Barry Lyndon sights on Thackeray's 1844 "satirical picaresque about the fortune-hunting of an Irish rogue," "Barry Lyndon", the setting of which allowed Kubrick to take advantage of the copious period research he had done for the now-aborted "Napoleon". At the time, Kubrick merely announced that his next film would star Ryan O'Neal (deemed "a seemingly un-Kubricky choice of leading man") and Marisa Berenson, a former "Vogue" and "Time" magazine cover model, and be shot largely in Ireland. So heightened was the secrecy surrounding the film that "Even Berenson, when Kubrick first approached her, was told only that it was to be an
The Luck of Barry Lyndon of trying to get the lad killed in battle. Then his own child—Bryan—dies in a tragic horse-riding accident. Combined with Barry's own profligate spending practices, he is ruined on many levels. As the "memoir" ends, (Redmond) Barry Lyndon is separated from his wife, and lodged in Fleet Prison. A small stipend allows him to live in moderate luxury, and his elderly mother lodges close by to tend to him. He spends the last nineteen years of his life in prison, dying of alcoholism-related illness. Stanley Kubrick adapted the novel into the film "Barry Lyndon", released in 1975. Unlike the film,