Although Nicol Williamson (Hamlet) played the son of Judy Parfitt (Gertrude) and the nephew of Sir Anthony Hopkins (Claudius), he was only ten months her junior and fourteen months his senior.
The first movie version of "Hamlet" in color.
Extra lines, made to sound like Elizabethan English, were added to this version because the order of two crucial scenes was reversed, and this could not have been done with the play as written. Tony Richardson places Hamlet's taunting of Polonius after the "get thee to a nunnery" scene with Ophelia, rather than several scenes before.
At only 31 years old, Anthony Hopkins is one of the youngest actors to have played Claudius in a production of "Hamlet".
One of the odder aspects of this interpretation is that some of the characters wear glasses. In reality, there is evidence that the Ancient Romans and Greeks used visual aids while the first known eyeglasses were believed to have been made in Pisa around 1290; Shakespeare has a character mention spectacles in "King Lear".