Born to Be Wilde

In his introduction to the handsome edition of Julian Mitchell’s screenplay for “Wilde,” British actor Stephen Fry, who plays the title role, writes, “For many years I have known that Oscar Wilde was one of the few major parts I might be lucky enough to be offered.”

Best known in America as P.G. Wodehouse’s imperturbable manservant Jeeves of the “Jeeves and Wooster” series on PBS, Fry is awfully hard on his own appearance--”a complexion not unlike that of freshly applied window putty” is really overdoing it--although he’s not conventionally handsome. Just 40, he’s about 6 feet 4, a bit thick in the waist and has a craggy nose and a strong jaw (perhaps more Julia Child than Jay Leno).

But his extraordinarily large, expressive eyes, deep mellow voice and endless wit and charm make him a more attractive man than he may realize.

A career of “Gestapo interrogators, emotionally constipated cuckolds and Bond villains” is what Fry envisioned for himself. 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.

Fry conveys strong character and emotional vulnerability, which seems the perfect combination to play Oscar Wilde. Like Wilde, Fry, a stylish essayist in his own right, also had a classical education, though he attended Cambridge rather than Oxford.

“Oscar means so much to so many people in so many ways,” remarked Fry over dinner at his West Hollywood hotel. (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. Well, he was not living in the era of e-mail, he was a man of his time. It’s silly to have expected him to be Harvey Fierstein or Larry Kramer. Yet actually he’s very modern; for him the sins of the flesh were nothing, the sins of the spirit everything.

“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. We see nature as beautiful, when so much of what man has made is so ugly. Such ugliness makes one feel guilty. 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. People confuse imagination and fantasy.”

Fry finds it unfortunate that despite Wilde’s stature as a major figure in English literature, we’re still obsessed with his love life. “Our Oscar is not a bitchy queen forever dropping epigrams. Films force real life on the screen; it will not tolerate what you can get away with on the stage.”

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.

“There is something about Oscar Wilde’s capacity for kindness and self-knowledge--he knew who he was--that affected me deeply,” Fry said. “Two months before everything started [on the film], I asked someone out, I felt more courageous. I decided that if I was going to play Oscar Wilde, I had to have a relationship. 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.

Since completing “Wilde,” Fry has finished shooting Steven Zallian’s “Civil Action,” due this fall from Touchstone. 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. Fry plays a key witness in Travolta’s defense.

“I’m torn apart on the witness stand by Robert Duvall,” said Fry. “What an experience! He’s such a wonderful actor!”

“Wilde” seems certain to increase Fry’s visibility and opportunities, and he would like to adapt Evelyn Waugh’s “Vile Bodies” and John Kennedy Toole’s “Confederacy of Dunces” to the screen. Writing, he said, allows him to get away from “other people telling you what to do. You yearn to be alone.”

“Yet I always knew I was going to be an actor, from the time I was a child going to the pantomimes with my brother. We both loved them, wanted to see them again, but my feeling was, ‘How do I get in one?’ while my brother always wanted to be part of the audience.”

The scholarship that took him to Cambridge also got him involved in student revues with the likes of Emma Thompson. “We had to write the sketches that we performed, and that was good training. Writing is an extension of acting. I was not at all surprised that Emma got an Oscar for her screenplay adaptation of ‘Sense and Sensibility.’ ”

“I’ve always been a realist. I will never get the parts that Leonardo DiCaprio is up for. ‘Wilde’ has given me a chance to swim in the deep end. I’d be perfectly happy to go back to playing those Bond villains with much more serenity now. If a star is in a movie, he may never be quite sure the director really wanted him, but I know I’m in this film because everyone wanted me.”