Spicing up Lygia in “Quo Vadis” (1951): The Development of Female Charactes from Script to Screen.

This chapter examines the development of female characters—especially Lygia—in the 1951 film Quo Vadis through a comparative analysis of multiple script versions produced between the 1930s and late 1940s. Drawing on extensive archival materials, including over forty script drafts, it traces how screenwriters progressively transformed Lygia from a passive, almost voiceless figure in Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel into a character endowed with agency primarily through dialogue. While early attempts to enhance female roles relied on adding actions, later revisions shifted toward verbal empowerment, allowing women to express autonomy, irony, and moral authority within the constraints of the historical setting. The chapter argues that this evolution was not solely a product of post-war gender discourse but emerged gradually through iterative rewriting. The final film presents a rare example of a classical epic in which female strength is constructed largely through speech rather than action, challenging both the source text and dominant cinematic conventions of the genre