Brian Bedford takes on the role of Lady Bracknell for the Stratford Festival's new production of The Importance of Being Earnest. (Stratford Festival of Canada)

Brian Bedford's acting career has spanned half a century and embraced comedy as diverse as Molière and Frasier, but until now, he has never portrayed a woman.

"I realized I had to be as utterly convincing as Lady Bracknell as Barry Humphries is with Dame Edna."

—Brian Bedford

With one exception, that is. "The first part I ever played, at the age of 13, was the Virgin Mary," says the charming, British-born actor, smiling at the recollection. "It was in a Christmas play at my Catholic all-boys school in the north of England."

At this year's Stratford Shakespeare Festival, the 74-year-old Bedford is finally getting another chance to swap genders. And for his professional distaff debut, he's chosen a maternal character decidedly different from the Virgin Mary. It's that gorgon of grande dames, that dragon in a dress: Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest.

One of the funniest battleaxes in the history of English comedy, the role has been played on stage and screen by the likes of Dame Edith Evans and Dame Judi Dench – and at Stratford, memorably, by the late, great William Hutt. His Lady Bracknell in the festival's 1975 production – revived twice – has become the stuff of legend. That's doubtless what inspired Stratford's new artistic chief, Des McAnuff, to suggest Bedford do the part.

"When he told me, I said, 'Oh my God, really? I'll have to think about that,'" Bedford says during an interview in the living room of his long-time Stratford home – a tastefully refurbished Ontario cottage. He's barefoot and wearing sweats – a disarmingly casual look for a member of festival royalty. He says he went back and reread Wilde's play and decided it would be the perfect left-field followup to his last Stratford outing two seasons ago. "What do you do after you've done King Lear?" he asks. "Lady Bracknell seemed to fill the bill."

Actor Brian Bedford. (Stratford Festival of Canada)

Bedford not only took on the role, he also agreed to direct Wilde's delightfully daft rom-com, which opens June 2 at the festival's Avon Theatre. His production stars Ben Carlson as Jack Worthing, that devious gentleman of uncertain birth, whose engagement to the lovely Gwendolen Fairfax (Sara Topham) is imperilled by the imperious Lady Bracknell, her disapproving mother. The cast also includes Mike Shara as Jack's languid pal Algernon, Andrea Runge as Jack's precocious ward Cecily and Sarah Dodd as her scatterbrained governess, Miss Prism.

To complement the play, Bedford will also be performing his one-man show based on Wilde's letters, Ever Yours, Oscar, beginning on June 19.

While Bedford says he was a fan of Dame Edith Evans – perhaps the most famous Lady Bracknell – during his days as a theatre student in London in the 1950s, the inspiration for his portrayal comes from other sources. One of them was the American philanthropist Brooke Astor, who died in 2007 at the age of 105.

"She wasn't by any means a Lady Bracknell – she didn't have that bluster or that size about her," Bedford says. "But she was definitely a grande dame." Astor was a Molière aficionado and became friendly with Bedford in the 1990s after the actor did his Tony Award-nominated turn in The Molière Comedies on Broadway. "She was quite old by the time I knew her," he says. "She'd had a big affair with an English actor called Brian Aherne, and I think she kind of got me a bit mixed up with him."

Through Astor he met other great ladies, including an eccentric British viscountess who makes "a slight personal appearance" in his Lady Bracknell. "This woman was a handful," he says with a chuckle. "She really impressed me. I remember she had a frock on which looked as though she'd made it herself."

To impersonate a member of the opposite sex, Bedford took his cue from one of the all-time great drag performers – Barry Humphries, a.k.a. Dame Edna Everage. "I realized I had to be as utterly convincing as Lady Bracknell as Barry Humphries is with Dame Edna," he says. "Of course, you know it's Humphries you're watching, but you don't think about that – you're just absolutely flabbergasted and absorbed by this crazy woman that he's giving you. I thought how important that was: there mustn't be any hint of a man playing a woman."

The drag role is a rare new trick for Bedford, an actor who has pretty much done it all. Born in Yorkshire, the son of a postman, he trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art with fellow working-class lads Peter O'Toole and Albert Finney. Sir John Gielgud became his mentor and directed Bedford in his 1958 breakthrough role in Five Finger Exercise, an early play by Peter Shaffer ( Equus, Amadeus ).

Iconic playwright and novelist Oscar Wilde. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Bedford took the play to Broadway, and his career blasted off. By the time he was lured to Stratford in 1975, he'd won a Tony in Molière's The School for Wives and starred in John Frankenheimer's racing movie Grand Prix. (Disney fans will also recognize him as the voice of the foxy hero in the cute 1973 animated version of Robin Hood.) The festival proved the perfect place for him to flex his muscles as a classical actor. In the course of 26 seasons, he has taken on many of the big Shakespearean tragic roles – Macbeth, Timon, Lear – while burnishing his reputation as a master of comedy. In fact, one of the few comic masterpieces he has never done, at Stratford or elsewhere, is The Importance of Being Earnest.

Again, with one small exception. In 2004, he was part of a staged reading of the play by the cast of Frasier to benefit L.A.'s Kirk Douglas Theatre. "Kirk Douglas himself did the first scene of Lane the butler, and then I took over the role," he recalls. Kelsey Grammer played Jack, David Hyde Pierce was Algy and John Mahoney was Lady Bracknell. "It was just a bash," Bedford says with a dismissive laugh.

Bedford admits he didn't fully appreciate the play until he began working on it at Stratford. Wilde's relentlessly witty dialogue, with its litany of paradoxes, "seemed to me rather sophomoric and show-off-y," he says. Now, he's come to see how subversive it really is. Whereas Wilde's previous plays were society melodramas, with Earnest, he exploded their conventions and made a mad mockery of the Victorians' social code. "Oscar decides to go for the jugular and reveal all their phoniness and pretentiousness," Bedford says. "It's this quite unique send-up of the times that he lives in."

The play, which premiered in London in 1895, was Wilde's last. That same year, he sued the Marquess of Queensberry for libel – a disastrous move that led to Wilde himself being tried for then-illegal homosexual acts and sentenced to two years' hard labour. He died three years after his release from prison, at age 46, poor and broken in spirit.

Bedford covers that darker side to Wilde's life in his one-man show. Ever Yours, Oscar is a biography fashioned out of Wilde's correspondence, in which Bedford reads select letters to trace the Irish writer's meteoric rise to fame and subsequent downfall. Bedford first devised the play in 2000 for Stratford's Wilde celebration to mark the centenary of his death.

Bedford says, of all Wilde's writings, he likes the letters best. He finds them more revealing of the man than his literary endeavours. "Oscar did say, 'I put my genius into my life and my talent into my work.'"

The exception, perhaps, is The Importance of Being Earnest. "Somehow we're getting the genius that he put into his life, in this play," he says. "It's Oscar himself."

The Importance of Being Earnest runs to Oct. 30; Ever Yours, Oscar runs June 19-Aug. 29, at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.