“Formerly we used to canonise our heroes. The modern method is to vulgarize them. Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable.” For any given situation there is always an Oscar Wilde quotation. In this case, the situation is the canonisation, or otherwise, of Wilde himself. His position in the pantheon is entirely justified: his work is never out of production on stage and screen – but for some Wilde-worshippers that’s not enough. They want to get closer to his self-declared genius, perhaps in the hope that it will rub off on them.

The latest edition of the great man is Rupert Everett, who jowls up unrecognisably to portray Wilde in his creatively depleted but corporeally bloated final years in The Happy Prince, also his directorial debut. Everett is something of a Wilde veteran, having appeared in Oliver Parker’s starry big-screen adaptations of An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, and having portrayed Wilde in a 2012 revival of David Hare’s play The Judas Kiss.

But he’s got competition here. The immediate comparison will be Stephen Fry’s portrayal in the 1997 film Wilde. Despite being physically perfect for the part, Fry had a lot of sceptics to win over: he was considered a light entertainer – rather than a serious actor – at the time, but he earned a new level of respect for his labours

Less successful was Al Pacino. It is unlikely when Wilde wrote the part of Herod in Salomé he envisaged a hammy New Yorker with a bouffant hairstyle and a crumpled suit, but simply staging Salomé, twice, was not enough for Pacino; he was impelled to make Wilde Salomé, a documentary following Pacino’s personal journey of Wilde discovery, with contributions from Tom Stoppard, Gore Vidal and, er, Bono. Other musicians to commit to Wilde fandom include Patti Smith and Morrissey, while Annie Clark (AKA St Vincent) is currently directing a film of The Picture of Dorian Gray with the title character as a woman.

But why does Wilde’s legacy persist so strongly? It is not necessarily the case that great writers lead biopic-worthy lives, and their stories often require some embellishment – as with multi-stranded Virginia Woolf movie The Hours, or strained “how I wrote” films such as Miss Potter and Goodbye Christopher Robin. By comparison, Wilde’s life was its own work of tragedy, celebrity and martyrdom. He was ahead of his time but entirely in tune with ours.

In comparison to other Wilde-worshippers, Rupert Everett has at least dismissed any direct comparisons with his hero. “He was a great intellect and I am a floozy,” he recently said. Oscar would surely have applauded.

The Happy Prince is in UK cinemas from 15 Jun