Bristow’s books include Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing after 1885 (Columbia UP, 1995) and Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions (U of Toronto P, 2003). The Making of a Legend is to explore the posterity of Wilde and of his works in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.ĢThis volume was edited by Joseph Bristow, professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, a specialist of Victorian poetry and LGBT literary studies and a distinguished Wilde scholar. The aim of Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture. Late work included the 1989 incarnation of Yves Saint Laurent in the 2014 biopic of the fashion designer directed by Bertrand Bonello, and his final role in Albert Serra’s 2019 film Liberté, which he plays an 18th-century aristocrat who organises a night of outdoor debauchery.Īside from his relationship with Visconti, Berger, who was bisexual, was associated with numerous celebrities of the era, and married Francesca Guidato in 1994.1Since his death in 1900, Oscar Wilde and his works have been an on-going source of discussions, appropriations and creations, a palimpsest as well as a mirror of the modern and postmodern periods. He also had a small part as corrupt Vatican accountant Frederick Keinszig in The Godfather Part III while continuing to work in mostly European productions. In the Tinto Brass-directed Salon Kitty, he returned to the combination of sleaze and Nazism as an SS man who sets up a brothel for spying purposes.Īfter Visconti’s death in 1976, which precipitated a personal crisis, Berger struggled in his career, but secured a prominent role in TV series Dynasty as Fallon Carrington’s sleazy fiance Peter De Vilbis, who dies in a plane crash. Berger reunited again with Visconti for Conversation Piece, released in 1974, in which he starred opposite Burt Lancaster in a drama inspired by his and Visconti’s relationship in the same period he played one of his many playboy-gigolo characters opposite Elizabeth Taylor and Henry Fonda in Ash Wednesday, and another opposite Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson in The Romantic Englishwoman. Berger was subsequently cast in another signature role in Visconti’s biopic of Bavaria’s eccentric 19th-century King Ludwig II. Berger played Martin von Essenbeck, a scion of a wealthy industrial family who struggle for control over the business in interwar Germany as the Nazis rise to power for the film, Berger famously performed in drag as Marlene Dietrich and was subsequently nominated for a Golden Globe for most promising male newcomer.īerger then starred in an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and was cast in Vittorio de Sica’s 1970 masterwork The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, as a member of prosperous Italian family that fall victim to the fascists during the second world war. Visconti gave him his first acting role, a small part in the comic anthology The Witches, and subsequently cast him in a spectacular role in his landmark 1969 epic The Damned. Photograph: AFP/Getty Imagesīorn Helmut Steinberger in the Austrian spa town of Bad Ischl in 1944, Berger studied acting in London before moving to Italy, where he met and began a relationship with acclaimed director Luchino Visconti, nearly 40 years his senior. Helmut Berger at the 1976 Cannes film festival.
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