Casanova (1987)

STARS: Richard Chamberlain, Faye Dunaway, Sylvia Kristel, Hanna Schygulla, Toby Rolt, Frank Finlay, Ornella Muti, Kenneth Colley, Roy Kinnear, Sophie Ward, Jean-Pierre Cassel.

DIRECTOR: Simon Langton. DURATION: 156mins.

SYNOPSIS: Tongue-in-cheek romp following the legendary Venetian's raunchy tour of 18th-century aristocratic bedrooms.

RC PLAYS: Giacomo Casanova.

"Some day, I want to play an impassioned Italian. That would be fun," wished Richard Chamberlain earlier in his career. And who said dreams don't come true? And never one to do things in half measures, not only did the actor get to play an impassioned Italian, he got to play the most impassioned of the lot - legendary Latin lover Casanova.

Chamberlain described the character as, "incredibly randy, amazingly resourceful. He fell in love with all the women he went to bed with, but he was incapable of sustaining a relationship. He would have liked to have found the woman he could have been in love with forever. But he didn't know that being in love and loving were different."

Richard went on, "He was also a great adventurer coming from 18th-century Venice. He was a kind of social genius. He came from an acting family (the lowest of the low at the time) and clawed his way up through society to the very highest echelons."

As with most of his roles, the actor discovered he admired his latest character. "The thing that I liked the best about Casanova is that a lot of Don Juan types don't really like women," explained Chamberlain. "But he loved everything about them; he was crazy about women. He loved their smell, he loved their laces, he loved their wit. And, of course, he was an extremely sensual guy. He was a great, great lover, but he was mostly his own creation."

At the end of his life, Casanova wrote a 12-volume memoir which became the basis of this series - although the scriptwriters took the liberty of injecting a little more humour into the tale.

Richard admitted that, "The persona is very different from anything else I've played," but some of the faces were certainly familiar. In fact, the project turned out to be something of a Richard Lester's Musketeers reunion, thanks to the presence of Faye Dunaway, Frank Finlay, Roy Kinnear and Jean-Pierre Cassel in the cast.

However, it was Ornella Muti who turned the star's head. "I fell in love with her the minute I saw her," he says. "She's the most ravishing woman. Those eyes. I had thousands of scenes with her - but some will only be viewed in Europe."

He was speaking of the fact that many of the raunchy scenes had to be cut for the US film, eventhough two different version had been shot side by side when it came to the bedroom moments.

"There is a great deal of sex in the European version," revealed Chamberlain. "We double-shot a lot. The tits came out, the thighs came out. It was very funny. You'd hear the velcro go 'rip!' and suddenly, everybody's naked for the European takes."

Co-executive producer Larry Sanitsky could hardly believe the harsh rules imposed by US censors, but was even more flumoxed when one particular shot got through: "We had shot some stuff of Sylvia Kristel, and there was one scene where she revealed herself to a young Casanova. To our surprise, the European footage, which we showed to the US network, was considered acceptable for American television."

In the US, where it was shown on TV as a three-hour movie rather than as a mini-series, there were 20 minutes of footage cut out, leaving the plot terribly disjointed. Thanks to the censor's scissors, Casanova received only mixed to poor reviews and faired badly in the ratings.

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