 I'm Rebecca O'Deal. I'm the director of the festival and it's so lovely in our fifth year to see so many faces actually physically here on site and also it's great to welcome everybody that's tuning in from around the world online as well. Before we get started I just need to run through a couple of housekeeping points so this is the boring part but important part. We'll take questions towards the end of the session so get thinking about what you might want to ask Rupert or Dan. For our online audience as well if you want to ask a question you can do so as well but you need to do that by submitting your question in the question box below the screen. Books you will have seen Sarah and her team at Blackwells outside selling lots of books outside so if you want to get your book signed afterwards Rupert's doing a book signing which is very nice of him. If you're watching online I'm afraid you can't get a signed book but you can use the tab above the screen to purchase Rupert's books there as well. I think that's everything aside from the event will have live speech to text captioning which you can see physically here but if you're watching online you can access this along with the live BSL interpretation by clicking on the button on the tab if you want to use that or need to use that. So I'm going to hand over to Jamie in a moment from PLB Limited to introduce our opening event but I just wanted to make a few brief words and I will be very quick because I know you're not here to listen to me speaking you're here for these speakers but I just wanted to say that we hear a lot in the media these days about so-called rewriting of history as though it's some kind of terrible and awful thing and I just want to say it's not always. We should be writing and rewriting, researching and reinterpreting, casting a lens on stories that have been overlooked or shifting focus with histories that we think we might know. The speakers that you're going to listen to over the course of the next two days have spent years researching, thinking, questioning, inquiring in order to distill a kaleidoscope of source material into sharp arguments, gripping narratives and readable or in the case of our first talk here watchable, actually unreadable too, history. From the life of Oscar Wilde, the Russian Revolution, early modern interactions with India and England and powerful global dynasties to the histories of hysteria and voyages of indigenous Americans to Europe and ancient goddesses and Agatha Christie. We have it all this weekend and because the beauty of history is that it's always open to interpretation and every single individual will bring something new to the story of humanity. It's a story that's as vast as it is changeable. To paraphrase the late great Dame Hilary Mantel, beneath every history there's the life of the historian. So while there are shelves to be filled, long may historians write and rewrite history books. Thank you. Thank you Rebecca. Hello, my name's Jamie McCall. I'm the creative director of PLB. We're a museum designer and heritage consultancy based in York. We're proud to sponsor the opening event of his fest 2023 with Rupert Everett Travels with Oscar Wilde chaired by Dan Vo. So to introduce the panel to you, Dan Vo founded the award-winning volunteer led V&A LGBTQ plus tours. He's developed LGBTQ plus programmes for the V&A for the National Gallery, the National Galleries of Scotland, the National Museums of Wales and the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge to name but a few. He's presented for BBC Arts and is a trustee of Queer Britain Museum and the director of pre-college at the School of the New York Times and Sotheby's Institute of Art in New York. Rupert Everett is one of the most multi-talented artists of his generation, a prolific actor with a career spanning 40 years, as well as a director, screenwriter and novelist. Everett first came to the attention in 1984 starring in a feature, another country, opposite Colin Firth. The role was to also garner him his first BAFTA nomination. He received his second BAFTA nomination playing opposite Julia Roberts in My Best Friend's Wedding, a role for which he received his first Emmy nomination. A second Emmy nomination followed with Oliver Parkins and Ideal Husband. With over 50 feature film credits to his name there are really too many of them to mention from starring opposite Madonna in The Next Best Thing to The Madness of King George. George from voicing prince charming in the animated Shrek films to A Midsummer Night's Dream and playing King Charles I into Killer King. More recently Everett wrote and directed his first feature film The Happy Prince, charting the last days of the genius playwright and poet Oscar Wilde, which was nominated for a British Independent Film Award. Dan Rupert, over to you. Oscar Wilde, the patron saint of homosexuals, or as Rupert puts it in his book, the most famous man in London reduced to a fairground oddity. Rupert, you've had a lifelong obsession with Oscar Wilde, which culminated in the film The Happy Prince and the story of the fallen star, the final years of Oscar Wilde after he leaves prison. He goes into two years hard labour coming out of that. It's a story that I think is rather sad. It's what happens when he comes out having been punished for gross indecency. And for Rupert it's been a decade sort of pulling together all the resources needed to make the film happen. So it was quite a grueling process as you will read in the third instalment of the three volume memoirs of Rupert Everett and later has been called to the end of the world. And as we speak about Oscar Wilde today, what I'd like to explore with you really is could he have avoided this tragedy? Was there a moment where he could have just not been the person that suffers for the sins of homosexuality in Victoria, England? So I think the only person who could tell us would be Oscar Wilde, but I think Oscar would probably wouldn't have even given us a straight answer. You've probably thrown out a witty epigram. So the best thing is I think somebody who has played hundreds and hundreds of performances as Oscar Wilde. So I am going to ask for one more warm hand of welcome to Rupert Everett for coming today. Thank you very much. Because Rupert I do know, this is the opening of his fest, I do know that you do like to say that you do like a warm hand on your opening. I do, I do. Tell me, what is it like to embody Oscar Wilde in so many performances? In the theatre, well the play was called The Judas Kiss by David Hearn. It's one of my favourite plays and I loved it for quite a few years. Liam Neeson did it originally in London and on Broadway and it wasn't a great success. When I was trying to set up my film I was having very little luck getting financed and getting people to join into the production. So I thought I'd try and put on that play so I could show myself off playing Oscar Wilde. It was a wonderful experience. I got to know the writer David Hearn, who is an amazing guy. We had a great director from Australia actually and we went on tour. We started the Hampstead Theatre Club which is a wonderful theatre and it was just one of those things. Show business is full of invisible green lights and red lights and when you're in a red light part of your career nothing works. But you don't really know why and then suddenly for little short periods of time you maybe go into green lights all the way moments and that was one of mine. I did that play, a book I wrote came out and then suddenly I got this momentum and then I managed to score the BBC to make my film and Lionsgate in the UK and then it kind of rollercoasted and then I got my film off the ground. So playing Oscar Wilde every night was a great experience particularly when we were in the West End playing it, one night was the day that the House of the Parliament voted on the gay marriage bill and it was just a very very weird day to be doing a play about Oscar Wilde, someone who was actually put in prison for being gay. It felt that night. Everyone in the audience who had come to the play, everyone had got the evening standard, was on the cover of the evening standard, gay marriage was legalised and it was a very very, when you go on stage in a play quite often, especially after you've done it, if you've done it three or four months, it can be very, it gets very wearing because you have to somehow pull up a bit of sparkle but that night the audience, everybody was in a completely electric state because we knew that we were kind of at a historical moment doing a play about Oscar Wilde, the day that gay marriage had been legalised and it really was, that was my favourite performance. I felt that I was kind of surfing on the wings of history for a second in a way and it was, that was very exciting I must say, very moving. I think in terms of very moving, about a kilometre north of us at the moment there's queer Britain and I've seen somebody wearing a badge from queer Britain over there as well so hello. We are the first LGBTQ plus museum in the country and when you go into the space, one of the striking things is you can visit, it's free, please go see it, there is a door there, a pale yellow door and that is the door behind which Oscar Wilde was in prison for those two years, it's the cell door for prisoner C33 and I wanted to kind of just drop us right into that space now because you have been in that cell, you have read The Ballad of Reading Jail which very much conjures up that space as well and tell me what it's like to be in the spaces that Oscar Wilde has been in as well because you very much followed his footsteps from that prison cell through to the end of his life to make the film as well. I think when you start sleuthing a historical character it's really exciting and strange as well because some places kind of have absolutely no message. For example Oscar Wilde's bedroom in L'Hotel in Paris which I kind of was terribly excited to get to. I kind of sat there once I got in there thinking I'm not feeling anything. I think sometimes whereas going into the cell in Reading Jail you really did get a kind of feeling of something shutting the door. They're quite big the cells in Reading Jail, it's difficult because when you have ideas about prison now, we know about cells with four beds in them, they're much more cramped now. I mean it's actually, I took my mother there and we were doing, Alan Yentob came with us, we were doing a documentary, my mother went in and said, oh my god this is bigger than most people's flat in London. And it was kind of weird because you have to adjust yourself to the times, it was quite a big cell. But I think that was exciting. Finding the villa he lived in in Naples was really the most exciting one and that was where I felt finally maybe I was coming into direct contact with him actually. I think in the book you sort of describe pulling away vines to uncover the words that kind of reveals that that's in space. Oh no, that's somewhere else. That's when I went to look for the hotel he lived in in the north of France, the Hotel de Plage at Bernival. And that was an amazing experience too, there was just the wall left of the hotel and it had the name of the hotel written behind the ivy. And there I did get a real feeling about Oscar Wilde too because when you're on the north coast of France it's kind of cliff like, just like the south coast of England. So you really do get the feeling of those two coasts once being together. And I could really imagine his loneliness in that place. I felt that very clearly visiting Bernival. I think in your embodiment of Oscar Wilde for hundreds of performances being able to get into his mindset and then you've written, this is your first time as a screenwriter as well as directing and acting for the film. But I think what's really interesting for me would be to play through the idea of was there a moment, and it is part of the play as well, was there a moment when he was in the Hotel Gaduggan, when the libel case against the 9th Marcus of Queensbury has completely fallen apart now and all of the queers of Victoria in London start to flee and head for the continent. They're taking trains and boats out, they know what is coming and in some ways the authorities have also delayed giving Oscar the time to flee as well. They hadn't actually. People said that the authorities gave Oscar time to flee, they hadn't really. I think Asquith was the person in charge and there's always been this rumour that they waited four or five hours hoping for him to go, they didn't actually. But I think his inability to take action is the same one you read about in Hamlet really. You know something's happening and you can't act. And I think Oscar had various ideas in his head probably in the Gaduggan Hotel because he could have gone to the station and he could have taken up a life in exile like many other people had done and had quite reasonable lives. He I think was weighing up how he would survive as a writer. Writing for him was more important than his life I think. And I think he figured out that he could become a kind of Christ figure if he just didn't move and he was right. He became I think he is the Christ of the gay movement in one sense because he was the first person that you could look at on the street and you could say that is a gay man because it didn't really exist before. It wasn't something that anyone talked about. Certainly not something a woman would ever have been talked about. I mean maybe between men they would talk about sexual acts between men but he really was the first visible homosexual man and from that moment a movement had to start. And so I think the gay movement really starts with him walking around the boulevards in Paris and I think he knew that and he said actually the road to liberty will be smeared in blood and long but I think he knew what he was doing in that sense. Because I think before Oscar Wilde there's a series of trials that leads to there's the Fanny and Stella trial. It's another theatre based trial that leads to ultimately they were acquitted but the change in law is the change in law that ultimately leads to the conviction of Oscar Wilde. It's the. The pusher. Absolutely thank you. And so in those years it feels like there is a need to find a scapegoat and Oscar Wilde becomes a scapegoat. I don't know whether it's quite like that. I think Oscar Wilde was somebody who got very successful. The time of his arrest he had three plays on in the West End. That's kind of like being Steven Spielberg in today's world. I think he put lots of people's backs up. I think he the thing that I find most moving about him is he became such a big star his head got so big. He thought he was above the law so he became reckless and he didn't know. He thought he said at one point the working classes are behind me to a boy and you know it wasn't actually true they weren't everybody turned against him you know all the people he thought he could count on. And I think he had a kind of folly de grandeur that in a way so I don't know whether it was people wanting to make him a scapegoat. I think he just pushed too far really and he was very successful and people were jealous of him in a way. I think he was also quite agitated by the ninth Marcus of Queensbury as well. When you say Steven Spielberg I think actually it might be more like Steven Sondheim so we're thinking about the car that the ninth Marcus of Queensbury left behind. It was like you are a Sondamite. I wonder if it was that part of it. Did he get so big that there was no alternative but to take him to court for libel? I think one of the things he was he was a terrific snob as well and being Irish in turn of the century England was difficult actually. The English were incredibly snobbish about the Irish and people said about Oscar Wilde when he went from Trinity College in Dublin to Oxford University. He changed everything about himself within about 15 days. He developed a new accent. He completely dropped any semblance of his Irish brogue. He developed this way of speaking and so for him to be on equal terms with a Martianess for example the Martianess of Queensbury he was always writing letters to her about Bosie. He felt he'd arrived at the centre of the world. The Prince of Wales was coming to his plays. He was like Beyonce really in a way and he got the blindness of a big star I think apart from anything else. I do disagree slightly with Rebecca because I think history must be about the events. I think obviously the way each of us see history is individual because every character resonates with you personally and you like this about them and you don't like that about them and you focus on one area of them. But still I am very much against what is happening particularly in show business now to do with history. There is a historical theme and a picture around it that is completely unrealistic of the times and they also paint a kind of moral code of today on to something that could be the 16th century or the 17th century. My feeling when I was trying to make a film about Oscar was I just wanted to paint a portrait of how I really believed after thinking about him and researching how he actually was. I didn't want to make him into something else. I wanted to try to distill a real presence of him and I don't think history is for reinvention. I think history is for us to learn from and to take. It's actually very encouraging for example playing the Judas Kiss that night of gay marriage. You couldn't as a gay person just be thrilled at the journey that had happened since Oscar Wilde's incarceration in 1895. It's incredibly thrilling and exciting and so I think history is much more useful when it's seen through not through rose colored glasses or through a modern morality system. I think we might queue up the trailer and as we prepare that for the film can you just tell me where the spark for the film began. The thing that I was always interested in about Oscar Wilde is not funny enough I wasn't really a fan all my life. When you're at drama school you have a term where everyone does Oscar Wilde and we all hated it. We wanted to do things where people were killing grandmothers with machine guns and raping each other and things like that. We wanted to do things that were more visceral and doing Oscar Wilde seemed like a real bore. What I liked about him later on was learning about his life in exile because it's such a wonderful and beautiful tragedy. This person who was so grand and such a star being reduced to kind of, it's not what we would call poverty now. Again that's another, I mean his life in one sense was by today's standards comfortable actually. He was in a little tiny hotel room, he ate in a restaurant most of the time. But he was dirty, he had no teeth, he was probably syfonitic and it's a very romantic story. So I was always in the Elman biography which was the kind of book that really brought Oscar Wilde back in the 1960s. Richard Elman was dying when he wrote it. So the last chapter which is the chapter of Oscar Wilde's exile is a very tiny little chapter. Strangely enough the whole life of Oscar Wilde's sense has really been based on that book. It was such a great book but the exile is absolutely wonderful and full of amazing people bumping into him, Ellen Terry bumping into him at a pastry shop. All these people, Sarah Bernhardt bumping into him in Nice. The picture of him is I think one of the most romantic pictures of the turn of the century really. I think he bumps into Nellie Melbour at one point and she pours out her purse to him. It isn't everything she's got right there in that moment. Because he's become by this stage a terrible tinker. He says at one point there's nothing like an Irish beggar once he gets into his stride. So anybody he met who looked like they had some money, he'd say, can I borrow £5? I love that about him too. I think Elman calls it the leftover years and it's the moments when he's been ostracised for being both a bugger and a beggar. So let's play the trailer. Is it old such a fascination? The appreciation has been most intelligent. I congratulate you on the success of your performance. What I'm saying is that I have lived in the grip of vice and pleasure. Ask a wild the sentence of the court is that you'll be imprisoned and kept to hard labour for two years. It was wrong and I have paid. I'll make a cast lick of you yet. Only I don't like dear Jesus, you have luggage. If we intend to affect a reconciliation with my wife. I feel sure that if I was to see him once, I would forgive him everything. Rest assured, I shall never see Lord Alfred Douglas again. I forbid him to live with that infernal man. Oscar, let's run away. Someone no one could find us. You don't know what you're saying. Then you will never see Constance again. Are you worrying of silk stockings today, Oscar? You go too far, sir. Then you go too far. Everything, my family, my work, my freedom, everything, there's nothing left to take. Suffering is nothing when there is love. Love is everything. I must love and be loved at the price I pay for it. Is the wired? Who can do you to speak to me? You couldn't lend me £5, could you? A mortal combat with this wallpaper, Robbie. One of a sess a girl. Waddle, sorry, the waldian waddle. Oh, well, I had a marvellous, there's this guy who for the cinema makes fat suits. And his fat suits are amazing. They have different kind of textures. I had these amazing moves, kind of low hanging tits that had kind of dried peas in them so that under a shirt they kind of moved. And when I first had it made, I had always imagined that Oscar Wilde was incredibly well hung. So I said to the guy, please make me a big cock. But it was ginormous, actually. I noticed when I launched this fat suit in the theatre because the Hampstead Theatre is quite like this. People at the front as close as you are. I saw everyone in the front where I was like... Just looking and then I looked down at my trousers in the middle of the plane. I saw this kind of gigantic sausage kind of all the way down to my knees almost. And I had to take it down a little bit after the first week. But the suit is... My fat suit was an amazing contrivance. And now I keep it because quite often I do other roles. For example, tomorrow I'm off to play the Holy Roman Emperor in a series. And I always take the fat suit with me to put on to get me into character. So that was a major part of my personality. The visuals for the film are also remarkable. And I think you worked with Brian Morris who started off with you in another country. That's right. But it's so evocative of that entire era. Talk to me about creating that world. Well, again, that's the thing I feel very strongly about in terms of entertainment, cinema, television. I wanted to express to the audience as exactly as I possibly could how I imagined that world felt. And so it's kind of neo-realism, I suppose. I wanted it to look a certain way and that was very important. And that's what really costed so much money at a certain point. I thought, God, what I should really do is just set it all now so that Oscar could go on the Euro star and you could just go and stay in an Ibbis Hotel and he could be dressed up as a 19th century character and everybody else could be in T-shirts and jeans. And I could have quartered the budget. And probably it would have been a better film. But anyway, we were on the route we were taking and in the end we got it together. And I'm thrilled with the way it looks. The parts in Naples are great. Naples is an amazing city to shoot in. It's incredibly cinematic and the actors there are all incredible. And so I was very lucky all the way through in the end. Let's talk about some of the characters as well now because you've played opposite three stunning Bosies. Of course there we've got Colin Morgan, the firebrand that is Freddy Fox you've played against and also the sort of exquisitely doe-eyed we've got our young man Charlie Rowe as well who was with you in the US. So who's your favourite Bosie? But then let's start to talk about the person Bosie as well and what your take on Bosie is. I think Colin Morgan is the most incredible Bosie and what's amazing about him in that role. Whether any of you know him as an actor but he's an Irish actor and he's got, he's very dark. He's got black black hair. And we did the first fitting with him and we put this wig on him, this blonde wig. And he completely, his whole face, everything about him changed. And that's a very exciting thing to stumble on in acting and he felt it. We both, you know, he suddenly became this character and I think he is for me the perfect Bosie. Dangerous, he's got kind of glassy eyes sometimes. He was just magnificent as Bosie I thought. And so was Freddy Fox, very amazing as Bosie too. I don't think Charlie tried hard enough to be honest. But he was good though, he's a great actor. But I think Colin was my favourite. And then I suppose that Bosie is, I mean in the production of it, one of your foreign editors of the script sort of said, Bosie isn't really that important a character is he? He's not really essential to the story is he? Oh right, no they wanted to lose the whole. Because my main financiers were German initially. And they had a very different idea of Oscar Wilde and everything about him. And they didn't think Bosie was a very important ingredient. And so obviously he is, or at least from my version he's very important. So finding the right actor was very, very essential I think. And it's the reunion that kind of, I find it so frustrating that after Oscar Wilde leaves prison part of the film is that he gets back with Bosie. He writes Daplofundus and that's how the film opens. He gives that script that becomes known as Daplofundus to Robbie Ross. And I'd love to come on to Robbie because you've got a brilliant take on Robbie. And he says, you know, make three copies of this. One for myself, one for you, and send it to Bosie. And I don't think Bosie ever reads it. Bosie didn't read it till 1927 I think or something like that. He never really knew what was in the letter. Because Robbie Ross did not send the profundus to Bosie. And Bosie, he only found out about it years later. But sorry, what was the question? The question is, tell me about this reunion moment. And again, is it a moment where Oscar Wilde could have saved himself from trouble? So you've got the public fall, that's him going into prison. Society sends him to prison. And then this is a more private fall. This is the second fall really. Yeah, but I think in a way they needed to see each other again. I mean, it's not an unusual thing. Anyone who gets back together with people as a modus operandi is probably in for a bit of trouble. Because it's better if you leave someone never to go back probably. But since Oscar was weak and he got very bored, and that's one of the things I learned when I went to Bernaval, which is this little tiny village on the plains of northern France with these cliffs in front of the sea. It's really lonely. It's just farms and sheep. And you could really imagine this man who'd been holding forth in the Café Royal and friends with everybody just sitting there day after day, walking down to the beach, walking back, not doing anything. And then Bozi was in Paris and started writing him letters. And of course, his fantasy got the better of him. And then they met and they had this historic meeting in Rouen. And then they decided to get back together. And you feel Bozi wasn't really that keen on it actually, I don't think, because he then went off to Barden Barden with his mother. And Oscar prepared to go meet Bozi in Naples. But it was a bad idea from the beginning. But again, it's another thing I find very romantic about Oscar. You know, trying again with Bozi. And I think he needed that. He needed to still go further down, I think, Robbie. So Dapre fundus, which we've just talked about, it is in here in the British Library. You can see the annotated publishers' proofs. You can also see this correspondence with Robbie Ross. And I feel that we should move on to Robbie now because you think that Robbie should have been the one for Oscar. I think Robbie was the one for Oscar in the end. Oscar realised Oscar was only stripped of all vanity right at the end of his life. And right up until that point, he was still kind of puffing and posturing and pretending to be something, I think. And he couldn't see that Robbie Ross was the man he loved. But he did love him. And he needed him. And Robbie was the person who was with him, you know, not actually at the very end, but almost until the end. And they're buried together. Robbie Ross is ashes on top of Oscar Wilde's grave in Paris. And I feel that they're the couple really. And the tragedy, the real tragedy in the end is when you don't realise that the person that you actually love is standing there in front of you. And Oscar didn't realise. And that sight is quite important because there's so many overlays for you. I believe when it was first unveiled, there as part of the unveiling. But also it's a place that you walked by with Pearl, another of a good friend, and the tragic story there is also in the book as well. But it's sort of how locations can have suddenly multiple meanings. I spent a lot of time at Oscar Wilde's grave and I also became very good friends with Oscar Wilde's grandson, Merlin, who, by the way, is bringing out an amazing new book about kind of the aftershock of Oscar Wilde, how it affected generations afterwards. Because a scandal like that actually is rather like they say in the Bible, the sins of the Father being visited on seven generations. You can actually see an explosion like the Oscar Wilde scandal and you can see how it affected his sons, his elder son, more or less, no one quite knows, but he went up in the First World War before the whistle, they whistled and then everyone went over and a serial went up before the whistle. So it feels like it was a kind of suicide and his other son, they all paid the price. Even Merlin wasn't allowed to study music at school because the family felt that it would look too gay. So it's a fascinating thing of how something like that can keep going through generations. I'm going to turn to questions now from the audience and we have one that's already come in online, so it's from Nicole and it's to you, Rupert, which is, are you working on any new books now? I am working on two new books now and not very successfully, unfortunately, but I'm writing on a book of stories and pictures that I've made for the movies over the years and none of them ever got made and I thought this was a good idea for a book at one point but then I realised as I started writing the stories I could kind of see why they never got made and so they've provided me with a lot of headache really because I've obviously got to try and make them into really good stories but I don't know, it's an uphill struggle but I think for me as an actor I think writing is a terrible uphill struggle because you do it all alone and if you're an actor really all you have to do is get up in the morning because the rest of it you're either in rehearsal with a group of people you're always bouncing ideas off people if you're a writer you can bounce ideas, you can read a book and say I'm going to copy a bit of that or I like this kind of type of writing for my book but it's an incredibly solitary thing and you have endless, at least I do, dark nights of the soul writing which you don't get the chance to have as an actor in a way Are there any questions from the audience please? Do raise your hand and a microphone will come to you and I think we've got the first one right here Rupert, you've talked about the actor you wanted to play, Bosie What about the other main characters as some familiar faces in that trailer? Did you have quite a clear idea about who you wanted to play those roles? I had to have as many famous people as possible for the money so I had to go through all the people I thought I could wrangle into the film and I was very lucky because Colin Firth agreed to be in the film and in a very tiny role and really once I'd said what you do with these things I had a reading of the film when I'd first written it about 10 years or 12 years before it was actually made and Colin came and Emily came Emily Watson and Tom Wilkinson came and you get everyone to sign this piece of paper saying I will be in the film if I'm not doing anything else and actually they're nothing these pieces of paper but they're what you take to places around the world you say I've got this, Colin rang me yesterday and said when are we starting blah blah blah and little by little as the money got raised it was all because Colin had just won the Oscar by the time the film was happening which was great for me in one sense but it meant I became completely reliant on him because all the deals were about him everyone just kept saying are you sure Colin's coming and I said yes absolutely meanwhile one day Colin rang me and said I just can't do it and that was it I got nearly there and I thought it's gone and I have my Brazilian mother-in-law did some black magic on him and then the next day literally he rang so I've worked it out and so he came on board and Emily came on board and Tom Wilkinson and they really were the ones who got it financed so I'm so grateful to them I think Tom Wilkinson's the importance of being earnest with you in that film he's going to baptise you he kind of gives you your last rights as well so it's a nice bookend and he's a marvellous actor, a wonderful actor We've got another question right at the back there How you touched on Bozi and Oscar in Naples and I wondered if you could say a little bit more about his time there and on the island of Capri Capri was not in... I don't think he went to Capri in that period in 1897 they'd gone to Capri before I think it's my understanding, I'm not sure but Naples was the end of the road for Oscar again it's another thing that seems very romantic to us because they went to Naples in September it's amazing Naples in September and it's got a warm summer until December but then it was 30 or 40 years after unification in Italy so Naples was this completely lawless, reckless, chaotic fallen down, really impoverished place horrible food because Oscar said a very funny thing there's a place where people used to go and commit suicide which you can go to and it's called Cap Porcelipo it's right at the end of the bay or not the end, halfway down the bay and he tells a friend he was thinking of committing suicide and then the friend said, why didn't you do it? and he said, well because I just was frightened of getting stuck here with the food but they had a horrible time in Naples and they lived in this castle that was this palazzo that was kind of rat infested and everyone stole everything from them and I think it was a very unsuccessful reunion and also everybody was squeezing them out as soon as they got there together so Oscar's allowance was cut off Bozi's allowance was cut off they had no money and then Lord Roseberry, the Prime Minister of England who was also secretly gay he had started building his house Villa Roseberry, which is in Porcelipo and they wanted to get Oscar out of the way as well so everybody was pushing them out I think he has a tragedy with one of the other sons one of the other Marcus's sons as well Marcus the Queensberry sons as well was it Roseberry and the Elder Brother? Roseberry, no, the Elder Brother of Queensberry of Bozi was Roseberry's private secretary and everybody thought or some people thought that Roseberry and the Elder Son of Queensberry were having an affair and anyway he committed suicide or he died from a gunshot wound which no one has quite ever understood what happened but people felt that it was because that was all going to come out of the open and then people also felt maybe that Roseberry was forced to convict Oscar to stop a story about himself coming out but none of that is grounded in any evidence I think it's kind of, so who knows really Do we have a second question just up the back as well or was that? Yeah If you were able to go back in time knowing what you know about what actually happens to him would you advise him to drop the libel case or do you think his importance as a gay Christ as you call it outweighs his personal tragedy? Well I think he would have been nothing we wouldn't know him now if he hadn't taken the decision he took because there are in fact a whole lot of 19th century writers of kind of pot boiling dramas from bad to fair to middle to very very good that we don't even know about now so even though I do think the importance of being earnest is a kind of perfect play there's a great plays too but they're probably a lot of other plays that are very good like that that we don't even know about so I think the only reason we know him is because of his crucifixion and I think him in general the whole of him is what is so intriguing and that includes staying in the Cadougan Hotel and going to prison I think for me Bosie stays during the trials but Robbie like many others he flees to the continent as well I think that comes back to I think that gets played out in the film as well or perhaps it's the play, it is in the play Douglas says that I stayed but everyone else fled you it's part of that love triangle Yeah but he didn't stay Bosie left too before the final conviction I think Robbie was the only one who stayed actually for the conviction Robbie was the one who bowed to him as he was taken out of prison and that's the line that's sort of mentioned in David Fondas it's something that he holds on to as a very noble act to have done silently After that Robbie leaves England but he stays with Oscar right until he's convicted We've got one in the back we'll take that in the back isn't he and then we've got one here as well So let's do that movement Hi, interesting to hear from you the relationship with his children when I watched your movie I was very moved and I really felt the pain it went through not being able to see his children a real agony I think so do you think it could have done something different going I don't know it's not I didn't understand if he ever really went to see his children if he wrote letters to his children if they've never been delivered to them could you tell about his actions could have done something different to be reconciled or reunited with his children I think that's an interesting thing because the myth is that Oscar Wilde loved his son so much that it broke his heart never to see them again I think the reality would have been something slightly different if you look at his life in London before the scandal he pretty much ignored his home life he certainly ignored his wife I don't think men were known to be that loving with their children I'm sure he was but our picture of him as being this father time character that we've developed I think that's possibly not what was happening I'm not saying he didn't adore his children I just don't think it was a relationship like for example a modern like we now would recognise how fathers feel about two sons there was more detachment to it more mental was it more mental maybe a relationship no it was just more distant right from I think people we have a very post Freudian way of dealing with children and they were before that they were quite hands off they went off to school after all age 5 or 6 they went off to stay at school they didn't really come back it was really hardly ever so I don't think I think he did like his children very much but I don't think it was this kind of I don't think it was quite what it's been made out of made out to be since your choice for the title of the film though it links to a children's tale and throughout the film there is a running thread between his children and he's telling of the tale to the children and it sort of plays through a few times as well it's a story of making the ultimate sacrifice in some ways as well well he wrote those stories before he had children anyway but I think I'm sure he was he was very friendly with his children but I think I think his problem afterwards I don't know whether he never really kind of I don't know you can't really tell what his relationship with the children was like they had a horrible time Cyril only learnt that Oscar was dead I mean Cyril didn't really know what they didn't they were split up straight after Oscar Wilde he went to prison they were split up because they didn't like each other and they weren't allowed ever to say that they were Oscar Wilde's sons so they were forced to lie everywhere they went and because they didn't get along it was thought better that they were kept separate Cyril only found out that Wilde had died he thought he died before in fact but he found out because someone in his school had a newspaper and said that poor Oscar Wilde's just died and this boy who is pretending to be someone else I mean that's the tragedy can you imagine how a 10 year old boy pretending to be someone else not being able to talk about anything never seeing your mother because she lived in Genoa and then she died because she died a year after Oscar came out of prison she had this gynaecological operation that went wrong and she died in Genoa so these two children are left without even an identity and they have to kind of negotiate their way through this incredibly hostile world that they know that if anyone ever discovers who their father is they're liable to be chucked out of the place or made fun of, I mean that really is something quite extraordinary and I think Cyril never managed to get over it and Vivien did manage to get over it but you know there was such a scar and a price to pay for them Constance Lloyd, Constance Wilde, Constance Holland his wife I find remarkable through those final uses also that she does write in a letter if I were to meet you again I would forgive everything so there is a love that sort of stays there as well and I just want to understand from you what your thinking is around what Constance was thinking I think Constance was amazing because Constance of course she had no clue even what homosexuality was she wouldn't have known when he had people staying with him in his dressing room she would just have assumed that that was just what friends did so for her when the court case came up suddenly this door is opened into a world that she had literally no idea about I think that must have been horrible and he hadn't been very nice to her since he was kind of loving to her before Cyril was born and then after Cyril was born he got to be quite not so nice the thing about Wilde is he wasn't altogether a nice person he was a human being which I also think is interesting about him but he wasn't very nice to his wife and she was incredibly long suffering afterwards as well and I think she did, she loved him Are you going to go to a question from Cyril? You might have to project Okay I'll repeat it You've been talking about people fleeing to the continent and presumably that is wealthier people people who could afford to go and live in a hotel and whatever and I'm thinking about that because at the moment my social media streams are full of trans people from places like Texas and Florida desperately trying to raise money to move to a safer part of the USA I know that a number of wealthier trans women have already left the UK in anticipation of similar laws there but equally people leaving the UK because they're afraid that laws like the US House will come in here but a lot of people are saying we can't afford to go so although obviously these wealthy people are fleeing to the continent I'm interested to know what were the consequences for your working class gay man in the street because of the wild trial and would it have been different for them if he hadn't made that stand? Would it have been different for them? I think things were very difficult for them but a lot of the boys involved in the wild scandal were bought afterwards and so they were protected but no I think it was very difficult if you read gay life in the time of Byron in the 1830s where Hophouse Byron's best friend went to see that amazing hanging of the officer and the drummer boy who had been having an affair and then the gay pub in Charing Cross where the bishop was caught being fucked by some boys and they were all put on in the pillory and the pillory then was basically a death penalty anyway because they threw cats, bricks, shit and everything at you and you just went round and round and that one pillorying when they busted this gay bar in Charing Cross in 1817 which was during the Regency which was a really nasty time for gays they were pilloried for 12 hours by 60,000 people quite a lot of people and all of them died after their eyes were out they had infections you couldn't survive so wealthy people were lucky in the Clifton Street affair where they had that brothel that the people running the brothel all pretended to be priests it was very clever until they were done the Lord Arthur, whatever he's called he managed to get away and he went to live abroad forever but yeah, poor people had to eat it So we sadly have to wrap so I'm going to land with one final question but Oscar Wilde did say towards the end that I'm dying beyond my means I will never outlive this century the English people just won't stand for it and yet now we are here where the only plays from the 1890s that have performed are the works of Oscar Wilde The Pitcher of Dorian Gray is a modern myth you can say you've got a picture in the attic and everyone knows exactly what that means and his widestisms remain endlessly quotable but he did also complain of prisons of stone prisons of passion, prisons of intellect prisons of morality and the way that the film ends is it says the Alan Turing Law pardoned 75,000 men for the crime of homosexuality the society can have a change of heart the law can wipe the slate clean but for Oscar it's a bit too little too late but what do you think ultimately is the legacy and the legend of Oscar Wilde for today? For me he's the start of the movement of liberty I think he puts a face onto it and that face means that a journey starts and the journey keeps on and I think we can either be encouraged by the distance the journey has gone or you're discouraged by what you feel is happening now but still the journey is things move all the time and I think Wilde is definitely the face of the beginning of that movement for me Thank you very much Rupert Everett please Thank you very much everybody Thank you both Thank you both I'm going to sneak in a really short question just because I'm using a privilege here You've played lots of historical characters Yes Which one is your favourite aside from Oscar? Charles II I played Charles I and Charles II and I think Charles II is a great character and I'd like to be James I and VI as well Yes Thank you, thank you, thanks everyone Thank you very much Can I quickly use a position of privilege as well? Slightly silly Have we ever led a carrier This is probably for the British Library stuff back there Have we ever led a karaoke session here at the British Library? Karaoke? Yeah, yeah Do you feel like starting a song for us Rupert? No Rupert's book is on sale It's plural Our on sale outside at the moment We're going to let Rupert have a few minutes break and then he'll be signing books for you all as well Thank you very much everyone, thank you