Critic C.A. Lejeune once called The Importance of Being Earnest the most quoted play in the English language next to Hamlet.

Director Anthony Asquith was the son of former Home Secretary Herbert Asquith, who filed the gross indecency charges under which Oscar Wilde was put on trial.

Michael Redgrave's mother played Lady Bracknell in the first London production of the play after Wilde's trial and incarceration.

Historians have suggested a number of in-jokes Wilde may have inserted in the play. "Ernest" may have been a code word for "homosexual" in 1890s London, while at least one biographer has pointed out the similarity between the name of Algernon's imaginary invalid friend, "Bunbury" and the towns of Banbury and Sunbury, where Wilde met and later engaged in a flirtation with a schoolboy.

The name of Margaret Rutherford's character, Miss Prism, is believed to be a pun on the word "misprision," which means "concealment of an error."

Cecily's fortune, 130,000 pounds, would be about $18 million today.

The Brighton Line, in whose cloakroom Jack Worthing says he was found, was the classier of the two railroad lines running through Victoria Station at the time.

The Importance of Being Earnest was only Edith Evans' sixth film. Despite its success, she would be off the screen for seven years.

Every day on the set (and on every film he made), Asquith wore a handkerchief given him by Mary Pickford in 1919 while he was studying the U.S. film industry in Hollywood.

For the U.S. release of The Importance of Being Earnest, the distributor insisted the word "perambulator" be re-dubbed with "baby carriage." Evans objected to this at first, trumpeting in her best Lady Bracknell voice, "I positively decline to do it," but she finally gave in.

The first film version of The Importance of Being Earnest was made in Germany in 1932 under the title Liebe, Scherz und Ernst. It was released in some countries as Bunbury, the name of Algernon's imaginary friend. More recently it had been filmed in Argentina as Al Compás de tu Mentira (1950).

The Importance of Being Earnest was one of the first plays broadcast over British television, with productions in 1937 and 1938. It also aired in 1946, with Margaret Rutherford as Lady Bracknell.

Edith Evans had to miss the film premiere of The Importance of Being Earnest because she was appearing on stage that night. Instead, she sent her secretary.

The film was advertised in the U.S. with the line, "They don't come any wilder than Oscar Wilde's classic comedy of manners, morals and morality!"

MEMORABLE QUOTES FROM THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST

"I really don't see anything romantic in proposing. It's very romantic to be in love but there's nothing romantic about a definite proposal. Why, one might be accepted. One usually is I believe. Then the whole excitement is over. The very essence of romance is uncertainty." --Michael Denison, as Algernon Moncrieff

"The truth is rarely pure and never simple. Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!"--Denison, as Algernon Moncrieff

"The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing ones clean linen in public." -- Denison, as Algernon

"You are quite perfect, Miss Fairfax."
"Oh, I hope I am not that. It would leave no room for developments, and I intend to develop in many directions." -- Michael Redgrave, as Jack Worthing, and Joan Greenwood, as Gwendolen Fairfax

"We live, as I hope you know, Mr. Worthing, in an age of ideals. The fact is constantly mentioned in the more expensive monthly magazines and has reached the provincial pulpits, I am told; and my ideal has always been to love someone of the name of Ernest. There is something in that name that inspires absolute confidence. The moment Algernon first mentioned to me that he had a friend called Ernest, I knew I was destined to love you." -- Greenwood, as Gwendolen Fairfax

"Rise, sir from this semi-recumbent posture. It is most indecorous." – Edith Evans, as Lady Bracknell, discovering Redgrave, as Jack Worthing, proposing to her daughter, Greenwood, as Gwendolyn.

"An engagement should come on a young girl as a surprise, pleasant or unpleasant, as the case may be. It is hardly a matter that she could be allowed to arrange for herself." -- Evans, as Lady Bracknell

"Do you smoke?"
"Well, yes, I must admit I smoke."
"I'm glad to hear it. A man should have an occupation of some kind." -- Evans, as Bracknell, and Redgrave, as Jack Worthing

"Ignorance is like a delicate, exotic fruit; touch it, and the bloom is gone. The whole idea of modern education is radically unsound. Fortunately, in England at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever." -- Evans

"To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness." – Evans

"Mr. Worthing, I confess I feel somewhat bewildered by what you have just told me. To be born, or at any rate bred, in a handbag, whether it had handles or not, seems to me to display a contempt for the ordinary decencies of family life that reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution. And I presume you know what that unfortunate movement led to? As for the particular locality in which the hand-bag was found, a cloak-room at a railway station might serve to conceal a social indiscretion -- has probably, indeed, been used for that purpose before now -- but it could hardly be regarded as an assured basis for a recognized position in good society." -- Evans

"All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That is his." –Denison

"I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays. You can't go anywhere without meeting clever people. The thing has become an absolute public nuisance. I wish to goodness we still had a few fools left."
"We have."
"I should extremely like to meet them. What do they talk about?"
"The fools? Oh, about the clever people, of course."
"What fools!" -- Redgrave and Denison

"The only way to behave to a woman is to make love to her if she is pretty and to some one else if she is plain." -- Denison "The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means." -- Margaret Rutherford, as Miss Prism, describing her lost novel

"You are too much alone, dear Dr. Chasuble. You should get married. A misanthrope I can understand - a womanthrope, never!" -- Rutherford, as Miss Prism, flirting with Miles Malleson, as the Reverend Chasuble

"I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read on the train." -- Greenwood

"Do you suggest, Miss Fairfax, that I entrapped Ernest into an engagement? How dare you? This is no time for wearing the shallow mask of manners. When I see a spade I call it a spade."
"I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different." -- Dorothy Tutin, as Cecily Cardew, facing off with Greenwood

"Never speak disrespectfully of society, Algernon. Only people who can't get into it do that." -- Evans

"To speak frankly, I am not in favor of long engagements. They give people an opportunity of finding out each other's characters before marriage, which I think is never advisable." -- Evans

"Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years. Lady Dumbleton is an instance in point. To my own knowledge she has been thirty-five ever since she arrived at the age of forty, which was a good many years ago now." -- Evans

"The plain facts of the case are these. On the morning of the day you mention, a day that is forever branded on my memory, I prepared as usual to take the baby out in its perambulator. I had also with me a somewhat old but capacious handbag in which I had intended to place the manuscript of a work of fiction that I had written during my few unoccupied hours. In a moment of mental abstraction, for which I never can forgive myself, I deposited the manuscript in the bassinette, and placed the baby in the hand-bag." -- Rutherford, as Prism

"Gwendolen, it is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth. Can you forgive me?" -- Redgrave, on discovering that his name really is Ernest

"My nephew, you seem to be displaying signs of triviality."
"On the contrary, Aunt Augusta, I've now realized for the first time in my life the vital Importance of Being Earnest." -- Evans and Redgrave, ending the film

Compiled by Frank Miller