Rupert bares all
Actor and author Rupert Everett talks frankly about his life
Rupert bares all
WHILE RUPERT EVERETT ADMITS TO HAVING BEEN MISTAKEN FOR HUGH GRANT IN THE PAST, THE CAREER HE HAS CARVED OUT IS VERY MUCH HIS OWN. INDEED, IF THERE WAS EVER A LIFE THAT DEMANDED RECORDING FOR POSTERITY, THIS IS IT, AND WHO BETTER TO SPILL THE BEANS THAN THE MAN HIMSELF
words: alex canfor-dumas
photography: carolyn djanogly
IF RUPERT EVERETT didn’t exist, you’d have to make him up. Take an actor and add a little bit Brideshead Revisited, a little bit Hollywood, a little bit rock band meets boy band. There would be huge amounts of colour should anyone wish to write about his life; so it’s just as well he has chosen to.
Everett’s just-published autobiography, Red Carpets And Other Banana Skins, is written in the best tradition of British thespians (think Peter Ustinov and David Niven, among others) who have survived Hollywood only to return with a bucketful of amusing anecdotes. He can be irreverent and no one escapes his sharp gaze.
For instance, recalling the time he worked with Faye Dunaway and an orangutan on the film Dunston Checks In, he remembers they both took ages to get ready. There are moments of pathos, too, such as when he writes about his hero, Bob Dylan, with whom he worked in the late 1980s, on a disastrous film called Hearts of Fire. “Bob looked as though someone had sucked all the fluids out of him. He was hunched and crumpled under a wistful afro. What was he doing here? He knew he was taking part in a piece of unmitigated rubbish.”
The book is a chronological romp through Everett’s life to date and is full of celebrity anecdotes. He recounts how, while still a drama student, he gate-crashed a party where Andy Warhol and Bianca Jagger were guests. Both took a shine to the young man, despite the fact he fell asleep as soon as he sat at their table. Bianca became a close friend. Apart from a way with people, the actor also has a penchant for words: take his chapter headings, such as ‘Charity Begins as Far Away as Possible’. He also has two novels under his belt: Hello Darling Are You Working? and The Hairdressers of St Tropez, and is an occasional contributor to Vanity Fair magazine.
Now, posing for the shoot in a London hotel suite, you realise how at home Everett looks in this environment. But then, hotels have long been his favoured residence.
He almost prefers them to his three homes in London, New York and Miami. “I haven’t cooked ever,” he reveals later. “I could probably cook a boiled egg, but I haven’t”. His lack of domesticity isn’t the only reason for his wandering lifestyle, however. In his memoirs he writes: “My life started on the move. Our family, led by my father, was a restless one from the beginning.”
Rupert Everett was born in 1959 into a privileged military family. His early years were spent in Norfolk and Essex. “I do have a very nomadic existence now,” he concedes. “But I was brought up like that – my family moved house often when I was small. But I like the idea of not being just defined as a Londoner, or being this or that. Those descriptions can be claustrophobic.”
This indefinable quality makes him not of one time or place or country; and could help explain why he has been cast so often, and so successfully, in period films. He’s been an Elizabethan playwright, two Stuart kings (Charles I and Charles II), a Regency prince, a Cossack and a medieval knight (though the last was a voiceover in animated movie Shrek 2). His 20th-century roles have been tortured ones, including David Blakely – who was murdered by his lover, Ruth Ellis, the last woman in Britain to be hanged – in Dance With A Stranger (1985). This followed Another Country (1984), in which he co-starred with Colin Firth, which was the film that made him a household name and earned him many a schoolgirl fan.
But Everett has always been something of a performer. In his memoirs, he recalls a defining moment in his childhood (he was five at the time) when his nanny took him to the cinema. “Mary Poppins sprang across the footlights and into my heart,” he writes.
Simultaneously “a giant and deranged ego” was born in him. Back home, the star-struck youngster conjured up an alter ego – Mary Poppins’ daughter – and took to dressing up in his mother’s clothes (a red tweed skirt being a favourite) while he sang endless songs to entertain his long-suffering family.
Clearly there were signs as to which way the wind was blowing for the young Rupert. Did his parents ever try to wrestle him out of the skirt and into a cowboy outfit? “Not at all,” he smiles. “My parents were almost Edwardian in outlook. The 1960s, psychiatry and Freud just passed them by. They couldn’t have imagined what was going on with me, so it wasn’t an issue for them.” Interestingly, as Everett has just been cast in a new film version of St Trinian’s, reprising the role of headmistress (made famous in the original by Alistair Sim), you could say that he finally got the part.
Although Everett had heterosexual relationships in his teens and twenties while working out his sexuality (including ones with the Oscar-winning actress Susan Sarandon and the presenter Paula Yates, who remained a friend until her death), he more or less knew he was gay soon after arriving at Ampleforth College, the prestigious Roman Catholic public school in Yorkshire. “In those days, being gay was barely legal, so you felt incredibly excited to be outside mainstream culture,” he remembers. “You were in a secret world.”
Everett is one of the few openly gay actors who retains star billing while continuing to be cast in straight roles (Sir Ian McKellen being another). As if to prove the point, his memoirs reveal an amusing story about filming a love scene with Hollywood star Sharon Stone during the making of A Different Loyalty in 2002. “Hon, I can turn a gay man straight in five minutes,” she murmurs to him, before the cameras roll. “How long does it take you to turn a straight man gay?” he whispers right back.
“I’m very pleased to be gay,” says Everett, “just for the fact that it made me not belong anywhere. Belonging is the most terrible thing because it gives one a false sense of security; a feeling that things will never change.
But of course they do – and then you suffer.”
No armchair analyst would miss the link between this statement and Everett’s memory of being left at boarding school when he was seven. He recounts in the book: “I begged not to be left… a child with a soft vulnerable heart soon had it calcified by abandonment.”
The Everett of today emits an air of emotional self-containment. He took a year off from acting to write the autobiography and enjoyed the solitary life of an author. “I loved not working as an actor for a while and having time on my own, staying in different places. I wrote every morning until lunchtime,” he remembers.
Although in his memoirs, Everett mentions a boyfriend from Uruguay, who lived with him in Hollywood in the late 1990s, and he is upfront and amusing about his crush on the actor Sir Ian McKellen when the author was a young drama student, he is, for the most part, circumspect about former boyfriends. And he is equally discreet about whether there is a regular partner at present.
However, the book does go into more detail about his well-documented affair with French film siren Beatrice Dalle. At one point she thought she was pregnant by Everett and when it turned out to be a false alarm the actor recalls feeling “really sad”. And in that strange way that life has of mirroring art (or vice versa), he found himself – years later – playing a gay man who has a child with a female friend (played by real-life pal Madonna) in The Next Best Thing. “I think that role was more integral to Madonna than to me,” he explains. “It’s something that could have happened to her.” With Everett as father? “No,” he says bluntly, with the faintest of smiles. “We’re just very good friends. But the storyline reflected a truth about a phenomenon that is happening, especially in Hollywood.”
Hollywood is a place that the actor has felt ambivalent about, especially after the success of My Best Friend’s Wedding revitalised his flagging career in 1997. At first, his part of gay best friend to Julia Roberts was rather modest, but was re-written and expanded when studio bosses noted his on-screen charisma. It was a performance that earned him a Golden Globe nomination, as did his portrayal, two years later, of Lord Arthur Goring in Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband. But the actor is happy to credit others with helping him give two scene-stealing performances. “If a part is brilliantly written, then it’s like a car; you just turn the key and off it goes,” he says generously.
And yet, in the ensuing years, his star in Hollywood has waxed and waned. “I could have been sucked into the Hollywood lifestyle,” he says. “But I was never going to get the roles I needed there to make my career work; the mainstream straight roles. At one point I wanted that, but not any more. It’s quite boring there now. All anyone talks about is box-office receipts.”
In some ways Everett’s Hollywood career has mirrored that of his contemporary, Hugh Grant. Both are highly successful British actors who have been wooed by the big studios. But, you always feel, there has been an ambivalence and perhaps a lack of commitment from both parties. Maybe they are too intelligent or too British to play the role of big Hollywood star. At the end of his autobiography, Everett recounts how a tourist once mistook him for Hugh Grant at the airport and asked for his autograph. Everett signed it: “Drop dead! Love Hugh Grant.”
Everett was last seen in Julian Fellows’ Separate Lies (2005) and he’ll soon be on his second outing as the voice of Prince Charming in Shrek The Third. Is he happy with his career, now that he’s 47? “I feel very lucky to have kept going as long as I have and to have made some very good films. Maybe I didn’t make enough of the opportunities that came to me,” he allows. “But there’s a lot about that world [the film industry] that is aggressive and divisive, if I’m honest. Also, being so rich can make you very out of touch. It wouldn’t be meaningless if the product were a mirror to society, like films used to be. Now, we’re just being entertained away from the issues that matter.”
If his own story were filmed, who would play his part? Everett considers for a moment. “Nope. I really can’t think of anyone at all,” he shrugs. Silly question. There’s obviously only one person who could ever play Rupert Everett. Well, if the skirt still fits.
