A Wilde journey for actor
After years and years of working as an actor, what I feel like, finally, is an artist.
Rupert Everett
Rupert Everett’s film The Happy Prince is an attempt at artistic reinvention — both of its subject, Oscar Wilde, and the man who plays him.
True, it’s a role Everett seems to have spent his entire career preparing for. Although the film marks the 59-year-old’s debut as a writer and director, it is not the first time Everett has portrayed the Irish playwright.
In 2012, he appeared in a London revival of David Hare’s 1998 stage play The Judas Kiss, about Wilde’s decision to mount a doomed legal defence against accusations of being a “sodomite” because of his sexual relationship with a young Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas.
Everett has also has acted in film versions of Wilde’s plays An Ideal Husband (1999) and
The Importance of Being Earnest (2002). The Happy Prince is a look at the final days of Wilde’s life, days spent in exile after imprisonment on charges of “gross indecency”.
Everett says it’s a “shadowy romance” rather than a tragedy, a tale of a “star on the skids, living in 1890 Paris in a series of cheap hotels”.
He wanted to correct “the Wilde of folklore”: the witty bon vivant and married family man.
The Happy Prince, which takes its name from a children’s story written by Wilde about a bejewelled statue of a prince that falls into decay, focuses more on the devastating effects of what, according to Everett, were Wilde’s “gigantic, Earth-shattering errors of judgment”: to wit, getting involved with Bosie — handsome, spoiled and impossibly selfish — in the first place and then trying to defend his honour.
The film also tries to set the romantic record straight: Bosie (Colin Morgan) was not Wilde’s one great paramour, as he is often portrayed. Rather, that honour falls to Wilde’s loyal friend, literary executor and presumed first lover, Robbie Ross (Edwin Thomas), who stays by Wilde’s side to offer comfort as he is dying.
For Everett, too, it’s something of a resuscitation effort. Over a long career, he says, he has experienced multiple periods in which acting work — or the kind of acting work that he aspired to — had simply “evaporated”.
He spent a couple of months writing the screenplay for The Happy Prince. The plan was that he would shop it around to directors and take on the meaty role himself. “It took me 21⁄2 years to get seven nos from seven directors.”
And he thought: “This script is going to be dead. I might as well try and direct it myself.”
Never having made a movie before, Everett had no idea just how complicated it would be. Now that it’s in theatres, Everett couldn’t be prouder. He views the film as a historical document and a personal reminder. “I remember coming to London in 1975, when it had only been legal to be gay for seven years.”
“After years and years of working as an actor, what I feel like, finally, is an artist.”