![]() ![]() “I’m torn apart on the witness stand by Robert Duvall,” said Fry. Fry plays a key witness in Travolta’s defense. In this legal thriller based on a true story and award-winning book, John Travolta stars as a small-time personal-injury attorney whose ego entangles him in a case that threatens to destroy him. Since completing “Wilde,” Fry has finished shooting Steven Zallian’s “Civil Action,” due this fall from Touchstone. That was very nearly two years ago, and we’re still together.” Although frank about the lack of romance in his life, Fry is reluctant to discuss his lover beyond saying that he is a “lovely man.” He added: “I don’t think I can rationally explain all this”-meaning how playing Wilde transformed his personal life. I decided that if I was going to play Oscar Wilde, I had to have a relationship. “Two months before everything started, I asked someone out, I felt more courageous. “There is something about Oscar Wilde’s capacity for kindness and self-knowledge-he knew who he was-that affected me deeply,” Fry said. Making “Wilde,” which was directed by Brian Gilbert, taught Fry “an enormous lot about acting and directing,” but its impact extended to his personal life. Films force real life on the screen it will not tolerate what you can get away with on the stage.” “Our Oscar is not a bitchy queen forever dropping epigrams. People confuse imagination and fantasy.”įry finds it unfortunate that despite Wilde’s stature as a major figure in English literature, we’re still obsessed with his love life. An individual who has no idea of art will be a violent person, because he has no belief that he can make the world better. We see nature as beautiful, when so much of what man has made is so ugly. “When Oscar was asked why America was so violent, during his tour in 1882, he replied, ‘Because your wallpaper is so ugly.’ But this phrase goes to the heart of the matter. Yet actually he’s very modern for him the sins of the flesh were nothing, the sins of the spirit everything. It’s silly to have expected him to be Harvey Fierstein or Larry Kramer. Well, he was not living in the era of e-mail, he was a man of his time. (He was in town briefly for the opening of the film, which is playing at selected theaters.) “Some see him as the ‘Queer Oscar,’ others as a grand martyr. ![]() “Oscar means so much to so many people in so many ways,” remarked Fry over dinner at his West Hollywood hotel. Like Wilde, Fry, a stylish essayist in his own right, also had a classical education, though he attended Cambridge rather than Oxford. But now he’s played the role that will be inevitably described as the one he was “born to play.” The match-up between the actor and the playwright-poet-novelist who dazzled and scandalized Britain a century ago is uncanny, one that goes beyond striking physical resemblance.įry conveys strong character and emotional vulnerability, which seems the perfect combination to play Oscar Wilde. A career of “Gestapo interrogators, emotionally constipated cuckolds and Bond villains” is what Fry envisioned for himself. ![]()
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