British actor Stephen Fry remembers being about 10 years old in the late 1960s when he first saw a production of Oscar Wilde’s play “The importance of Being Earnest” on television.
He immediately checked out the “Complete Works of Oscar Wilde” from the mobile library that visited his town in rural England.
“I went back and said, ‘Have you got anything else?’ And [the librarian] said, “Well, that’s the complete works,’” Fry tells me on the latest episode of the “Just for PvNew” podcast. “I searched the shelves and I found this book, ‘The Trials of Oscar Wilde.’ I thought, that’s really weird. I thought trials as in trials and tribulations, maybe he had a very unhappy life. So I took the book out and she stamped it out for me looking a bit doubtful as to whether I should read it. I didn’t understand why.”
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