![]() But he endorses Parker's point about tolerance: "Lying at some point seems forgivable: everyone is a liar." Rupert Everett sees Robert Chiltern, the ideal husband, as a twist on the romantic political hero of 19th-century theatre and also makes analogies with Bill Clinton and other contemporary political scandals. "We pulled it out of the city and put it in the countryside because we felt that a lot of people in the country still speak and act like Oscar Wilde's characters." Parker, meanwhile, kept the 19th-century setting, while attempting to transform the melodrama into drama and farce into romantic comedy. "We felt that it was very relevant to a modern setting," says Figuero. However, a plot about an ideal husband, whose marriage and promising political career, are endangered by past financial irregularities, has obvious contemporary resonance. Wilde's dialogue is brilliant, but artificial, and his structures theatrical. People appropriate some of the classic writers and make them conventional." And I was conscious that the audiences I was playing to were often not those that I felt should necessarily be seeing the stuff. "He's a terrifically exciting, rebellious character. Virtually everything he writes about touches on some sort of plea for tolerance. It was so cloaked, which made it all the more moving. "I began to realise he was the opposite of my preconceptions," says Parker. He changed his mind after reading the late Richard Ellmann's biography, which provided the framework for the film Wilde. Oliver Parker appeared in a stage production of The Importance Of Being Earnest about 10 years ago and at the time regarded Wilde as "clever-clever and rather callous and cynical". Then when they started to look at Wilde in the seventies, they suddenly thought, Oh my God, the whole thing about being gay and being closeted, and leading a double life, was covered by Wilde in the 1890s.' Suddenly these were no longer seen as old-fashioned, dumb waxwork people these were actually highly subversive, highly intelligent plays." Sheridan Morley, theatre critic, Wilde biographer and son of Oscar's screen alter ego, Robert Morley, says: "He went into decline because of the coming of John Osborne and the Royal Court. Ironically, the two biopics appeared at a time when Wilde's plays, with their finery and upper-class characters, were falling out of fashion. An Ideal Husband was filmed in the forties with Paulette Goddard. There had already been numerous films of Wilde plays and stories, including The Importance Of Being Earnest, Lady Windermere's Fan and The Picture Of Dorian Gray, which proved most cinematic, for obvious reasons. ![]() The production of two simultaneous biopics probably had as much to do with the growing, though still cautious, debate over homosexuality, as it did with interest in Wilde - Dirk Bogarde's film Victim followed soon after. In 1960, The Trials Of Oscar Wilde, starring Peter Finch, began shooting four days before Oscar Wilde, with Robert Morley. This is the second historical clash of Wilde films. It might be better to allow a decent interval between the two, but Figuero hopes his film will appear "close on the tail of the other one", believing interest in Wilde is sufficient to support both. Parker and co had a red-hot cast and a £6.5 million budget courtesy of Pathe, Miramax, Mel Gibson's Icon company and the Arts Council of England's Lottery funds, whereas the rival had the less hot James Wilby and Sadie Frost, cameo appearances from Tamara Beckwith and Tara Palmer-Tomkinson and a budget of less than £1 million raised by public subscription, prompting reports of a David and Goliath battle, the Hollywood film versus the people's film.Īlthough Parker's film was second into production, it has reached cinemas while rival producer Daniel Figuero continues to discuss a distribution deal. Barnaby Thompson and Susan Landau subsequently joined forces, but Wilde's work was out of copyright and they were in pre-production before discovering the existence of a rival Ideal Husband. Oliver Parker, who had previously directed Othello with Laurence Fishburne and Kenneth Branagh, was approached by two producers simultaneously. The success of the long-running West End revival of An Ideal Husband was reinforced by the appearance of the film Wilde, and suddenly producers were falling over each other to do a film version. With Titus in post-production, and Love's Labour's Lost currently before the cameras, cinema has all but exhausted the works of William Shakespeare and Hollywood is on the lookout for the next great dead writer.Ī film adaptation of An Ideal Husband opens here on April 16, with a cast including Rupert Everett, Minnie Driver and Cate Blanchett. The timing of Wilde's re-emergence could not be better.
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