Reversal of Fortune Movie Review (1990) | Roger Ebert I followed the investigative accounts of the von Bulow case with that special attention I always pay to the troubles of society people. Advertisement With their advantages and connections, they have a better chance of being involved in a stimulating crime. Some of them, it is true, simply stab or shoot one another, but a few go to the trouble of using classic means: poisons and deceptions, subterfuge and wit. With all the lack of subtlety in modern murder, it is heartening to find that a few people still aspire to the perfect crime. Having seen "Reversal of Fortune," the story of Claus von Bulow's two trials on the charge of attempting to murder his wife, I am no closer than before to a clear idea of who did what, or why. That is the charm of the movie. Something terrible happened to Sunny von Bulow on that winter day 11 years ago, and nobody knows exactly what it was. The victim still lingers in a coma. Her husband was convicted of attempted murder, but his conviction was overturned, and there is compelling suspicion that some of the evidence used against him was fishy.

Now we have this film, based on a book by Alan J. Dershowitz, the famous Harvard professor who conducted Claus von Bulow's appeal. It is a surprisingly entertaining film - funny, wicked, sharp-tongued and devious. It does not solve the case, nor intend to. I am afraid it only intends to entertain. Because Sunny von Bulow does lie in a coma, I felt at first a little guilty that I enjoyed the film so much. But I am in attendance as a critic, not a priest or prosecutor, and like the other witnesses I can only testify from my own experience. Advertisement The genius of "Reversal of Fortune" is that the story is narrated by Sunny from her sickbed. We hear her voice, wondering aloud at the chain of events caused by that day when she sank into her long sleep. She guides us through the details of the case. She reminisces about the first time she met Claus, about what she felt for him, about how their marriage progressed. She confesses herself as confused as anyone about what happened on her last day of consciousness. "You tell me," she says, and somehow this gives us permission to look at the film in a more genial mood.

The opening shot, taken from a helicopter, shows the great mansions of Newport, R.I. They stand like sentinels at the edge of the sea, flaunting their wealth at the waves. In one of those mansions Sunny lived with Claus and the children they had together or previously. How could one not be entertained by living in such a place? And yet Sunny seems to seek the escape of unconsciousness. She abuses pills and alcohol. After brief forays into the world she retreats to her bed. She is not really present for her family; her mind is clouded, and her memory shaky. While her body goes through the motions of smoking and drinking and taking pills, her mind yawns and dozes. Advertisement One day she nearly dies, probably of an overdose, but is rescued in time. A year later, she is not so lucky, and by the time help is summoned she is in a coma. What happened? The maid says she was worried for hours before Claus would let her call for help. Claus says he thought she was sleeping; she had often slumbered deeply before. But how did she end up on the bathroom floor? And what about the insulin? Did Claus administer a near-fatal overdose?

Whose insulin was it, anyway? And who found it? The question of the insulin is what finally brings Alan Dershowitz into the appeal, after Claus is found guilty. The evidence was gathered by private investigators hired by Sunny's children, and then turned over to the authorities. Dershowitz decides that the rich simply cannot be permitted to hire their own police and decide among themselves which evidence should be made available. It isn't fair. There are also questions about many other aspects of the case - so many that, if Claus is not innocent, there is at least no way to prove that he is guilty. "Reversal of Fortune" is above all a triumph of tone. The director, Barbet Schroeder , and the writer, Nicholas Kazan , have not made a docudrama or a sermon, but a film about personalities. The most extraordinary personality in the film is Claus von Bulow's, as he is played by Jeremy Irons . He appears as a man with affections and bizarre mannerisms, a man who speaks as if he lifted his words from an arch drawing-room comedy, who smokes a cigarette as if hailing a taxi.

Irons is able to suggest, subtly, that some of this over-the-top behavior is the result of fear. Von Bulow cannot modulate his tone, cannot find the right note, because beneath his facade he is quaking. Advertisement And yet he keeps up a brave front. That is one of the best qualities of the film, the way it shows him trying to brazen his way out of an impossible situation. If he wins, he keeps the fortune and the lifestyle. If he loses, he ends his life in prison. The man who can save him is Dershowitz, played by Ron Silver as a hyperkinetic showboat who surrounds himself with students and acolytes, possibly as a protection against the fear of silence. The law students plunge like beavers into their research, triumphantly emerging with new strategies for their leader, who does not like von Bulow much and doubts his innocence, but believes the case raises important legal points. Glenn Close is important too, as Sunny. She appears in some flashbacks as well as narrating the film, and we see the two things we need to notice: her beauty and personality when she's got it together, and the vague lost confusion of her alcoholic and tranquilized daydreams.

Advertisement Without nudging us, the film shows us two things. First, why a man might finally be tempted to allow his wife to slip into the oblivion she seems so desperately to desire. Second, how she could have accidentally overdosed in any event. What happened? Who knows? The movie's strength is its ability to tantalize, to turn the case this way and that, so that the light of evidence falls in one way and then another. You tell me. Popular Blog Posts BP's Great Characters- Claus von Bulow - YouTube BP's Great Characters- Claus von Bulow Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Need to report the video? Sign in to report inappropriate content. Rating is available when the video has been rented. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later. Published on Oct 3, 2014 Tyler discusses Claus von Bulow, played by Jeremy Irons in REVERSAL OF FORTUNE. Category Reversal of Fortune (Film) - TV Tropes Reversal of Fortune You need to login to do this. Get Known if you don't have an account Share Alan Dershowitz: You are a very strange man.

Claus Von Bulow: You have no idea. Reversal of Fortune is a 1990 drama Based on a True Story , directed by Barbet Schroeder. It's about Claus von Bulow ( Jeremy Irons ), a British aristocrat of Danish-German extraction living in Rhode Island at the time, who was tried and convicted of attempting to kill his wife Sunny ( Glenn Close ) by injecting her with insulin, which put her into a coma. Von Bulow, who maintained his innocence throughout, hired law professor/lawyer Alan Dershowitz (Ron Silver), who successfully appealed the verdict. The film was very well reviewed when it came out, and Irons won an Academy Award for his performance (the film itself received two other nominations for Best Director and Adapted Screenplay). This film contains examples of: Adaptation Distillation : While the book the movie is based on (written by Dershowitz) covers both the appeal and the second trial (where Von Bulow was found not guilty), the movie concentrates only on the appeal, some names were changed, and some details were compressed (as well as invented), but overall, it's pretty faithful to what happened during the appeal process.

Affably Evil : "Evil" is obviously up for debate but Claus is undoubtedly charming and pleasant throughout. All Men Are Perverts : Von Bulow sees a lot of other women, which is discussed by members of Dershowitz's legal team: Sarah: He (Von Bulow) had a gorgeous mistress and he went with an ugly whore? Raj: You know, there are some things even mistresses won't do. Alan Dershowitz: Like what? Raj: I am not telling. Army of Lawyers : In Dershowitz's case, an army of current and former law students, a couple of colleagues, and a former prosecutor. Justified in that overturning the conviction means attacking the evidence in detail and figuring out a precedent to do so, and he can't do it alone. Avengers Assemble : There's a brief Montage where we see Dershowitz calling on those colleagues and former students, telling them why he needs them (the prosecutor because he's better than the D.A. who tried Von Bulow, one of the colleagues because he knows the State Supreme Court, the former students because they're great at assimilating details).

Big Applesauce : Since Von Bulow lived in New York City during the appeal, a good portion of the movie takes place there. Crusading Lawyer : The other case Dershowitz is dealing with in the movie is of two African-Americans on death row for a crime he believes them innocent of, and he's working that case pro bono. Driven to Suicide : Claus may or may not have been trying to do this to Sunny, depending on whether you think, for instance, that he deliberately left all of his love letters to Alexandra lying around for her to read. He denies this, of course. Sunny: How could you leave me there alone with all those beautiful letters? Sunny is actually annoyed that Claus prevented her first attempt. Sunny: I would have been better off. You would have been better off. Eureka Moment : Dershowitz gets one of these during a pick-up basketball game, when he realizes what Sunny's maid said about the insulin she found wasn't what he thought it meant at first.note He realized that the bottles were unlabeled, and there should have been no reason for the maid at the time to jump to the conclusion it contained insulin. It was something planted by either Sunny's children or her lawyers.

Maid: Insulin? For what, insulin? My lady is not diabetic! According to Dershowitz, this was Truth in Television . Good Lawyers, Good Clients : Averted with Von Bulow; Dershowitz doesn't care about Von Bulow's guilt or innocence (though he does care about the constitutional principle involved; see "The Reason You Suck" Speech below), and he knows clients always lie to their lawyers, so he doesn't want to hear Von Bulow's claims of innocence. Not only that, but Dershowitz becomes freaked out when it looks like he'll have to present his case as if Von Bulow was innocent. Finally, Dershowitz and the others on his team believe at the end while Von Bulow might have been legally innocent of the crime - certainly, they see enough reasonable doubt - he was at the very least morally guilty. Played straight with the two African-American kids he's defending; however, Dershowitz does explain most clients are guilty, and lawyers pray for a client who's actually innocent. Subverted with the dream he tells his son Elon about: Alan: Reminds me of my Hitler dream. You know, Hitler calls up, he's alive... needs a lawyer.

I say, "Sure, come on over." Then I have to decide: do I take the case, or do I kill him? Elon: You? No question. Alan: I would take the case. Elon, Alan: (in unison) Then kill him. Idle Rich : Invoked by Alan on Claus and Sunny's marriage, saying that a good marriage takes work, and those people don't like to work. Imagine Spot : Alan and Sarah each give their own take on what really happened - Alan weakly explaining how Claus could have been innocent, Sarah giving a stronger scenario with Claus culpable. Parental Favoritism : Claus' youngest daughter is his favorite, and the only one of his children (or step-children) who believes his innocence. Posthumous Narration : Well, narration while in a coma, but it amounts to the same thing. In real life, Sunny never woke up from her coma, and died in 2008 after being in a coma for 28 years. "Rashomon"-Style : We see events happening from the maid's point of view, from Sunny's children's point of view, and from Claus' point of view.

As Sunny herself says in the narration, no one will ever really know what happened. "The Reason You Suck" Speech : When Dershowitz is telling his former students about working on Von Bulow's case, one of them, Minnie (Felicity Huffman) becomes outraged. She's offended Dershowitz would even consider the case because Von Bulow's so obviously guilty. This is how Dershowitz responds: Alan Dershowitz: Look, you're my student, you, you have a choice. You don't have to do anything you don't want to do; that is your choice. The reason I take cases - and here unlike most other lawyers, who are not professors and therefore have to make a living - I take cases because I get pissed off, and I am pissed off here. The family hired a private prosecutor: unacceptable! They conducted a private search! Now if we let them get away with that, rich people won't go to the cops any more. You know what they're going to do? They're going to get their own lawyers to collect evidence, and then they are going to choose which evidence they feel like passing on to the DA.

And the next victim isn't going to be rich, like Von Bülow, but it's going to be some poor schnook in Detroit who can't afford, or who can't find, a decent lawyer. I think it's a little more complicated than your simple moral superiority, hmm? He later gives a short one to von Bulow himself. Alan Dershowitz: One thing, Claus. Legally, this was an important victory. Morally - you're on your own. Shout-Out : Von Bulow's children are watching The Crimson Pirate at one point. While driving him to see David Marriot, Sarah asks Dershowitz if he thinks he's Perry Mason . The Stoic : Von Bulow, and Dershowitz calls him out on this a few times. Alan Dershowitz: (after Von Bulow calls Sunny's second coma "more theatrical" when the team asks him about it) Theatrical? What is this, a fucking game? This is life and death; you're wife is in a coma. You, you don't even make a pretense of caring, do you? Claus Von Bulow: 'Course I care, Alan.

It's just, I don't wear my heart on my sleeve. Stopped Caring : Sunny, because she's dead. Instead, she laughs about the circus her death caused. Sycophantic Servant : Claus believes Maria, Sunny's maid, is this. Teacher/Student Romance : It's implied the relationship between Dershowitz and Sarah was like this before, though they're trying to keep things on a professional level here. What You Are in the Dark : Alan: One thing, Claus. Legally, this was an important victory. Morally - you're on your own. You Have to Have Jews : Andrea, Claus' current girlfriend, claims she's the one who told Claus to "hire the Jew (Dershowitz)" as his lawyer. Claus is less than pleased by her statement, though it's not made clear if it's because what she said was offensive to him or that it wasn't a good idea to reveal this to Dershowitz. :: Indexes :: <em>Reversal of Fortune</em>?

For Claus, Yes, but for Sunny, Never, as a New Film Puts the Von Bülows on Trial Again Email She was born to beauty and a fabulous fortune; what he lacked in wealth, he replaced with idiosyncratic style. Together, Sunny and Claus von Bülow paraded through Newport, R.I., and New York City society, seeming as charmed as they were charming. Then on Dec. 21, 1980, Sunny, now 59, was found comatose on the floor of her bathroom in her Newport mansion. The ripples of horror that spread through the Von Bülows ‘glittering circle would soon boil into a scandal: Seven months later Claus, now 64, was charged by a Newport County grand jury for attempting to murder his wife with injections of insulin. While the heiress reposed unknowing in a New York City hospital, the private life she had so carefully guarded—her alleged alcohol and drug abuse, Claus’s womanizing—became public spectacle as Claus was convicted, then acquitted on appeal. In the minds of many, though, Von Bülow was never exonerated.

The two criminal trials and a civil suit filed by Sunny’s children from her first marriage, Ala Isham and Alex von Auersperg, also split the family down the middle, with the Von Bülows’ daughter, Cosima, lining up with Claus against his stepchildren. All of these troubled lives unfold again in Reversal of Fortune, the critically acclaimed new movie based on the 1986 book by Alan Dershowitz, the lawyer who won Claus’s appeal. Here’s what the principals have been doing since their names left the headlines. CLAUS VON BÜLOW As part of the 1988 settlement of a $100 million civil suit filed by his stepchildren, Claus agreed not to discuss the case publicly. He has been living up to the bargain in a London town house overlooking a South Kensington square. ” ‘My stepchildren only agreed to share [their grandmother’s] inheritance with my daughter on a number of conditions,” he explained recently. “One of them being that I abandon freedom of speech.” Claus, in the process of divorcing Sunny, doesn’t work and lives off a small inheritance. He tries his gentlemanly best to stay out of the limelight.

Gone from his life is Andrea Reynolds, the publicity-savvy social barracuda who championed his case during the second trial and who last year wed (her fourth marriage) an English financier. Claus (played to a starched T by Jeremy Irons onscreen) says that both he and Cosima find “the idea of the film deeply distasteful” and do not intend to see it. “I find it a little painful,” he adds, “that people should wish to write fiction about either those whom I love or myself.” SUNNY VON BÜLOW In a haunting reminder of the woman at the emotional core of the scandal, the voice of Martha “Sunny” von Bülow (played by Glenn Close) floats over the opening scenes of Reversal of Fortune. “That was my body,” says Close, as the camera zooms in on her hospital bed. The real Sunny, according to a spokesman, is suspended in a “persistent vegetative state” in her private hospital room. According to doctors, she’s no longer in a coma and does have sleeping and waking periods, although all of her senses are severely impaired.

Contrary to media reports, her hair hasn’t been professionally styled or her nails manicured since before her “accident.” The two remnants of her previous life are the classical music she listens to each day (her doctors believe she has partial hearing) and the pictures of her three children and the two granddaughters she has never seen (although they’ve been at her bedside with their mother, Ala, and uncle Alex). Her medical care costs the family an estimated $550 a day. Though the film depicts her as a harridan, she is remembered fondly. ” ‘You kind of appreciate sweet souls like her,” says a friend. “Because there are more than enough of those society shrews and trust-fund bimbettes around.” COSIMA VON BÜLOW To most observers, Cosima von Bülow was the true victim of the tawdry tangle. Only 13 when her mother lost consciousness, Cosima stood by her father and was shunned by her step-siblings and “polite” society for doing so.

She was also disinherited by her maternal grandmother, Annie Laurie Aitken, and had to go to court to win her fair share of the $90 million utility-company fortune Aitken left when she died in 1984. Cosima escaped the glare by blending into the student body of Brown University, from which she graduated in 1989, and then moving to London to become a free-lance writer. Last summer her guide to the world’s most eligible bachelors was published in Britain’s upmarket Tatler magazine. Still close to her father, Cosima receives an annual income of $500,000 from her various trusts and holdings. She recently bought a one-bedroom apartment in London and keeps a $2 million, two-bedroom apartment in New York City, around the corner from the family’s former Fifth Avenue digs.

Her friends find her to be pleasant and down-to-earth, or as one college buddy puts it, “I like her because she isn’t full of s-t, like so many of the WASPy girls in New York.” THE VON AUERSPERG CHILDREN Often portrayed as the wicked stepchildren because of their unbridled dislike for Claus, Ala, 32, and Alex, 31, have steadfastly defended Sunny. “Our mother has been portrayed as pathetic and self-destructive,” they said in a written statement. “We reject this injurious and erroneous portrayal.” Ala and sports promoter Franz Kneissl, the father of Sunny, 7, and Alexandra, 4, divorced in 1988; the following year she married Ralph Isham, an investment banker. Both Ala and Alex live in New York City, where he is vice president of a mutual fund management company. The siblings memorialized their mother by founding the Sunny von Bülow National Victim Advocacy Center and the Sunny von Bülow Head Trauma and Research Foundation.

(Sadly, their father, Alfie von Auersperg is in a coma following a 1983 auto accident.) Ala and Alex’s only regret seems to be their poor relationship with Cosima. Reportedly the three exchange letters and gifts on birthdays and other special occasions but have little personal contact. ALAN DERSHOWITZ The Harvard Law professor portrayed by Ron Silver has taken on another high-profile case—he is trying to get Leona Helmsley’s recent conviction on tax fraud overturned. But Dershowitz still revels in the Von Bülow spotlight and was seen standing under the marquee of a New York City theater when the film opened there last month. When a senior citizen approached him and asked if he was the lawyer in the movie, the attorney replied, “Yes, yes, I’m Alan Dershowitz. This is my movie.” —Mary H. J. Farrell, Khoi Nguyen in New York City, Laura Sanderson Healy in London Show Full Article Catching up with Claus von Bulow - Telegraph Catching up with Claus von Bulow David Jenkins 12:01AM BST 27 Apr 2008 The dark rumours. The macabre jokes.

The party invites. David Jenkins speaks to friends of the much talked-about aristocrat and finds life's never dull once you've been acquitted of attempted murder Picking through a pile of books at an acquaintance's place the other day, I came across a paperback called Insulin Murders, published last year by the Royal Society of Medicine. In it was a postcard, addressed to my friend, commending the fourth chapter to his attention. As well it might, because the postcard's author was Claus von Bulow and Chapter 4 of this very authoritative book - by Professor Vincent Marks, a world expert on insulin, and the medical journalist Caroline Richmond - deals with von Bulow's notorious case, making it very clear that von Bulow was innocent of twice attempting to murder his wife, Sunny, by administering an insulin overdose; crimes with which he was charged, initially found guilty of and, at a second trial, finally acquitted of. Such an out-and-out vindication must obviously bring great comfort to the 81-year-old. But on another level, you might say that this would spoil von Bulow's fun, for he is famously fond of a mordant jest at his own expense.

While he was on bail, for instance, he was eating at Mortimer's, then the haunt of Manhattan's Eurotrash. Someone at a table nearby had a heart attack and was carried out; von Bulow leapt to his feet and declared, 'It wasn't me! It wasn't me!' (Shortly after, he asked a young woman friend of mine if she'd like to 'come and sit with an old murderer like me'.) Another example: the historian Anne Somerset was once talking to him about The Affair of the Poisons, a book she'd written about murder and infanticide at the court of Louis XIV, at which von Bulow said, 'I must read that: people always think it's my special subject.' And then there's the story of von Bulow bumping into an old friend in the street and asking his chum how the latter's amicably estranged wife was. 'I'm sorry to tell you, Claus,' the friend replied, 'but she's just died. I was sailing in the Mediterranean when we got the news. It's...' 'Stop! Stop! Stop!' von Bulow cried. 'I wasn't asking for an alibi.' More?

Well, some time back, von Bulow told Nicky Haslam, the celebrated designer, that he was going to New York. Where, asked Haslam, was von Bulow going to stay? 'Oh,' he replied, 'I always stay with my old friend Frank Campbell' - Frank Campbell being the most famous undertaker's in New York. A reference, this, to the society joke that von Bulow is a necrophile - a gag that was started in Capri in 1949 by Gianni Agnelli and the late Prince Dado Ruspoli, and one that he's played along with. Of more recent vintage is the story (allegedly concocted by his friend the late Lord Lambton) that von Bulow had murdered his mother and kept her in the deep freeze. 'Yes,' says one informant, 'that was absolutely all over the place.

People said that's why he murdered Sunny, or rather didn't murder Sunny: people said he was reverting to type.' Von Bulow takes all this upper-class ragging on the chin and plays along: one friend of his says that, 'He once told me that one advantage of having once been accused of murder is that you can get a table at the Ivy.' There is, I have been told, an agreement that von Bulow will not talk publicly about the case and that, I gathered from an intermediary, was why he would prefer not to talk to me. But as can be gleaned from these tales, von Bulow makes a pretty good fist of coping with a very difficult past. And it's not just dark humour he displays: English friends variously describe him as very loyal, generous, intelligent, cultivated and kind. Gully Wells, who works for the American edition of Condé Nast Traveller, says that when her mother, the writer Dee Wells, was becoming seriously ill, 'Claus was one of her two or three most constant friends. You know how, when people get old and sick, not everyone hangs in there, but Claus did.

He sent her cards, visited her, phoned her, invited her to the theatre. She couldn't necessarily go, but Claus kept trying. And I don't want to paint a picture that he just took pity on her. They made each other laugh - he's very clever and quick. And my mother was a socialist and Claus is well over to the Right, so they used to have very entertaining arguments.' Lady Charlotte Fraser, a friend who's known some tough emotional times herself, emphasises that, 'He's a very kind person - in part because he knows what it is to be down.' Indeed he does: as another friend put it to me, 'It can't be easy to go into a room and feel everyone's saying, "He murdered his wife." None of us would like it.' And it was certainly the case that, after his acquittal, von Bulow found it politic to leave America, and came back to London. 'The bon ton of New York turned on him,' I was told. And not just the bon ton: not everybody appreciated Andrea Reynolds, his girlfriend during and after the second trial, nor the leather-clad photographs she and Claus posed for.

Though, as one non-fan of Reynolds ('a bit of a pill') also noted, she was the right person for the time: 'She saw him through it. Certainly better than putting your trust in the Mortimer's lunchtime crowd - one wouldn't want to go into the jungle with them.' Von Bulow came back to London because it was there that he'd lived since the early days of the Second World War, and there that he'd made many of the friends who have stayed loyal to him since. Von Bulow is in fact Danish and was born Claus Borberg in 1926. His father, Svend Borberg, was a playwright and author who sympathised with the Nazis and was, after the war, sentenced to jail for collaboration. His mother, Jonna, had divorced Svend when Claus was four. She was living in England when Denmark was invaded, and the Borbergs managed to get young Claus to England; Claus adopted his mother's maiden name, Bulow. The 'von' got attached later. 'And he didn't add it,' says Haslam. 'It's just everybody assumed he was called von Bulow because of the von Bulows [the prominent German family].

And he says, "Everybody thinks it's von Bulow, so I may as well use it."' At 16, he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, to read law and graduated in 1946. In due course, he entered Quintin Hogg's chambers, and practised law throughout the 1950s. Tall, handsome, elegant, he lived with his mother in Belgrave Square: 'Grand staircase, an enfilade of drawing rooms - not very English. And a wonderful, serious butler called Knights,' a friend recalls. At that period, John Aspinall was running (perfectly legal) gambling parties in private houses: von Bulow's was one of them. It's from this period, too, that his great friendships with the glamorous Londonderry girls - now Lady Annabel Goldsmith and Lady Jane Rayne - date. (He is also very friendly with Desmond and Penny Guinness.) Indeed, many of those who knew him from this era could never believe that he could have been guilty of the crimes with which he was accused; he was, they felt, too kind. In 1959, he was spotted by J.

Paul Getty and taken on as the notoriously penny-pinching oil baron's personal assistant. (The colossally rich Getty famously had coin-operated telephones installed at his house for guests to use.) According to a friend, 'Getty saw a worldly sort of fellow who knew the sort of milieu he [Getty] wanted to inhabit. So he helped him with parties, girls, the law. And Claus was very loyal to old Paul - who was a monster - and very loyal to young Paul [who died in 2003].' Indeed Paul Getty Jr is said to have helped fund von Bulow's very expensive defence, a bill estimated at about $3.5 million. 'Well, Paul Getty adored him,' another friend says, 'because he was wonderful to Paul when Big Paul was alive. Helped him bear being Big Paul's son; always took his side.' Be that as it may, Big Paul wrote very warmly of von Bulow, praising his work and his personality; less inspiringly, he's reported to have paid von Bulow less than $20,000 a year. Post-1966, though, von Bulow was in no great need of money.

He had married Sunny von Auersperg, née Crawford, the heiress to a great American fortune conservatively estimated in 1960 at $75 million. Sunny had first fallen for a handsome young Austrian prince called Alfie von Auersperg, married him in 1957 and had two children by him, Ala and Alexander. The couple grew apart, and Sunny met von Bulow. In 1966, they were married. In 1968, he gave up his job with Getty - something he always felt to be one of the biggest mistake of his life - and moved to the States. ('She didn't want him to work, he agreed reluctantly, and the rest is marital history,' I was told.) In America, he and Sunny led an intensely grand, but not necessarily fascinating life in New York and at Clarendon Court, Sunny's mansion at Newport, Rhode Island: 'Twenty-five years of Newport dinner parties must be enough to anaesthetise a brain, however acute,' says one acidulous British friend of von Bulow.

'Rich Americans are boring in a very special way.' The couple had a daughter, Cosima, and a luxurious life, but the marriage began to founder. Why and how are of little moment here - his supporters paint Sunny as a 'garbage-head... has three pills to sleep, two to go sideways, three more to go up and then you have a drink - that's the condition she was in'; hers deny this and point to the affairs that he was conducting. What matters is that, first, in December 1979 and then on 22 December 1980, Sunny went into a coma. She has never emerged from the second one and today lies in a permanent vegetative state in a private medical facility in New York. I'm told that her children visit her, and that she has not aged very much, because 'there's no stress in her life'. Von Bulow, of course, was arrested, charged, found guilty on both counts of attempted murder and sentenced to 30 years in jail on 2 April, 1982. He appealed, and a year later had his conviction reversed.

The court ordered a fresh trial; in June 1985, after a slew of expert witnesses testified that Sunny's comas were not consistent with an insulin overdose, von Bulow was found not guilty. By that point the trial had became a national obsession: it was the first such court case to be televised and more than 70 hours of it were broadcast by CNN. Sunny's children by her first marriage always believed von Bulow to be guilty, and still do; Cosima stood by her father. ('To have your father accused of killing your mother is no joke,' Gully Wells points out. 'But she never wavered.') For this, she was disinherited by Sunny's mother. After his acquittal, von Bulow dropped his claim against Sunny's estate; in return, Cosima was again made a substantial (a reported $30 million) beneficiary of her grandmother's will. The saga was turned into a film, Reversal of Fortune, based on a book written by one of von Bulow's lawyers, Alan Dershowitz, and starring Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close (as Sunny, who narrates from her coma). And von Bulow re-entered London society.

This was not without its problems. You would, I was told, see 'rooms divide like the Red Sea' when von Bulow entered a party. He was, another person told me, ostracised by certain sections of society - and still is, by a very few. Others were more open-minded. 'I had him to dinner with people,' Charlotte Fraser told me, 'and afterwards they all made comments - and it never occurred to me that they would. Having met him, and he being so kind to me, I instinctively knew he couldn't have done it. I made a decision that he was all right, so that was that; that was my decision. But I think people who didn't know him well... well, people love to talk, don't they? "I had dinner last night with someone who was actually found guilty of murder."' It wasn't only the notoriety that appealed. Von Bulow was also attractive, polite and intelligent. According to Peter Soros, a financier: 'Generally, he's an all-round amusing fellow who's capable of being outrageous. Invite him to lunch and you'll get a good meal out of it.

Or rather, he'd get a good meal and I'd get a good story.' He's also, all agree, a devoted father and grandfather. Cosima is married to Riccardo Pavoncelli, an Italian count. The couple live in Knightsbridge, have three children and once featured on the Tatler 100 Most Invited list. She told one friend of mine that, as she drove home one evening, a man stepped into her path; she narrowly avoided running him down. Who was it? Jeremy Irons. 'Just imagine what the press would have had to say about that,' my friend added. (Incidentally, although you'd have to go a long way to find anyone who looked less like von Bulow than Jeremy Irons, several people told me that the film got von Bulow's clothes absolutely right: very polished shoes, beautiful tweeds.) Von Bulow also lives in Knightsbridge in what I'm told is a small, exquisite flat - 'nice books, nice furniture, nice prints of the Old Masters; a lovely bachelor pad'. He gives small dinners there and serves stunning wine and foie gras, for which he makes the toast. Larger dinners are given in his daughter's house.

Emma Soames, editor-at-large of Saga, went to one recently: 'There was,' she says, 'a nest of historians there - Andrew Roberts, Antony Beevor...' Roberts and Beevor also go to the all-male lunches von Bulow gives for 20 or so people in a private room at Brooks's club from time to time, as do people such as Paul Johnson, Julian Fellowes, Christopher Reid and Matthew Carr. This literary/artistic bias reflects von Bulow's intellectual tastes. He was for many years theatre critic for the Catholic Herald (he gave up the post a couple of years back) and has also written about art. He even sees his life in literary terms: von Bulow was once heard saying, 'My life has been like a Wilkie Collins novel.' All in all, people like him. He is worldly, intelligent, good value - and dignified. He does, they sigh, like an anecdote, and eventually his audience does wonder just how many anecdotes they can take. He's rather given, too, to peppering his stories with the nicknames of obscure continental nobles.

As one acquaintance puts it: 'You feel you're learning just a little more about Danish society than you need to know.' But, says the artist Matthew Carr, 'Claus can take a tease.' As he ought to: not everybody thinks he should get away with such conversational gambits as, 'While I was still a murderer and waiting for my second trial...' - though Gully Wells says he makes such remarks less often nowadays. Though he is said to be ill, he has looked after himself - he used to go to Quiberon each year for a touch of thalassotherapy - and still cuts a tall and distinguished figure when he eats out in London restaurants. Wells had lunch with him at the Wolseley recently and says, 'He's still incredibly attractive. He's got the best taste of any man I know in terms of art, clothes, etc. And he's clever. What more do you want from a man?' Just one last story, to put things into perspective. Von Bulow, it's said, once ran into the late Stavros Niarchos Sr, the rich shipping magnate who was once accused of having inflicted fatal injuries on one of his wives, Eugenie.

(He was later exonerated.) 'So, Claus,' said the tycoon, 'how are you?' 'Oh,' said Claus, 'mustn't grumble. At least I haven't killed anyone.' 'Most invited' the high life and times of Claus von Bulow 1926 Von Bulow is born in Copenhagen, into a well-heeled family. His father, Svend Borberg, is Denmark's leading drama critic and playwright 1942 After the Nazi occupation, his parents resolve to get the 15-year-old Claus out of Denmark as soon as possible. He is whisked off to neutral Sweden, where his mother, Jonna, bribes a bomber pilot to fly him to England 1943 Attends Cambridge University, aged just 16 1959 After nine years as a London barrister, in Quintin Hogg's chambers, von Bulow becomes executive assistant to the oil billionaire J. Paul Getty 1966 Marries American heiress, Martha 'Sunny' Crawford. Their daughter, Cosima, is born a year later 1970 Claus and his new family leave Britain for Newport, Rhode Island, playground of the rich and famous.

Lavish parties become the norm. Visitors to their 20-room mansion are greeted with a glass of champagne, whatever the time of day 1980 Sunny, who has become increasingly depressed and reclusive, falls irreversibly into a coma 1982 Von Bulow is arrested, put on trial and found guilty of attempted murder. He's said to have given his wife an overdose injection of insulin, and is sentenced to 30 years in prison 1984 His conviction is overturned on appeal, and he is acquitted in a retrial a year later. It's argued that Sunny overindulged on alcohol and sleeping pills 1990 Von Bulow's lawyer Alan Dershowitz's account of the trials, Reversal of Fortune, is made into a film, starring Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close.

Irons wins a Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of the socialite 1991 Von Bulow returns to Britain, and starts work as an art and theatre critic 2001 He is voted 46th 'most invited' party guest in London by Tatler magazine Reversal of Fortune - Movies & TV on Google Play Reversal of Fortune Item added to wishlist. Item removed from wishlist. You will receive an email when your movie becomes available. You will not be charged until it is released. ( 15) Synopsis Academy Award, Emmy and Golden Globe-winner Jeremy Irons won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of the icy aristocrat Claus von Bulow in this stunning true story about two men of vastly different backgrounds who form an uneasy alliance. Emmy-nominee Ron Silver is Alan Dershowitz (whose book the film is based on), the combative lawyer with working class New York roots and a passion for clear-minded justice who decides to defend von Bulow in the attempted murder of his heiress wife, Sunny (Academy Award-nominee, Emmy and Golden Globe-winner Glenn Close) even though he's not sure of von Bulow's innocence.

From Academy Award and Golden Globe-nominated director Barbet Schroeder and produced by Edward R. Pressman and Academy Award, Emmy and Golden Globe-winner Oliver Stone and co-starring Annabella Sciorra and Emmy-winner and Golden Globe-nominee Christine Baranski. MPAA Rating: R Copyright 1990 Warner Brothers. All rights reserved. My review Will Claus von Bulow ever shed a tear for Sunny? | Daily Mail Online Next Will Claus von Bulow ever shed a tear for Sunny? As his heiress wife lay in a coma for 28 years, he was the world's most infamous poisoning suspect. Now she is dead - and the icily composed Claus has been reborn as the darling of London society comments Claus von Bulow arrives at his home in Kensington after Sunny's death They were the jet set's most glittering couple. Cosmopolitan socialite Claus von Bulow and his rich American heiress wife, Sunny, met in London in 1966. They married in grand style, and oil tycoon J. Paul Getty was godfather to their daughter Cosima.

But when they moved into a 20-room mansion in millionaire's playground Newport, Rhode Island, taking Sunny's two children by a previous marriage with them, it all went spectacularly wrong. Sunny, who had made her husband the main beneficiary of her £60 million fortune, soon developed an alcohol and drug habit. And ten years later, in 1980, she was discovered comatose in the mansion with a syringe nearby. In a sensational trial, her suave husband was accused of trying to murder her by giving her an overdose of insulin - being first found guilty, then dramatically (and controversially) cleared. Now, 28 years after she lapsed into a coma, Sunny has died, aged 76, without regaining consciousness. Despite the money lavished on her treatment by her children and their constant visits to her bedside, she had remained unresponsive, curled up in a foetal position. It is a story so extraordinary that it was immortalised in the 1990 film Reversal Of Fortune, which starred Jeremy Irons as von Bulow and Glenn Close as his wife.

But it is the remarkable rehabilitation of Claus, 82, as one of London's foremost social butterflies that continues to amaze. Even during his trial, he never looked flustered. But since his acquittal, he has dined out on the idea that he was once the world's most famous poisoning suspect. The story begins in 1966 when Sunny, or to use her formal title, Princess Martha von Auersperg, the divorced wife of an Austrian prince, visited London. Blonde, beautiful and fabulously rich, she was the daughter of Pittsburgh utilities tycoon George Crawford, who had died when she was four and left her a portion of his fortune. It was during her visit that she met the tall, elegant and Cambridge-educated Claus von Bulow, the son of a Danish playwright, Svend Borberg, who was later accused of being a wartime Nazi sympathiser. Claus had been spirited out of Denmark during the German occupation in the bomb bay of a Mosquito warplane bound for Britain. A determined social climber, he ditched his father's name and took on that of his mother, which featured the pleasingly aristocratic 'von'.

During the Fifties, he was largely known for attending illegal gaming parties run by future casino owner John Aspinall, at which he acquired the reputation of being Europe's finest backgammon player. He was also known for a succession of beautiful girlfriends. Martha 'Sunny' von Bulow in Providence, Rhode Island, shortly before she went into her 28-year coma. She had a problem with drugs and alcohol But Claus also found work with the rich oil tycoon J. Paul Getty. The billionaire hated flying, so Claus's job was to jet all over world in his boss's place. When he met Sunny, he fell in love at once - although friends say he was reluctant to marry her in case people thought he was only after her money. But the wedding went ahead and in 1967 their daughter Cosima was born. Yet problems soon surfaced, some say because of the reclusive Sunny's dependence on drink and pills; others claim it was because Claus had a string of affairs. The high-profile court case Either way, things got worse when the couple moved from London to Newport, where neither felt at home.

There, the mindless chatterers at the opulent dinner parties never warmed to Claus, dismissing him as an aloof intellectual. Sunny, meanwhile, would often refuse to leave the house. But matters came to a head in 1980, when the family gathered for Christmas. One night, Sunny was in such a wretched condition that she had to be put to bed early. And the next morning, when she was found unconscious on her marble bathroom floor, her two teenage Auersperg children brought in investigators, suspecting their stepfather of giving her an overdose. There followed the trial of the decade. And if Sunny's tragic plight was not enough of a story itself, the public soon became fascinated by her husband's exhibitionist behaviour, too. Released on $1 million bail, put up by Paul Getty, the great womaniser soon appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine, dressed in a leather jacket and posing with his latest girlfriend, Hungarian adventuress Andrea Reynolds, in Sunny's dressing room. He also continued dining at some of Manhattan's trashiest socialite haunts, drawing needless attention to himself.

One night, when someone at the next table had a heart attack, Claus leapt to his feet shouting: 'It wasn't me! It wasn't me!' Claus von Bulow with girlfriend Andrea Reynolds in the 1980s In court, the prosecution argued that Claus had induced Sunny's coma with an injection of insulin. And in the end, they prevailed. Claus, who maintained an icy composure during his trial, was found guilty in 1982 and sentenced to 30 years in jail. But the matter did not end there. Still aided by J. Paul Getty, who was always an admirer of what he called von Bulow's razor-sharp mind, penchant for hard work and personable manner, he appealed against the verdict. The conviction was reversed and a retrial took place three years later. This time, von Bulow hired celebrity lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who would later successfully defend O.J. Simpson. And the public were rivetted, especially as they could now follow the proceedings on TV. It was quite a trial. U.S. writer Truman Capote and TV presenter Johnny Carson's wife, Joanne, gave evidence about Sunny's unhappy addictions.

And British friends rallied to Claus's defence, including Lady Londonderry, who was married to rock star Georgie Fame. Their faith was rewarded. New medical trials had proved that other drugs, such as Valium and barbiturates, could cause false insulin readings. And the defence asserted that as there had never been an insulin overdose, no crime had been committed. It also emerged that Sunny had swallowed more than 100 aspirin two weeks before collapsing and that she had lapsed into a coma before, following a severe bout of self-induced vomiting. When the Nobel laureate Arthur Robinson and four other eminent professors declared that Sunny was in a coma as a result of taking a combination of prescription drugs and had a known chronic glucose intolerance, Claus von Bulow was found innocent. He was a free man - but the world, and his two stepchildren, still entertained a flicker of doubt. Quite apart from his flashy behaviour outside the courtroom, he had never expressed any anger or torment inside it either. But while his stepchildren remained suspicious, his daughter Cosima stood by him, an act of loyalty that saw her disinherited by Sunny's mother, who controlled all of the money.

A beloved figure on the cocktail-party circuit But Claus's problems were not yet over. His stepchildren, who believed that their mother had been about to divorce Claus, leaving him without a penny, then mounted a civil suit against him to ensure that he would never get hold of their mother's money. As a consequence, Claus had to agree to divorce Sunny and relinquish any claim he had against her estate. In return, Cosima's inheritance, estimated to be around £30 million, was reinstated. Von Bulow was also sworn to silence. In 1991, after Dershowitz's story of the trial had been adapted into the film Reversal Of Fortune, Claus moved back to London, where he continued to wear his wedding ring. He converted to Roman Catholicism and took to visiting the sick - usually, the well-born sick. But the erstwhile ladies' man still found time for his indefatigable social life, cultivating historians and literary figures and peppering all-male lunches with marathon theatre-going sprees - only two weeks ago, he told a friend he had seen eight plays in seven days during a recent visit to Paris. A print of Sunny with her husband from 1979.

Claus was found guilty on two counts of trying to murder his wife, before the verdict was later overturned Today, Claus, with his elegant, drawling speech, boasts that his past helps him to get the best restaurant tables. He was at interior decorator Nicky Haslam's purple and black recession-busting ball last month, and a fortnight ago made an appearance at the Bad Sex Awards - which are presented to the authors of the year's worst literary love scenes. Von Bulow even laughs off friends' jocular claims that as a young man he murdered his horrendous old mother, Jonna von Bulow - who died in 1959 - and that he kept her in the deep freeze at his London flat rather than report the death. In fact, he is a much-loved figure among the cocktail party set. The society hostess Annabel Goldsmith thinks him so benign that she calls him 'Clausikins'. But his charismatic persona has never been enough to convince his stepchildren, Alexander, now 48, and Ala von Auersperg, 49, of his innocence.

They even banned him from visiting their mother in hospital in case she one day opened her eyes and was confronted by the man they maintained had destroyed her. So while Claus continued socialising, the Auersperg children went on visiting Sunny, first in New York's smart Presbyterian Columbia hospital with its view of the Hudson River, then, when even their family money started to run out, in a cheaper Manhattan nursing room. Though Sunny was left in a persistent vegetative state, she was able to breathe on her own and was fed by a tube. Her children played her classical music and arranged for her hair to be done every day and her nails to be manicured. They founded two medical charities in her name and could not be dissuaded from their belief that one day she would awake. In fact, Sunny's eyes were said to fill with tears when they entered the bedroom and their dearest hope was that one day she would waken and tell them the truth about what happened to her that night 28 years ago. But Sunny is now dead, and the secret of how she ended up in a coma dies with her.

Care that cost a family fortune A team of specialist nurses looked after Sunny von Bulow 24 hours a day, first at New York's Presbyterian Columbia Hospital and then in a nursing home. They went through the same routine, day after day, for 28 years. Mrs von Bulow was fed through a tube in her stomach and was washed once a day. Although she showed no signs of brain activity, there were always fresh flowers in her room and photographs of her children and grandchildren on her bedside table. By the end of her life, the treatment, including the cost of a security guard, was around £750,000 a year - exhausting the family fortune. Though they are not fully understood, comas occur when there has been damage to the section of the brain regulating sleep. Though most coma victims recover in days, Mrs von Bulow's condition progressed to a so-called persistent vegetative state. Sufferers of this condition are able to breath as normal and may be able to open a their eyelids. Their internal organs function normally, but they are unable to move and are unaware of what is happening to them.

The depth of a coma has no bearing on how likely you are to emerge from it, although the chance of recovery worsens the longer the patient is unconscious. American car-crash victim Terry Wallis is believed to have survived the longest coma, when, in 2003, he woke up after 19 years. He was 39 but thought he was still a teenager and didn't recognise his mother. Reversal of Fortune - Microsoft Store Reversal of Fortune 1990 • Drama • 1 h 51 min • English • HD (4) $12.99 Jeremy Irons in his portrayal of aristocrat Claus von Bulow in this true story about two men of vastly different backgrounds who form an uneasy alliance. Buy HD $12.99 From this director Synopsis Academy Award, Emmy and Golden Globe-winner Jeremy Irons won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of the icy aristocrat Claus von Bulow in this stunning true story about two men of vastly different backgrounds who form an uneasy alliance.

Emmy-nominee Ron Silver is Alan Dershowitz (whose book the film is based on), the combative lawyer with working class New York roots and a passion for clear-minded justice who decides to defend von Bulow in the attempted murder of his heiress wife, Sunny (Academy Award-nominee, Emmy and Golden Globe-winner Glenn Close) even though he's not sure of von Bulow's innocence. From Academy Award and Golden Globe-nominated director Barbet Schroeder and produced by Edward R. Pressman and Academy Award, Emmy and Golden Globe-winner Oliver Stone and co-starring Annabella Sciorra and Emmy-winner and Golden Globe-nominee Christine Baranski. Actors

Question: Who played Claus Von Bulow in the 1990 film Reversal of Fortune?
Answer: Jeremy Irons