The best Oscar Wilde films

It is 122 years this week since Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde died – in exile, poverty and disgrace – at Paris’s shabby St Germain Hôtel d’Alsace. His last words were said to be: ‘My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us must go.’

Despite Wilde’s precipitous fall from grace and the ignominy heaped upon him (his children had to change their surname to Holland), within a relatively brief time his plays were revived and books reissued to renewed popular acclaim. And more than a century later, that appeal hasn’t faded: this year in England alone, The Importance of Being Earnest toured the north and Richard Strauss’s adaptation of Salome was performed at the Royal Opera House.

But some of the best adaptations of Wilde’s work can be found on screen. As a child of the 1970s, I was introduced to Wilde via Michael Mills’s wonderfully affecting animated versions of The Selfish Giant (1971) and The Happy Prince (1974), which Thames Television were wont to play during the school holidays.