I occasionally wonder if Oscar Wilde's life wasn't just a necessary preliminary so that Stephen Fry could get to play him. Fry clearly has a lot of sympathy with Wilde, and has little trouble placing himself in his shoes - something that I suspect he has done all his life. The story is familiar by now - Oscar becomes one of the most popular playwrights and wits of his age, only to shoot himself down at the height of his fame due to his relationship with the horrible Alfred Lord Douglas, for which he finds himself sentenced to two years' hard labour. The film goes to some pains to be historically accurate (it even gets right the almost illegible message that Lord Queensberry pinned to the theatre door which sparked off his ill-fated libel trial) but makes one blunder in providing a happy reunion of the two lovers upon Wilde's final release. In fact Wilde didn't get a happy ending, because he never did the one thing that would always have turned his fortunes up, even after his sentence: ditch Douglas. The film is a largely accurate and involving portrait of one of the most mistreated literary figures in history, but I can't help suspecting that it would have been far less of a success with anyone else in the title role.
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Production Year: 1957 - Drama - Director: Leo McCarey - Original Language: English - Classification: Universal - Starring: Cathleen Nesbitt, Deborah Kerr, Cary Grant, Richard Denning, Neva Patterson, Fortunio Bonanova
Production Year: 2004 - Drama - Director: Nick Cassavetes - Original Language: English - Classification: 15 years and over, 12 years and over - Starring: Rachel McAdams, Ryan Gosling, Gena Rowlands
Let the BBC transport you back to the decadent aristocratic drawing rooms of 1890's ... more
England. Lovingly restored the four plays in this collection feature a who's who of great actors of the British stage & screen; including stars like Sir John Gielg...
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The Oscar Wilde CollectionLet the BBC Transport you back to the decadent aristocratic ... more
drawing rooms of 1890s England. Lovingly restored for DVD, these plays feature a who's who of great actors of the British stage & screen including Sir John Gielgu...