The Blue Bird (movie)
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Several film versions of Maurice Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird were created.
In 1910, a silent, black-and-white version starring Pauline Gilmer as Mytyl and Olive Walter as Tytyl was filmed in England. Maurice Tourneur directed another silent version in 1918 in the United States, under the auspices of producer Adolph Zukor. In 2004, the 1918 version was added to the US National Film Registry.
In 1940, Shirley Temple starred in a Technicolor, Walter Lang-directed version (produced by 20th-Century Fox). Despite Temple's starring in it, it failed at the box office, but went on to become a favorite among her fans later, and has since been reissued on video.
The most notorious film version of the play was a 1976 Soviet-American coproduction, directed by George Cukor, starring Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Fonda, Patsy Kensit, Todd Lookinland, Ava Gardner and Cicely Tyson. There were endless on-set problems, partly due to the fact that this was the first joint production between an American studio (Fox, again) and a Soviet one (Lenfilm). The film was widely panned by both critics and audiences.
Two animated versions have also been produced, one in 1970 in Russia and a Japanese anime version in 1980, produced as a 26-episode TV show for Japanese television.