WATCHING "Byron," a biopic about the English poet that will be shown Saturday on BBC America, you might be struck by how different the path to fame was two centuries ago compared with today. After all, nobody these days is likely to achieve celebrity status merely by writing a poem.

"Unless, of course, you count Bob Dylan," noted Nick Dear, who wrote the script for the film.

Lord Byron found himself a star after the publication of "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" in 1812, and the lifestyle that followed would have fit comfortably into today's scandal sheets. "If you look at Mick Jagger and John Lennon and Jim Morrison in the late 60's, they're kind of comparable," Mr. Dear said. "Wild, crazy - we would say 'Byronic' about many of them: 'We don't care, we don't play by the rules, we're pretty and rich and famous and do what we like.' He was just the epitome of that attitude. And, of course, it brought him to a very untimely end, as it did with so many of them."

Byron, who died of a fever in 1824 at 36, lived an adventurous and affair-filled life, and it is chronicled lustily in the BBC film. Jonny Lee Miller plays the poet, with a supporting cast that includes Vanessa Redgrave (above) as Lady Melbourne, his clever confidante, and Natasha Little as Augusta Leigh, Byron's married half-sister, with whom he is thought to have had an affair and possibly a child.

"When I first read the script, the part of Augusta wasn't the part I had been directed to look at," Ms. Little said, "but she was the character I was really most drawn to," despite her abhorrent actions.

"It seemed to me that she really loved him in a way that none of the other people in his life did," she said. "She wasn't interested in his fame." And so Augusta, in her portrayal, comes off as one of the more honorable people in the movie.

"I thought she was noble, really," Ms. Little said, "and I completely forgave her."

Mr. Dear said he hoped showing the connections to the modern cult of celebrity and scandal might help resurrect interest in Byron, whose poetry may not have withstood the test of time as well as the works of some of his contemporaries. "It's not immediately accessible in the way that, say, Shelley is," he said. "Long narrative poems full of topical references and classical allusions. It's not easy stuff for the MTV generation. So part of my mission was to say, 'Look, here's this great figure from our heritage, and we know the name, and we know the word Byronic, and we think we know what it means, but do you actually know the story? No, you don't.'"