Sir John Gielgud: Trouser Enthusiast

Sir John Gielgud was one of our best-loved actors, but the Oscar-winner has become involved in a highly controversial production from beyond the grave.

A gay porn film for which the celebrated Shakespearean actor secretly wrote the screenplay has been made.

Trouser Bar, which is set in a menswear shop, features unlikely roles for Eighties heart-throb Nigel Havers, 63, camp comedian Julian Clary, 56, and veteran comic Barry Cryer, 80. ‘It’s very light-hearted,’ Havers tells me.

However, the film has caused an outcry from The Sir John Gielgud Charitable Trust, which administers the affairs of the actor, who died in 2000 aged 96.

‘Earlier this year, the trustees decided not to give their permission for it to be produced because they didn’t think it was appropriate,’ one member, Ian Bradshaw, tells me.

‘They didn’t have to go into detail because they own the copyright.’

Gielgud, perhaps best known as Dudley Moore’s butler in the Hollywood comedy Arthur [!!!], was arrested in 1953 and fined for cruising [sic] in a public lavatory.

According to Trouser Bar’s producer, David McGillivray, Sir John was a keen viewer of such material.

‘Pornography is still a stigma in this country, but Sir John loved porn and, in his letters, he talks about visiting gay cinemas,’ says McGillivray.

Daily Mail.

News of this exciting project was first revealed last year.

Fagburn is ever so pleased they've pulled it off, and hopes this can be resolved amicably.

Sir John Gielgud: All Mouth And No Trousers

[Peter] De Rome, who died earlier this year, made gay pornography in New York from the 1960s onwards, at a time when homosexuality was illegal, and became the subject of the recent documentary Peter de Rome: Grandfather of Gay Porn. The documentary’s producer David McGillivray revealed details of a collaboration between De Rome and Gielgud at a recent Barbican retrospective of pulp director Pete Walker.

“Peter de Rome knew everybody when he was working, including John Gielgud, and John was so impressed with Peter’s work – which of course was porn – that he wrote Peter a screenplay,” McGillivray said. “Nobody knows anything about this script, it’s not in the John Gielgud letters, it’s not mentioned in the biographies, it’s an unknown script. John Gielgud’s only screenplay. So next year, we are going to make that.

“It’s called Trouser Bar. John Gielgud was obsessed with trousers, loved corduroy and leather. And so he wrote a film set in a menswear shop.” ...

Guardian online.

Hope they can find the flipping script - you old dog, you! x