Trivia / Cromwell

• California Doubling: The battle scenes were shot in Spain.
• Creator's Favorite Episode: In 1970, writer-director Ken Hughes said that he considered this to be the best thing he ever did.
• Dawson Casting:
  • Charles I was forty-eight when he was executed. Alec Guinness was fifty-five during filming. (In fact Charles I was one year younger than Cromwell, while Guinness was sixteen years older than Harris.)
  • Oliver Cromwell was forty-three when the English Civil War began, and the film ends with his death aged fifty-nine. Richard Harris was thirty-nine during filming, making him an inversion.
• Deleted Role: The final version was 180 minutes long, but it was cut down to 141 minutes, deleting a number of featured roles in the process including Felix Aylmer (in his final film) as an archbishop, and Bryan Pringle. Tony Caunter, George A. Cooper and Peter Bennett, three prominent English actors, were also cut out of the film following production.
• Fake Brit: Irishman Richard Harris as Oliver Cromwell.
• Falsely Advertised Accuracy: The movie's publicity boasted that it was made "after ten years of research". However, takes enough liberties with how things actually played out to have a rather lengthy page dedicated to them.
• Hostility on the Set: Alec Guinness stated in his memoirs that he was seriously unimpressed with Timothy Dalton's behavior during the production.
• Irony as She Is Cast: The choice of Richard Harris to play Oliver Cromwell raised many eyebrows, as he was a hedonistic and proudly patriotic Irishman (and a Catholic) playing an English puritan who had allowed countless massacres to happen in Ireland. The salary was simply too good to pass up.
  • Generally, a film about the famously anti-Catholic Cromwell stars avowed Catholics Alec Guinness, Frank Finlay, and Patrick Magee (also an Irish Republican). In the latter's case, Money, Dear Boy was in full effect.
• Money, Dear Boy: The main reason Richard Harris accepted to play Cromwell.
• Uncredited Role: Victor Maddern as an executioner.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The studio wanted Charlton Heston to star, but Ken Hughes did not think he was appropriate. Hughes tried to get Richard Burton to read the script, but Burton was not interested.
  • At one stage, producer Irwin Allen hoped to get Paul Scofield to play Charles I and Albert Finney to play Cromwell.

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