![]() In 1892, Wilde's four-act comedy, Lady Windermere's Fan, A Play About a Good Woman, was first performed at St. Gray realizes his looks won't last forever, and wishes that instead of his fine features aging, that his inevitable decay would instead be borne by the painting. The story, set in Victorian England, follows the life of the beautiful narcissist Dorian Gray, who has his portrait painted by an artist captivated by his handsomeness. There have been multiple screen adaptations, with the first in 1945, starring Hurd Hatfield, George Sanders, Lowell Gilmore and Angela Lansbury. Wilde wrote the gothic novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, in 1890. Robinson, Charles Boyer, Robert Cummings and Barbara Stanwyck. The second segment is based on Wilde's short story, Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, which is about a palmist who predicts the fate of one of the guests, specifically that he'll make a fateful turn at a street intersection on his way home that evening. It's made up of three unrelated stories tied together by two men at a club talking about the occult. In 1943, the Julien Duvivier directed anthology film Flesh and Fantasy premiered. Let's continue to celebrate this wonderful writer with a look back at our favorite on-screen adaptations of his many plays, short stories and standalone novel: Colin Morgan portrays his lover, Alfred Douglas. The Happy Prince also stars Firth as his friend, Reggie Turner, and Emily Watson as his loyal wife, Constance. "Suffering is nothing, when there is love. "There is no mystery so great as suffering," he said. While it was a tragic period for Wilde - the public turned on him and he was imprisoned for being gay - (though the actual charge was "indecency"), he still held onto hope. Now here he is in the role of the poet and playwright himself, in the biopic The Happy Prince, premiering today (October 10).Įverett also wrote and directed the film, which examines the final years of the celebrated writer's life. The adaptation is directed by Oliver Parker, written by Toby Finlay (his first screenplay), and stars Ben Barnes as Dorian Gray and Colin Firth as Lord Henry Wotton.Rupert Everett has already starred in two Oscar Wilde film adaptations, The Ideal Husband (1999) and The Importance of Being Earnest (2002). Source: ĭorian Gray is a 2009 British fantasy-horror drama film based on Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. But for a movie bug, it’s a work of utter beauty. For a book bug who looks for similarities, there is nothing much to find in this one. Could the other passions not have been represented in the movie? Or was it because of what would grab the eyeballs? And of course, the movie has highlighted what seems to be only one interpretation of Dorian’s character. The hedonism remains but only through the means of what would seem to be the preference of the majority of the viewers – sex, also BDSM. It had an eerie beginning and the storyline too has been changed significantly. All credit for that goes to the gothic atmosphere created in the film. The story in the book begins in quite a sunny manner, but there’s a certain haunting quality to the movie right from the beginning. While the decadence described in the book was captured through the fine cinematography, the philosophical part appeared to be missing. ![]() Now, the book is nothing but pure gothic horror and philosophical fiction. The movie is glaringly different from the book, in that it is usually described as a fantasy-horror drama. I read and reread the book in the last two years. Because it is very tough to capture thoughts into live-action. That’s what happened with The Sense of an Ending and it was the same here. I said inspired and not based because most of the times a philosophical novel tends to somewhat lose its meaning in cinematic translation. And at the centre of it all is a lifelike portrait of his, which contains a piece of the very soul of the artist who painted it. But everything has an expiry date and so does the hedonistic pleasures that Dorian indulges in. Inspired from the 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, Dorian Gray – the movie – is about the titular character, a naive young man who is introduced to the decadent life of high society by one Lord Henry Wotton. And also because I hadn’t read the book then. Nope, not even the sexually explicit scenes because they’re censored on Indian television, even now. It’s been some ten years now and I didn’t remember much. I saw this movie in my late teens when it premiered on television.
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