The Best Picture of Dorian Gray Movie Adaptation: 1945, 2009, and the Rest

Two full-scale English-language versions dominate the comparison, sixty-four years apart, and they fail the book in opposite directions. One is beautiful and will not say what Dorian actually does; the other says it and loses the cold, mannered surface that makes the novel work. Both invent a woman to redeem him, and neither casts the face Wilde spends the first chapters describing. If you want the version that keeps all twenty chapters’ worth of choices open, the playable Picture of Dorian Gray starts in the studio and lets you take the afternoon differently.

🎞️ 1945: the one that left objects behind

Albert Lewin wrote and directed the MGM version, released in March 1945, and made one formal decision that still gets copied: the film is black and white apart from four Technicolor inserts, each of them the portrait, so the only colour in the picture is the thing that should not be changing. The studio commissioned two separate canvases for those inserts, one showing the young sitter and one showing what the years have supposedly been doing instead, according to the standard production record for the 1945 film.

The second canvas is the reason this film has a physical afterlife. Ivan Albright painted it on commission during production, and the Art Institute of Chicago’s own catalogue dates it 1943 to 1944, lists it as on view in Gallery 263 of the museum and treats it as a work in the permanent collection rather than as a prop. Very few studio pictures of any decade end with a painting hanging in a major museum eighty years later.

• ✅It won an Oscar. Harry Stradling took Cinematography, Black-and-White, at the 1946 ceremony, per the Academy’s own record of that year.
• ✅It made a career. Angela Lansbury, playing Sibyl Vane, was nominated for Actress in a Supporting Role at the same ceremony, in the same Academy listing.
• ✅It invented a rescuer. The screenplay gives the painter a niece and gives Dorian a romance with her, a person who does not exist anywhere in Wilde.

The Locked Schoolroom is a doorway in the playable Picture of Dorian Gray: an upstairs room in the house that nobody is allowed to enter, a key that is never handed over, and a household that has started to notice what the master does with his afternoons. Role-play The Picture of Dorian Gray →

📽️ 2009: the one that says it out loud

Oliver Parker directed the 2009 British version from a screenplay by Toby Finlay, and it opened in the United Kingdom on 9 September of that year according to the standard record for the production, with Ben Barnes as Dorian and Colin Firth as Lord Wotton. Where the older film keeps the debauchery off screen and lets a closed door do the work, this one dramatises it, and the difference in what a British release could show between 1945 and 2009 is most of the gap between the two pictures.

Contemporary reviewers noticed the same thing from the other side. Empire’s review, published on 26 August 2009 by Will Lawrence, runs the film at 112 minutes with a certificate of 15, credits Parker with cocooning his protagonist’s decline in what it calls a painterly gauze, and frames the whole release against the fact that the novel had enjoyed only one previous major screen adaptation. That is a fair summary of the 2009 film’s position in the record: it is the first serious attempt in six decades, and it is discussed almost entirely by reference to the one that came before it.

💍 Both films invent the same missing character

The most revealing thing the two versions share is not a scene, it is a vacancy they both fill in the same way. Wilde gives Dorian no late-book romance capable of saving him. Each film supplies one, and each attaches her to a man already in the story, so that the redemption arc arrives pre-wired into the existing cast rather than dropped in from outside.

• ✅1945. The painter acquires a niece, and Dorian acquires a courtship with her, on the record of the production cited above.
• ✅2009. Lord Wotton acquires a grown daughter, and Dorian returns to London to find her waiting, again on the production record cited above.
• ✅The novel. Neither woman exists in it, and no counterpart is available. Whatever the last chapters of the book are doing, they are not doing this.

👱 Nobody has cast the face in the book

The novel is unusually specific about what Dorian looks like, and it repeats the detail rather than dropping it after the introduction. Lord Henry’s first proper look at him in Chapter II supplies the inventory, and the description of the painted face in Chapter VII reuses the same two features, so the gold and the blue are load-bearing rather than decorative.

“Yes, he was certainly wonderfully handsome, with his finely curved scarlet lips, his frank blue eyes, his crisp gold hair.”

Both of the leads discussed above are dark-haired men, and the same has been true of essentially every prominent screen Dorian since. There is no conspiracy in that, only casting practice, but it does quietly change what the story looks like: Wilde is describing a specific Victorian ideal of unspoiled English youth, gold and pink and blue, which is exactly the palette a portrait painter of that decade would have been expected to flatter. Cast a saturnine, dark-eyed lead and the ruin stops being a contrast and starts being a forecast.

🏆 Which one to watch first

On the evidence rather than on taste, the 1945 picture is the one that lasted. It has the Academy record from the 1946 ceremony, it produced an object that a major museum still hangs, and it is the reference point every later version is measured against, including by the trade pressreviewing the 2009 film on its release. Watch it first if you want the adaptation with the longest shadow.

Watch the 2009 film second, and watch it for the thing the older one genuinely cannot do, which is to show you a man actually spending the life he bought instead of implying it through cutaways and a closed door. Read the novel alongside either, because both films resolve ambiguities Wilde deliberately left open, and the portrait’s own behaviour in the early chapters is stranger and more precise on the page than either script allows it to be on screen.