TBF Cleopatra was Greek, so while she probably didn't look like Elizabeth Taylor I suspect that she didn't look like a modern Egyptian or whatever that commenter thought she should look like. (Not that Hollywood would have cared if she had, mind.)

But there is a tendency, about race but also about other things, for historical fiction to smooth over the complexity of the past; reading books that were actually published in such-and-such a time period is often surprising because the actual world of the past is so much bigger than the world that often makes it into historical fiction.