Rupert Everett’s Oscar Wilde Movie
From The Telegraph review of a movie opening tomorrow in the UK and early October in the USA: ‘Oscar Wilde ended his days lost in a miasma of bankruptcy, public infamy and viral agony, never returning to Britain after his release from Reading Gaol, but exiled to the continent. Bravely, it’s this period of his life that Rupert Everett has chosen to focus on for his directorial debut, The Happy Prince, letting him expand on his celebrated performance in the 2012 West End revival of David Hare’s The Judas Kiss.
Everett has danced around the role of Wilde throughout his career, notably as the idle bachelors Oscar wrote in An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, both plays landing on screen during the peak Miramax era as a pair of nattily cast Oliver Parker divertissements. But it’s here that the writer-director-star truly gets to grips with the grisly decay of the author’s life, sparing us nothing as he plunges into a destitute purgatory with little in the way of comic relief. With only brief upward glances at Wilde’s faded star as the one-time toast of London society, these are very much the gutter years.’
