Row over Giel gud’s gay porn film starring Nigel Havers

SIR John Gielgud was one of our best-loved actors, but the Oscarwinner has become involved in a highly controversial production from beyond the grave.

A gay porn film for which the celebrated Shakespearean actor secretly wrote the screenplay has been made.

Trouser Bar, which is set in a menswear shop, features unlikely roles for Eighties heart-throb Nigel Havers (pictured right), 63, camp comedian Julian Clary, 56, and veteran comic Barry Cryer, 80. ‘It’s very lighthearted,’ Havers tells me.

However, the film has caused an outcry from The Sir John Gielgud Charitable Trust, which administers the affairs of the actor, who died in 2000 aged 96.

‘ Earlier this year, the trustees decided not to give their permission for it to be produced because they didn’t think it was appropriate,’ one member, Ian Bradshaw, tells me.

‘They didn’t have to go into detail because they own the copyright.’

Gielgud (pictured far right), perhaps best known as Dudley Moore’s butler in the Hollywood comedy Arthur, was arrested in 1953 and fined for cruising in a public lavatory.

According to Trouser Bar’s producer, David McGillivray, Sir John was a keen viewer of such material.

‘Pornography is still a stigma in this country, but Sir John loved porn and, in his letters, he talks about visiting gay cinemas,’ says McGillivray.

‘ He was in a pornographic film himself — Caligula.

‘I was shocked when the trust didn’t give me permission. We stuck to Sir John’s script very tightly when we made the film a couple of weeks ago. He was very specific about the clothes he wanted the actors to wear.’

In the film, Havers, Clary and Cryer, who are friends of McGillivray, play (fully clothed) passers-by who peep in through the shop window and see an orgy taking place. ‘You could call them voyeurs,’ says the producer.

However, Havers insists: ‘ I was just meant to look into the shop — I didn’t know what I was looking at.’ Gielgud wrote the screenplay in 1976 and handed it to his close friend, the erotic film director Peter de Rome. Before de Rome’s death last year, he passed the script on to McGillivray.

The producer claims Gielgud had a fetish for fabric.

‘Corduroy was his favourite, but he also liked velvet, flannel, leather [and] denim. He was very particular about the type of clothes he liked. Trouser Bar is a film of enormous historical interest.’

Costing £50,000 to produce, the film is at the editing stage, but is unlikely to be screened in Britain due to the trust’s objections.

‘ They have come down heavily on me,’ says McGillivray. ‘ They are using intellectual copyright as an excuse.’