When the movie was released, Sir Laurence Olivier said it had been filmed in black and white for artistic reasons. The true reason, as he later admitted, was that "I was in the middle of a furious row with Technicolor".
This was the first British or non-American film to win the Oscar for Best Picture, as a result this is the first "foreign" film to win Best Picture.
Sir Laurence Olivier was 41 when this movie was released. Eileen Herlie, who played Hamlet's mother Gertrude, was 30. Herlie also played Gertrude on Broadway in 1964 with Richard Burton's Hamlet (1964), which was filmed and shown in a limited release. Whereas she was eleven years younger than her "son" when Hamlet was played by Olivier, she was seven years older than Burton.
Greatly influenced by the inventive camera effects that Orson Welles and Gregg Toland pioneered in Citizen Kane (1941), and by the psychological reinterpretations of the play that were being floated at the time.
This was the first of 22 films in which Christopher Lee (Spear Carrier) and Peter Cushing (Osric) both appeared.