linguistic:voice_change, quality:corruption
Modern depictions and brand imaging

In Victorian Britain, Cleopatra was highly associated with many aspects of ancient Egyptian culture and her image was used to market various household products, including oil lamps, lithographs, postcards and cigarettes. Fictional novels such as H. Rider Haggard 's Cleopatra (1889) and Théophile Gautier 's One of Cleopatra's Nights (1838) depicted the queen as a sensual and mystic Easterner, while the Egyptologist Georg Ebers 's Cleopatra (1894) was more grounded in historical accuracy. The French dramatist Victorien Sardou and Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw produced plays about Cleopatra, while burlesque shows such as F. C. Burnand 's Antony and Cleopatra offered satirical depictions of the queen connecting her and the environment she lived in with the modern age.

Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra was considered canonical by the Victorian era. Its popularity led to the perception that the 1885 painting by Lawrence Alma-Tadema depicted the meeting of Antony and Cleopatra on her pleasure barge in Tarsus, although Alma-Tadema revealed in a private letter that it depicts a subsequent meeting of theirs in Alexandria. Also based on Shakespeare's play was Samuel Barber 's opera Antony and Cleopatra (1966), commissioned for the opening of the Metropolitan Opera House. In his unfinished 1825 short story The Egyptian Nights, Alexander Pushkin popularized the claims of the 4th-century Roman historian Aurelius Victor, previously largely ignored, that Cleopatra had prostituted herself to men who paid for sex with their lives. Cleopatra also became appreciated outside the Western world and Middle East, as the Qing-dynasty Chinese scholar Yan Fu wrote an extensive biography of her.

Georges Méliès 's Robbing Cleopatra's Tomb (French: Cléopâtre), an 1899 French silent horror film, was the first film to depict the character of Cleopatra. Hollywood films of the 20th century were influenced by earlier Victorian media, which helped to shape the character of Cleopatra played by Theda Bara in Cleopatra (1917), Claudette Colbert in Cleopatra (1934), and Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra (1963). In addition to her portrayal as a " vampire " queen, Bara's Cleopatra also incorporated tropes familiar from 19th-century Orientalist painting, such as despotic behavior, mixed with dangerous and overt female sexuality. Colbert's character of Cleopatra served as a glamour model for selling Egyptian-themed products in department stores in the 1930s, targeting female moviegoers. In preparation for the film starring Taylor as Cleopatra, women's magazines of the early 1960s advertised how to use makeup, clothes, jewelry, and hairstyles to achieve the "Egyptian" look similar to the queens Cleopatra and Nefertiti. By the end of the 20th century there were forty-three films, two hundred plays and novels, forty-five operas, and five ballets associated with Cleopatra.