Collegiate Church of Sant Vicenc (Cardona, Spain)
Collegiate Church of Sant Vicenc (Cardona, Spain)
In October 1964, Orson Welles used the Collegiate Church of Sant Vicenç in Cardona as the location for CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT, his personal Shakespeare adaptation, with himself in the leading role. Although shooting lasted nine months, only fifteen days were spent in Cardona, and yet thirty minutes of the final cut were shot there, containing some of the most emblematic locations: the castle of King Henry IV, the castle of his rival Henry Percy and the cathedral where Henry V is crowned.
Cardona citizens were intensely involved in the shooting of CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT, which premiered at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival where it won the 20th Anniversary Prize and the Technical Grand Prize. In the village, which in the sixties had much less than today’s seven thousand inhabitants, are still many who remember those two weeks in 1964 that took to the streets of the small mining town actors like John Gielgud, Keith Baxter, Marina Vlady, Norman Rodway, Fernando Rey and Welles himself, combining acting with his work on the other side of the camera.
