Coriolanus

Ralph Fiennes is directing and playing the lead in a film of Shakespeare's Coriolanus due out next year. I've been reading the play and watching clips from a 1984 BBC production starring Alan Howard in a literally hair-raising performance as the Roman general Caius Marcius (later Coriolanus). His colossal hauteur and disdain for the mob could strip paint. His mother, Volumnia, played in the Fiennes film by Vanessa Redgrave, reveals her nature plainly when she says that blood

"more becomes a man
Than gilt his trophy: the breasts of Hecuba,
When she did suckle Hector, look'd not lovelier
Than Hector's forehead when it spit forth blood
At Grecian sword, contemning."