BBC News
By Damon Quinn
Did Edward Carson destroy Oscar Wilde?
In a new documentary set to screen on BBC NI, Wilde s grandson Merlin Holland asks if Carson deserves the reputation as the man who took down his grandfather.
In 1895, Wilde fought a duel in court with a lawyer who he had once called an old friend .
The lawyer was Carson, a fellow Dubliner Wilde knew from Trinity College Dublin, and it was the most scandalous case of Victorian times.
It ended in Wilde s ruin and led to his imprisonment for his homosexuality, which was a criminal offence in Britain until 1967.
Irish dramatist Oscar Wilde with Lord Alfred Douglas at Oxford in 1893. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
And as Carson is about to open up the arguments for the defence and a string of rent boys are about to give evidence Wilde, defeated, withdraws his case against Queensberry under advice from his lawyer, Sir Edward Clarke.
Shortly thereafter the evidence amassed by Queensberryâs team is handed to the British DPP and two criminal cases are taken against Wilde for gross indecency, the first resulting in a hung jury, the second leading to his conviction, prison, bankruptcy, exile and death in Paris in 1900.
The grandson of Irish playwright Oscar Wilde, whose life was said to have been ruined after a bitter courtroom clash with Unionist leader and lawyer Sir Edward Carson, has stumbled on a million-to-one discovery about his ancestor s deathbed conversion to Catholicism.
And it was all thanks to the team behind the TV show Give My Head Peace and a Belfast priest who narrowly escaped death in a shooting in South Africa 14 years ago.
The remarkable find came as the normally comedic team from Belfast were preparing a very different type of documentary with Merlin Holland about the links between his grandfather and Carson often dubbed the father of Northern Ireland .
The importance of being Everett The greatest role played by the actor is his portrayal of a profane, outrageous entertainer – himself. The end of the world, as far as Joan Collins was concerned, was being stood up by Rupert Everett. She’s waiting in the Ivy with Christopher Biggins; Rupert is in J Sheekey, down the road, recklessly spending the last of his Hollywood fame-currency with a trio of producers (he sums them up as “thin ties and neon teeth”). Suddenly, the maître d’ informs Everett that Miss Collins’s people are on the phone. She is very angry, and is leaving. They don’t speak again for ten years.
As a youth, Peter Craze once played Pip in Great Expectations opposite Donald Sutherland. Photograph: Jim Four
As a youth, Peter Craze once played Pip in Great Expectations opposite Donald Sutherland. Photograph: Jim Four
JackCraze
Wed 13 Jan 2021 11.12 EST
Last modified on Mon 15 Mar 2021 21.25 EDT
My father, the actor and theatre director Peter Craze, first appeared on stage aged 12 in a 1958 production of Peter Pan at the Scala theatre in London. In the audience that day was Sir Winston Churchill. Peter, who has died aged 74, went on to deliver a string of well-regarded radio, stage and television performances during the 1960s and 70s. But perhaps he will be most fondly remembered for his later work at the Drama Studio London, where he taught for more than 30 years and helped to shape the careers of so many.