It was announced this week that Davies will work on a six-part adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace," which will be broadcasted by BBC One in 2015 as event television
There have been five previous adaptations of the novel. The earliest version was a little seen 1915 silent Russian film. The most recent, a 2007 Russian-French-Italian-German television mini-series.
Three adaptations stand out in particular. King Vidor's 1956 "War and Peace" was a typical 1950s Hollywood epic with a cast headed by Audrey Hepburn as Natasha Rostova and Henry Fonda as Pierre Bezukhov. The film was lushly scored by Nino Rota and richly photographed by Jack Cardiff in Italy. Yet, it took eight screenwriters to fashion a film-able 208-minute screenplay from the novel's ample page count.
Sergei Bondarchuk overcame this problem by filming the movie in four parts. The director shot the film between 1962 and 1967 and included members of the Red Army as extras. At the time it was the U.S.S.R.'s most expensive film, and it went on to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language film.
The British Broadcasting Corporations's previous attempt came in 1972 when a young Anthony Hopkins starred as Bezukhov in the BBC's 20-part version of "War and Peace."
