Oscar Wilde is a 1960

1960 in film

The year 1960 in film involved some significant events, with Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho the top-grossing release in the U.S.-Events:* April 20 - for the first time since coming home from military service in Germany, Elvis Presley returns to Hollywood, California to film G.I...

 biographical film

Biographical film

A biographical film, or biopic , is a film that dramatizes the life of an actual person or people. They differ from films “based on a true story” or “historical films” in that they attempt to comprehensively tell a person’s life story or at least the most historically important years of their...

 about Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...

, made by Vantage Films and released by 20th Century Fox

20th Century Fox

Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation — also known as 20th Century Fox, or simply 20th or Fox — is one of the six major American film studios...

.

Production

The film was directed by Gregory Ratoff

Gregory Ratoff

Gregory Ratoff was a Russian-born American film director, actor and producer. His most famous role as an actor was as producer Max Fabian who feuds with star Margo Channing in All About Eve ....

 and produced by William Kirby, from a screenplay

Screenplay

A screenplay or script is a written work that is made especially for a film or television program. Screenplays can be original works or adaptations from existing pieces of writing. In them, the movement, actions, expression, and dialogues of the characters are also narrated...

 by Jo Eisinger

Jo Eisinger

Jo Eisinger was a film and television writer whose career spanned more than forty years from the early forties well into the eighties...

, based on the play Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde (play)

The play Oscar Wilde, written by Leslie & Sewell Stokes, is based on the life of the Irish playwright Oscar Wilde in which Wilde's friend, the controversial author and journalist Frank Harris, appears as a character...

by Leslie Stokes

Leslie Stokes

Leslie Stokes was an English playwright and BBC radio producer and director.As a young man Leslie Stokes was an actor and later became a playwright and BBC radio producer and director. Together with his brother, author and playwright Sewell Stokes, he co-wrote a number of plays, including the...

 and Sewell Stokes

Sewell Stokes

Francis Martin Sewell Stokes was an English novelist, biographer, playwright, screenwriter, broadcaster and prison visitor. He collaborated on a number of occasions with his brother, Leslie Stokes, an actor and later in life a BBC radio producer, with whom he shared a flat for many years...

. Original music score was by Kenneth Jones

Kenneth Jones

Kenneth Jones , was the son of Helen Myrl Carter and of Glenn Jones. He is best remembered for a song he wrote called "Sing A Traveling Song" which appeared on Johnny Cash's albums Hello, I'm Johnny Cash and Johnny Cash at Madison Square Garden. Kenneth was Cash's nephew-in-law...

.

The film starred Robert Morley

Robert Morley

Robert Adolph Wilton Morley, CBE was an English actor who, often in supporting roles, was usually cast as a pompous English gentleman representing the Establishment...

 as Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...

, Ralph Richardson

Ralph Richardson

Sir Ralph David Richardson was an English actor, one of a group of theatrical knights of the mid-20th century who, though more closely associated with the stage, also appeared in several classic films....

 as Sir Edward Carson, Phyllis Calvert

Phyllis Calvert

Phyllis Calvert was an English film, stage and television actress. She was one of the leading stars of the Gainsborough melodramas of the 1940s....

 as Constance Wilde, John Neville as Lord Alfred Douglas

Lord Alfred Douglas

Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas , nicknamed Bosie, was a British author, poet and translator, better known as the intimate friend and lover of the writer Oscar Wilde...

 , Dennis Price

Dennis Price

Dennis Price was an English actor, remembered for his suave screen roles, particularly Louis Mazzini in Kind Hearts and Coronets, and for his portrayal of the omniscient valet Jeeves in 1960s television adaptations of P. G...

 as Robbie Ross, Alexander Knox

Alexander Knox

Alexander Knox was a Canadian actor and author of adventure novels set in the Great Lakes area during the 19th century.-Biography:...

 as Sir Edgar Clarke and Edward Chapman as the Marquess of Queensberry

John Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry

John Sholto Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry GCVO was a Scottish nobleman, remembered for lending his name and patronage to the "Marquess of Queensberry rules" that formed the basis of modern boxing, for his outspoken atheism, and for his role in the downfall of author and playwright Oscar...

.

This was one of two films about Wilde released in 1960, the other being The Trials of Oscar Wilde

The Trials of Oscar Wilde

The Trials of Oscar Wilde also known as The Man with the Green Carnation and The Green Carnation, is a 1960 British film based on the libel and subsequent criminal cases involving Oscar Wilde and the Marquess of Queensberry. It was produced by Irving Allen, written by Allen and Ken Hughes and...

. They were both released in the last week of May. Author and former film extra, Brian Edward Hurst, gives a detailed description of a scene he witnessed during filming where Morley (as Wilde) attempted to pick up a newspaper boy on a foggy London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

street. Hurst's book: Heaven Can Help - the Autobiography of a Medium describes the day's filming at Walton-on-Thames Studio.

The attempted seduction scene was cut from the final version. This movie was a lower budget production which was compared unfavorably with the wide-screen, technicolor version The Trials of Oscar Wilde.