Two British actors find a kindred spirit in each other

By Shawn Levy-The Oregonian

On is a cheeky gadabout, droll and killer handsome and openly gay and famed for his wicked past, his fabulous friendships with the likes of Madonna and the razor wit that he displays in parlays with the press and in published works of his own hand.

The other drier, lower-keyed, more traditionally attractive has made a name playing characters who exhibit such stereotypical traits of his nationality as emotional reserve, deference, politesse and the stiff upper lip as well as making a subspecialty of fellow named Darcy. 

Say hello to Rupert Everett and Colin Firth, stars of the new  adaptation of Oscar Wilde's 'The Importance of  Being Earnest,' which opens Friday and as pleasant a pair of fortysomething actors as you could chat  with on the phone from the New York hotel where they're promoting the picture. 

Nearly 20 years ago, the two made another film together, 'Another Country,' a drama about English college students being drawn into Marxist fervor and illicit homosexual romance. They both made a big impression in the picture but, to hear Everett tell it, "We didn't really get on."

They went on to their own things. Everett gabbed attention in such smoldering fare as "Dance With a Stranger" and "The Comfort of Strangers" and then spent a few years working in Europe, returning to English-language movies  reborn as a delicious light comic talent in such films as "The Madness of King George," "My Best Friend's Wedding" and "An Ideal Husband." 

Firth embarked on a series of somber roles in "Apartment Zero" and "A Month in the Country," then a career as the other man in such films as "The English Patient," "Shakespeare In Love" and "Circle of Friends," and finally found  himself cast as
the guy who gets the girl in the BBC "Pride and Prejudice" and its mod sister "Bridget Jones's  Diary," in both of which playing a putative priggish Mr Darcy. 

Now, however, cast as Wilde's roguish upper-class heroes, dining out on nerve and dash, running from creditors, wooing women under false pretenses, even singing old-timey courtship tunes with their own guitar and piano  accompaniment, the two actors seem to have found in each other kindred spirits, one-time young hotshots who've mellowed into 
knowing and exquisitely crafty pros. 

"We got on really well and had a great rapport when we worked together now," Everett concedes. "He's a very good person to tease, Colin. He's quite earnest."

Firth, too, was grateful to behold a familiar face on the set of Oliver Parker's adaptation of the Wilde chestnut. In part, he says, it was simply because acting with someone you know is so much easier than the alternative. "Knowing  each other's steps, so much of what you might otherwise have to struggle for can be assumed," he explains. "You already trust them; the barriers have been broken down; there's recognition between each other. In a film you're usually having to manufacture an intimacy with somebody  whom you don't know at all, and you have an enormous task of suspending disbelief in order to act properly." 

But in part, the familiarity Firth had with Everett-and with each other "Earnest" co-stars as Judi Dench and Tom Wilkinson-made him more at ease with the broad changes that Parker instituted in the play. While the structure is essentially that of the original and most of the precious lines of dialogue are untouched, Parker has injected  the film with
modern touches, flights of fancy and, yes, some rewrites, in an effort to =enliven Wilde for an audience who may not have been raised, as earlier generations were, on a steady diet of the play.

"It had become this iconic antique," admits Firth, "dead as a doornail And too often the productions I've seen  have been an homage to aphorisms and epigrams and great literature, and it's been really dull. It's become a ritual where already converted Wilde devotees sit there and nearly laugh before they hear the lines. This one had to be given 
some freshness, and because it's so rich, when you appropriate the words, it was surprising how easily it felt like your own  speech."

The invigoration of a Wilde classic, according to both actors, is  part of a general rehabilitation of the writer, who was celebrated at the end  of the 19th century for his outrageous talent but condemned-and even imprisoned-for  flouting Victorian sexual conventions concerning homosexuality. 

With this film, Parker's 1999 admirable adaptation of "An Ideal Husband," the 1997 biopic "Wilde" with  Stephen Fry in the lead role, and dozens of recent stage productions of works by and about the playwright, we're in the midst of a  full-fledged Wilde renaissance.

"It's about time, is all I can say," declares Firth, who ascribes the newfound interest in Wilde to the excessive doting on the author's works in generations part.

"One generation may have seen dozens of productions of his work and then they got tired of them and so he was put back on the shelf," he explains.
"And then you have a generation of kids whose parents aren't particularly interested in it and they get to discover it. I think it goes in cycles like that. I spoke to a girl of about 17 who said the kids at her school had heard there was a film of 'Earnest' coming out and they were dying to see it and wasn't it cool? 

"And when I told my dad what I was doing, he said "Oh, they're doing that again?" As it we'd been doing nothing but 'Earnest' year after year."

For Everett, the revival of interest in Wilde has to do as well with the writer's ill treatment at the hands of the English establishment. "Oscar Wilde is still an unresolved question mark," he says. 'He's a kind of local figure in one sense, in that he's part of English literature, but he's an international figure in another sense, because he's kind of a 
punctuation point in the human rights movement. He was a martyr."

But Everett is quick to add that the contemporary taste for Wilde's works has as much to do with their content as with their author's  sensational life. "His central theme, which is how camouflaged we all are compared to what we're  like underneath, is a good one," he reckons. "What obviously amused him was looking at upper-class people and seeing how 
their surfaces were completely different from what they were like underneath. And that's what he was like as well."

Everett warned to his own theme. "He was presenting one thing on the surface and being something else underneath. And I don't think that's changed, really. Even though we look more relaxed, we're still constrained by morality about what we are to be and how we are to be. 

"And quite often what we really are inside is this corseted thing that lies in there festering because it really hasn't ever been allowed to reveal itself."

Firth agrees that the Wildean theme of hidden reality is for him, one of the play's chief appeals. "I find reserve interesting," he says. "Whenever people describe uptightness, they always refer to the emotion that's underneath, the  emotional story that's being told through a filter. The suggestion is always so much more powerful than having to be explicit."

Such duality, he explains, can mean the difference between an exhausting  experience of watching a film and an engaging one: "I've sat in a cinema and watched a person totally alienate me because they had done all the work. I was just being screamed at. Congratulations on being so free with your emotions, but nothing's happening to me; I don't get to interact; I'm just being lambasted."

For the lucky audiences that catch up with "Earnest," however, there's plenty to do: Have a good laugh, enjoy some of the sharpest dialogue ever written, and watch Everett and Firth, a couple of accomplished actors with skill and talent to spare, delight in their mutual company.

© 2002 The  Oregonian
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.