Many plays bring in pre-established movie stars, and actors getting famous for stage work is decidedly less common. In comparison, now Hollywood actors are cast as a way of marketing plays, such as Adam Driver in the 2019 revival of Lanford Wilson’s Burn This. Stars could be a household name through theatre alone and one’s fame in theatre could be used to market a play. Though he had only appeared in one film, The Men (1950) before that, he was well known for his work in theatre. Marlon Brando is perhaps the most obvious example of this – his performance as Stanley in the original Streetcar was so well regarded, that he reprised it for the film version. Whereas in previous decades actors struggling to find work in film could earn equal prestige on stage, it is now far more common for them to work their way up through smaller film roles, or on television.

One notable facet of this decline is the relative scarcity of actors moving from the stage to film. From a culture of regular and successful stage to screen adaptations to one in which it is vanishingly rare, this article will reflect on how and why these changes have come about. As film technology has improved in the intervening years, so has the public interest in stage works that are not comedies or musicals declined. For example, A Streetcar Named Desire was the 5 th highest grossing film of 1951 while Fences was the 91 st highest grossing film of 2016. Play to film adaptations have fallen in prestige and numbers in recent years, and one of the main reasons for this is the decline in popularity of plays that can be adapted.

Fences drama