Rupert Everett Is Making An Oscar Wilde Biopic

From Variety:

Rupert Everett is making his directorial debut with the Oscar Wilde biopic “The Happy Prince,” in which he will star alongside Colin Firth and Emily Watson.Everett, who stars as Wilde, also penned the script for the film, described as a comedy with tragic undertones that tells the story of the Irish playwright’s final days as he observes his own failure with ironic distance and humor.

The cast also includes Tom Wilkinson and Edward Fox.

Everett, who starred in film adaptations of Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” and “An Ideal Husband,” has long championed the writer’s works on the stage and screen.

Set to shoot in summer 2013, “The Happy Prince” is a German-U.K.-Italian co-production by Cine Plus Filmproduktion and Bavaria Pictures with Robert Fox and Bavaria Media Italia.

Munich-based Beta Cinema is handling world sales and has started pre-selling the pic at Cannes.

Concorde Filmverleih will release the film in Germany.

Can I just say that I love the f-ck out of Oscar Wilde? Because I really, really do. He was a completely fascinating man, and he’s the only person I can think of who has both written and been the subject of wonderful, wonderful plays. Do you know a lot about Oscar Wilde? Because while today, my imaginary BFFs include Adele and Jennifer Lawrence, if I was a time traveler or a necromancer, I would want one of my BFFs to be Oscar Wilde. I love him.

If this movie is about his final days, then it’s going to be a sad, sad movie. Oscar Wilde started out as a wealthy, well-known writer with a wife and two sons. He then started an affair with a man named Alfred Douglas, and Alfred’s father was not pleased with that at all. A year later, Oscar was sentenced to two years in jail for sodomy and gross indecency. He served his two years, and when he was released, he went into exile. For the next three years, he didn’t do much. He lived off of money provided by his estranged wife, who wouldn’t let him see their children, and he spent a few months with Alfred Douglas. He did write the lovely poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol, as well as a few letters to a newspaper about prison conditions. But in November of 1900, three years after he was released from prison, he developed meningitis and died, but not before he sent out a telegram to his dear friend, Robert Ross, that said “terribly weak. Please come.”

But what makes Oscar Wilde so special, to me, at least, is his beautiful words. Since I’ll never have any reason to talk about Oscar Wilde at length again to you guys, let me beg you right now to please read one of my very favorite works of his, De Profundis. It’s a letter he wrote to Alfred Douglas while in prison, and it’s very long, but very beautiful. He writes lines like “nothing in the whole world is meaningless, and suffering least of all” and “nobody great or small can be ruined except by his own hand” and “when one has weighed the sun in the balance, and measured the steps of the moon, and mapped out the seven heavens star by star, there still remains oneself.” But my very favorite is what he wrote to close the letter:

Society, as we have constituted it, will have no place for me, has none to offer; but Nature, whose sweet rains fall on unjust and just alike, will have clefts in the rocks where I may hide, and secret valleys in whose silence I may weep undisturbed. She will hang the night with stars so that I may walk abroad in the darkness without stumbling, and send the wind over my footprints so that none may track me to my hurt: she will cleanse me in great waters, and with bitter herbs make me whole.

If you have an hour or so to kill, I strongly suggest reading through the whole thing. If not, just hang out for a bit, and we’ll get right back to Miley Cyrus boobs and the unsolved mystery of Kim Kardashian‘s fame.