DECEMBER 2011/JANUARY 2012
www.celtic-connection.com
Page 27
NO MORE KISSES FOR OSCAR WILDE'S TOMB
PARIS - Oscar Wilde wrote: "Each man kills the thing he loves. The coward does it with a kiss."
And for more than a decade, fans of Oscar Wilde have been proving his point. A craze started in the 1990s to place lipstick kisses, or daub painted lips, on the tomb of the great Irish writer in the famous Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris.
Eventually there were so many kisses that the grease in the lipstick and the oil in the paint threatened to destroy the limestone of the tomb, which includes a celebrated image of a 'flying angel-demon' by the Anglo-American sculptor Jacob Epstein.
The tomb survived almost unscathed until 1985, except for the angel's genitals being hacked off.
On November 30,111 years to the day of his death penniless in a Paris hotel at
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WRITER OscarWilde was born in Dublin on October 16, 1854. He died at the age of 46 on November 30,1900 in Paris. He became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. Today he is remembered for his epigrams, plays and the circumstances of his imprisonment, followed by his early death. The above photograph taken in 1882 by Napoleon Sarony.
OSCAR Wilde's renovated Paris tomb was unveiled on November 30, complete with a new glass barrier to shield the monument from a torrent of admiring kisses.
the age of 46, Wilde was given sanctuary from those who claim to love him.
In a moving ceremony, his only grandchild, Merlin Holland, rededicated a cleansed and restored tomb, now surrounded by an elegant glass screen.
More than 200 people gathered to hear the actor Rupert Everett read from Wilde's prose poem De Profundis, written while he was imprisoned in Reading Jail for acts of homosexuality.
Irish Junior Arts Minister Dinny McGinley paid tribute to a "very great Irishman, who has moved people the world over." The "modest" EU50,000 cost of restoration was covered by the Irish Government and the private Ireland Fund of France.
Holland (66) a British writer based in France, campaigned for the restoration of his grandfather's tomb with the help of Sheila Pratschke, the director of the Irish Cultural Centre in Paris.
In 1895, Wilde was jailed inEngland for being homosexual, something which impacted greatly on Holland's father and uncle.
"I think it had less impact on my father than it did on my uncle who was a year and a half older and who knew what was going on.
"My father didn't have clue - he didn't know what had sent his father to prison until he was about 17 years-old. He thought his father had been sent to prison for embezzling money.
"The effect on my father for many years was profound because Oscar Wilde was seen as the naughty boy of English letters until well up into the 1920s. It was without question extremely difficult for my father."
Pere Lachaise, in north-eastern Paris, is the most visited cemetery in the world.
It is the last resting place of, among others, the composers Chopin and Bizet, the writer Marcel Proust, the singer Edith Piaf and the American rock star Jim Morrison.
A graffiti epidemic in the cemetery began when Morrison, lead singer of The Doors, was buried there in 1971.
At one point, every fourth tomb on the route to his grave was daubed with arrows or scrawled with the words: "This way to Jim."
When the Morrison graffiti calmed down in the late 1990s, the Wilde graffiti took over.
"Something had to be done," Everett said. "Okay, so people want to express themselves. Well, baby, from now on you can kiss the glass screen."
Tributes to 'unique' Ken Russell
LONDON - Tributes were paid to the "unique" talent of Oscar-nominated British film director Ken Russell following his sudden death at the age of 84.
The director of Women In Love and The Devils died at his home in Lymington, Hampshire on November 27, said his devastated wife Elize.
She said, "It is with great sadness that I can confirm that Ken Russell passed away peacefully in his sleep on Sunday afternoon. It was completely unexpected, as he was doing what he loved."
Russell had been working on the script and casting for the movie Alice In Wonderland The Musical, which he was directing, she added.
The film-maker, who began his career in television, had a reputation as an enfant terrible of the British movie world, with his 1969 movie Women In Love known to a generation for its nude male wrestling scene, with Oliver Reed and Alan Bates.
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