Rouben Mamoulian was hired as director, and the script underwent numerous revisions from Nigel Balchin, Dale Wasserman, Lawrence Durrell, and Nunnally Johnson.

After the Battle of Pharsalus in 48 BC, Julius Caesar goes to Egypt, under the pretext of being named the executor of the will of the father of the young Pharaoh Ptolemy XIII and his older sister and co-ruler, Cleopatra.

[6] Wanger had envisioned Cleopatra as "the quintessence of youthful femininity, of womanliness and strength," but it was not until he watched Elizabeth Taylor in A Place in the Sun (1951) that he found his ideal candidate for the role.

[19][20] Based on his recently aired I, Don Quixote episode in the CBS anthology series DuPont Show of the Month, Dale Wasserman was selected to complete the final draft.

[25] When Mamoulian was hired to direct, he had offered the title role to Dorothy Dandridge, an African American, during a lunch meeting at the Romanoff's restaurant in Beverly Hills.

[25][28] On October 15, a contract-signing event was staged inside Adler's office where Taylor signed blank papers because the real contract would not be ready for months.

The Eady Levy had offered financial incentives to American film studios as long as a certain percentage of the primary cast and production crew were English.

[35] In 1960, Adler entered into a coproduction deal with Italian producer Lionello Santi, who had recently completed a foreign-language version of Cleopatra that the studio purchased to keep away from the American market.

[41] Taylor's cold soon progressed into a lingering fever, and for the next few weeks, she was treated by several doctors, including Lord Evans, Queen Elizabeth II's physician.

Mankiewicz also described Cleopatra's depiction as a "strange, frustrating mixture of an American soap-opera virgin and an hysterical Slavic vamp of the type Nazimova used to play.

[56] By February 1961, Mankiewicz had conceived a "modern, psychiatrically rooted concept of the film," envisioning Marc Antony's self-destruction because of his "inability to match [Julius] Caesar.

On June 30, Skouras reversed his decision and agreed to allow Mankiewicz shoot the film at Cinecittà in Rome, where the sound stages had been occupied for the studio's television series and George Stevens's The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965).

[46] Mankiewicz then suggested Marlon Brando as Mark Antony, but Richard Burton landed the role after Taylor had seen him as King Arthur in the Broadway musical Camelot.

[69] Mankiewicz had expressed his intention of directing a two-part epic: "I had in mind two separate but closely linked Elizabeth Taylor films—Caesar and Cleopatra and Antony and Cleopatra—each to run three hours, both segments to receive simultaneous release.

[75] By late May, most of the palace scenes were finished, but the remaining sequences, including those of the Battle of Pharsalus and Actium, the arrival of Cleopatra in Tarsus, and Antony's confrontation with Octavian's legions, were not yet filmed.

[78] From June 1–5, Fox executives Peter Levathes, Otto Koegel and Joseph Moskowitz, whom Wanger jokingly named as the "Three Wise Men," arrived on set to cancel the scheduled shoot of the Battle of Pharsalus.

Mankiewicz had read Wilson's column, and asked Lewis "Doc" Merman, the studio's production manager, to assume Wanger's position and thereby reinstate the filming of several sequences that were cut.

"[88] A few days later, Zanuck issued a press release stating, "In exchange for top compensation and a considerable expense account, Mr. Joseph Mankiewicz has for two years spent his time, talent, and $35,000,000 of 20th Century-Fox's shareholders' money to direct and complete the first cut of the film Cleopatra.

"[99] On October 30, Mankiewicz flew back to his East Side townhouse where he held a press conference, insisting he had "never demanded control" nor disputed the studio's right to the final word on the finished cut.

Among those present at the premiere were Rex Harrison, Walter Wanger, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Darryl F. Zanuck, Jacob Javits, Richard Rodgers, Joan Fontaine, Louis Nizer and Beatrice Miller.

[107] Schawn Belston, senior vice president of library and technical services at Fox, led a two-year process that restored a four-hour, eight-minute version in 2013.

[108] Bosley Crowther of The New York Times called Cleopatra "one of the great epic films of our day," crediting Mankiewicz for "his fabrication of characters of colorfulness and depth, who stand forth as thinking, throbbing people against a background of splendid spectacle, that gives vitality to this picture and is the key to its success.

"[110] Vincent Canby, reviewing for Variety, wrote that Cleopatra is "not only a supercolossal eye-filler (the unprecedented budget shows in the physical opulence throughout), but it is also a remarkably literate cinematic recreation of an historic epoch.

"[111] For the Los Angeles Times, Philip K. Scheuer felt Cleopatra was "a surpassingly beautiful film and a drama that need not hide its literate, intelligent face because it happens to have been written, not by Shakespeare or Shaw, but by three fellows named Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who also directed it, Ranald MacDougall and Sidney Buchman.

Of the cast, she lauded "Rex Harrison's brilliantly quizzical Caesar, the best written role in Joseph Mankiewicz's erratic script, and haunted by Richard Burton's tragic Marc Antony, an actor's triumph over a writer's mediocrity.

But for this ambition to hold up, over the film's great footage, he needed a visual style which would be more than merely illustrative, dialogue really worth speaking, and actors altogether more persuasive.

[4] Among contemporary reviews, American film critic Emanuel Levy wrote retrospectively: "Much maligned for various reasons, [...] Cleopatra may be the most expensive movie ever made, but certainly not the worst, just a verbose, muddled affair that is not even entertaining as a star vehicle for Taylor and Burton.

This restored big-screen version shouldn't be missed: it's a colossus of the analogue-epic era, and the high point of Elizabeth Taylor's global celebrity, when her prestige was hardly less towering than that of the actual queen of the Nile.

"[120] Billy Mowbray of British television channel Film4 remarked that the film is "[a] giant of a movie that is sometimes lumbering, but ever watchable thanks to its uninhibited ambition, size and glamour.

[132] Fox eventually recouped its investment that same year when it sold the television broadcast rights to ABC for $5 million,[133] a then-record amount paid for a single film.