Olivier stopped at three and so did Welles. Now it's Kenneth Branagh's turn to wonder if he should quit with his trio of filmed Shakespeare plays: Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing and, opening next Friday in Vancouver, a four-hour version of Hamlet complete down to its last "go, bid the soldiers shoot."
"I certainly don't have plans to do the rest of the canon," he says. "You do the ones that you feel very strongly about, that you feel have a story to tell."
During a Vancouver visit last week, the 37-year-old actor and director admitted that if Hamlet is a success, he's already planning to film his own Macbeth and, even more intriguing, a musical version of Love's Labour's Lost.
Branagh recently narrated a documentary series, Cinema Europe: The Other Hollywood, which only reinforced his belief that British cinema has been badly served by decades of disinterest in indigenous material.
"Now we're believing much more in home-grown product," he says. "People like Mike Leigh and Ken Loach are being recognized for the amazing work that they've been doing consistently."
As for his own efforts, Branagh displays the honest modesty of a well-trained Shakespearean actor.
"The buzz back home is that this is a much-anticipated film and there's a sense of event about it. Although I get a lot of gyp [trouble] back home in the press, they still come and see my films, and in this case I think people see it as a mad, interesting endeavor."
Even a heavy edit of the 238-minute full version, down to two hours, five minutes for distribution in places without the patience for the full text, doesn't faze the notoriously demanding director.
"Because it's Hamlet and so much of it is bloody marvellous anyway," he says, "you can cut it down and it's still formidable."
Instead of a castle to stand as Elsinore, Branagh chose to film his exteriors at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire. Home to the Duke of Marlborough, this tan-colored wonder of English Baroque "looked as though the fate of nations was decided there; it would be impossible to live in such a place and not have your personality shaped by it."
The film's most impressive set is a hall of mirrors literally reflecting the prying, narcissistic royal court. Branagh borrowed the concept after a visit to Paris.
"Versailles," he says, "is an incredible palace where you really feel the reek of corruption. You understand when you've been there why there was a revolution in France. The atmosphere of the uneasiness that seems to come out of much of the language of the play, was behind creating a world like that, with mirrors and doors and a sense that these privileged people pay a price for their power -- isolation and yet an utter lack of privacy."
It's the perfect setting for the play's famous "to be or not to be" soliloquy, spoken directly to a mirror by Branagh as if Hamlet is somehow aware of the presence of Polonius and Claudius.
"We wanted," he says, "to put an ambiguous little frisson underneath it that just says, 'I'm going to have this conversation with myself, reflected all over the place, and they may be listening.'"
Branagh knows all about a life led in mirrors. Since leaping to fame at age 22 on the London stage as Judd in Another Country, then drawing worldwide audiences for his film of Henry V at the age of 28, Branagh has lived in fame's fishbowl. Especially after separating from actress Emma Thompson in 1995, he's been drawn into solitary thought about the deeper meaning of a life which won't reach 40 until the year 2000.
"I feel I'm such a privileged fellow, to have some degree of talent and the opportunity to express it. I've always felt a kind of guilt about life being so short, so many other people not having these opportunities, that there's a kind of obligation to get on and make as much of your life as you can. The camaraderie produced on the set of Hamlet, the joy of trying to work on some of the problems, the stimulation to one's spirit in looking at a great poet analysing human behavior -- you can't help but feel that your life is being enriched.
"And along the way, you have an incredible box of toys to play with. The mechanics of making a film are so fascinating."
All those years on stage with the Royal Shakespeare Company haven't left Branagh bereft of appreciation for such stylish new interpretations of the Bard as Baz Luhrmann's.
"Luhrmann's film is brilliant in the way it updates Romeo and Juliet. It's definitely in our faces, but it's an utterly consistent style the whole way through, and connects to the heart of the play -- ferocious gang energy, ferocious adolescent love, irrationality and passion."
He has similar praise for the other extreme, a newly rebuilt Globe Theatre in London so authentic to the original that it lacks stage lighting and encourages the most vocal of audience response.
"It's a very healthy development, shaking the dust off Shakespeare and saying, 'C'mon, let's just make it live; be perverse and contrary.' There's no set way to do it; do it so that it stimulates us."
As for Branagh's own stage work, which hasn't been seen since an RSC production of Hamlet in 1993, "I've got to say I don't miss it at the moment because one of the things that frustrate me about theatre is the price of the tickets; people not being able to get in. It's wonderful to do plays in a studio theatre -- it's a lovely way to act -- but no one can see them.
"Although the live experience is something I would hate to give up forever, I feel so impassioned by the desire to make this work available largely and cheaply, that all my theatrical juices are going into making films."
And ahead? Branagh drags on a cigarette and exhales with a sigh at the thought of a quick trip to London, then on to his birthplace of Belfast and back to this side of the Atlantic to star as a southerner in Robert Altman's The Gingerbread Man, from a script by John Grisham.
"I assume nothing about life," Branagh says. "Sometimes I wish I could just slow down a bit, but that doesn't seem to be the way I am. I guess I worry less about it now."