King Lear is a 1971 British film adaptation of the Shakespeare play directed by Peter Brook and starring Paul Scofield.

[2] Peter Brook’s version of King Lear was prompted by an essay by Polish critic Jan Kott titled “King Lear or Endgame”, where Kott writes that Shakespeare's play is a tragedy of the grotesque, “an ironic, clownish morality play, […] a mockery of all eschatologies: of the heaven promised on earth, and the heaven promised after death.” The film was shot in 16mm black-and-white and mostly made in the mid-winter dune country of the Jutland Peninsula of Denmark.

[2] Brook's film starkly divided the critics: Pauline Kael said "I didn't just dislike this production, I hated it!"

[3] Yet Robert Hatch in The Nation thought it as "excellent a filming of the play as one can expect" and Vincent Canby in The New York Times called it "an exalting Lear, full of exquisite terror".

[8] Paul Scofield, as Lear, eschews sentimentality: this demanding old man with a coterie of unruly knights provokes audience sympathy for the daughters in the early scenes, and his presentation explicitly rejects the tradition (as Daniel Rosenthal describes it) of playing Lear as "poor old white-haired patriarch".