Shakespeare died centuries before the camera was invented yet his influence on cinema is extraordinary. Directors and film stars are drawn to his poetry like moths to a candle. His plays are the ultimate screen challenge. Hamlet has been resurrected more often than Dracula. Orson Welles squandered every penny he made in Hollywood on brilliant but doomed masterpieces like his 1948 Macbeth. And Marlon Brando learned that being marvellous at method acting was not enough to master Mark Antony in Joseph L Mankiewicz’s terrific 1953 version of Julius Caesar.

Cinema is now littered with colourful versions of the Bard’s greatest hits. But it’s also worth noting that no other writer in history has inspired so many Hollywood wrecks. Shakespeare’s plays might be the crown jewels of the English language but turning them into lucrative cinema is another matter. It’s no secret why Hollywood producers as robust as Harvey Weinstein fear Shakepseare. The scripts are 400 years old, the dialogue is written in blank verse, and popcorn audiences tend to fall asleep in the middle of speeches. Weinstein was so petrified of the academic connotations associated with Shakespeare’s name that he tried to force the director John Madden to change the title of his romantic spoof, Shakespeare in Love.

The illustrious list of disasters begins in 1899 with a silent movie clip of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree in a seminal West End production of King John. The venerable ham appears on screen in his nightshirt. He waves his arms about like a demented platform guard before being wrestled off stage by chaps in chain mail armour. This humble trailer is revealing about why Shakespeare films are a perennial source of pleasure and pain. Tree was far more interested in recording his stage performance for posterity, rather than how to turn the play into magic cinema, and that, essentially, is the artistic conflict that has defined every Shakespeare movie for the last 111 years.

The way the Bard is revered by directors and stars is more often than not the kiss of death. Al Pacino’s witty 1996 documentary, Looking for Richard, illustrated all too eloquently the problems facing anyone trying to put Shakespeare on screen. Despite the fact that there are at least half a dozen new versions produced every year, precious few directors have made money out of Shakespeare films. Box office hits such as Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 Romeo and Juliet, starring Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey, or Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 leather pants version of Much Ado with Keanu Reeves and Denzil Washington, are exceedingly few and far between.

The list of iconic critical successes is also relatively short. Actors with the ego, charisma, and sheer talent to turn a character like Richard III into a matinee idol are as rare as blue moons. Laurence Olivier was the sparkling first. Indeed he played Richard III on screen in 1955. But it is his patriotic, swashbuckling performance as Henry V in 1944 put Shakespeare on the Hollywood map. It is a master-class in old-fashioned glamour and heroism, and became Shakespeare’s first mainstream blockbuster.

Welles didn’t share Olivier’s Midas touch but his stunning screen productions of Macbeth in 1948, and Othello in 1952, established Shakespeare credentials as an art house fixture. Welles’ stroke of genius was to create cinematic images to rival the language. His Othello – which took three chaotic years to assemble in Morocco and Italy – is a sensational slice of film noir. The soliloquies are haunting voice-overs full of doubt and self-delusion. Welles effectively introduced Shakespeare to the auteur. Directors as far flung as Akira Kurosawa took their cues from Welles to make films like Throne of Blood, a brilliant samurai reinvention of Macbeth.

The rarity of directors like Olivier and Welles, with the clout and courage to tackle Shakespeare’s biggest plays head on, has encouraged others to experiment. This is the area of cinema where Shakespeare’s influence has produced the most startling results. Derek Jarman and Peter Greenaway produced radical new interpretations of The Tempest (Jarman in 1979; Prospero's Books in 1991) that could be hung on the wall of an art gallery.

No other writer has had such a profound impact on the two main arteries of cinema.

Shakespeare is infinitely more interesting on screen when his plays are wrenched out of context or totally reinvented. It’s precisely because his stories are so adaptable and resilient that he has maintained a grip on the industry. Baz Luhrmann’s dazzling remake of Romeo + Juliet in 1996 with Leonardi DiCaprio as the gun-toting hero and Claire Danes as the daughter of a Mafia boss is a terrific piece of Hollywood chutzpah. Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins did exactly the same thing in 1961 when they relocated Romeo and Juliet to the crime-infested streets of New York in their masterpiece, West Side Story.

Some plays are so neatly appropriated that you’re almost unaware of the original source. Gil Junger’s cheeky, rites-of-passage comedy, 10 Things I Hate About You, is a beautifully crafted retelling of The Taming of the Shrew. Venerable English Kings pop up in the most unusual places. Richard Harris transforms Lear into a wonderfully bullish East End gangster in Don Boyd’s 2001 thriller, My Kingdom. It was his last performance on screen, and up there with his most memorable.

Every fresh generation of filmmakers seems able to discover a new evolutionary twist that chimes with our troubled times. In this respect Kenneth Branagh is something of a novelty. His modern feel-good Shakespeare films are straight out of the old-school mould patented by Laurence Oliver. Branagh, of course, is one of those privileged geniuses God has planted on earth specifically to champion Shakespeare on stage and screen and stage. He is almost certainly not the last.