes to Eliot's reference to Lazarus in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead."
• There is also a Doctor Who novel called The Hollow Men featuring animated scarecrows.
• The last line of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,"--"Till human voices wake us, and we drown"--is the title of the 2002 film Till Human Voices Wake Us featuring Guy Pearce and Helena Bonham Carter.
• Tracy Letts's August: Osage County features several Eliot quotations, especially of The Hollow Men; the prologue ends with patriarch Bev Weston quoting "here we go round the prickly pear..." and the play ends with housekeeper Johnna singing the poem's "this is the way the world ends" stanza.