Rupert Everett “caustic new memoir”

Oscar Wilde in exile seemed to be the obvious choice. [After serving two years for gross indecency with his lover, Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas, Wilde sailed for France in 1897. He never returned to England.]

If the only role I was permitted to play in world cinema was the gay best friend — to Madonna in The Next Best Thing and to Julia Roberts in My Best Friend’s Wedding — then I’d take it all the way back to the prototype.

I wrote my script, The Happy Prince. The world’s best and toughest producer, Scott Rudin, loved it, thought it was brilliant.

I remember that day very well, the intensity of happiness, the congratulations I received from all the doubters in my camp. I was walking on air, making all sorts of plans, acceptance speeches in mirrors, dispensing largesse.

However, the next day Rudin said that he wanted Philip Seymour Hoffman to play Oscar, and here is where I made my greatest mistake. I should have said yes.

Hoffman, of course, would have been brilliant and my career as a screenwriter would have been established at the highest level. However, I declined. I’d written the script for myself and I still had grandiose plans.

Rudin relented: he agreed to let me act in the film as long as the director Roger Michell was involved. So far, so good. Roger then decided that he didn’t want to direct the film after all, so Rudin gave me a list of six directors he’d accept. I approached them all.

It took nearly two years to extract a negative response from each of them. Then Rudin backed out — the last ember of my Hollywood career by this stage having irretrievably crumbled to ash. I was just another old freak on the dust heap, joining Mr T, Robby Benson and Mark Lester in the ‘where are they now’ category.

Soon I had nothing left but my script. And that was when I decided to try to make the film myself. F*** them. F*** them and f*** them, I thought.

The year is 2010. Hollywood has zipped up behind me, the script of The Happy Prince has been rejected by all the usual suspects and I’m back in the theatre, aged 50 — not getting great reviews, bitter, desperate, with the atrophies of middle age setting in.

At this point, David — a close friend with contacts in the German screen trade — tells me: ‘Listen. Your script is dead in the water [a muffled gasp from me] but I think I could sell it in Germany.’

He ends up making a deal with a camera-hire company from Berlin called Cine Plus who are ‘getting into making movies’.

Their head of production is a man called Jörg Schulze. On the phone, he has a rich voice — ‘I loved the script, yeah?’ — and says he can definitely find the money to make the film.

‘I don’t think it will be that easy,’ I caution. ‘I’ve been everywhere. You’re my last resort.’

‘Are you crazy? You’re Rupert Ewerett, yeah!’ Jörg speaks good English but is unable to pronounce the letter v, and confirms every sentence with ‘yeah’. There’s something touching about him. He has a child’s enthusiasm — a dangerous trait in a producer — and it veers towards fantasy.

His best friend and partner, Thorsten Ritter, is the head of production at the Bavaria studios in Munich (‘Bawaria, yeah’). On an October morning, I meet them in Berlin to go through the script of what could be the strangest, greatest German film ever made.

Jörg is large and dishevelled and Thorsten is small and neat, with sensible shoes. They remind me of the Two Ronnies.

This is my new dream team. The only snag is that neither of them has ever actually made a film. Today they’ve brought in a ‘script expert’ to solve some problems they have with the structure of my film. He’s a tall man with a gunmetal crop and red eyes framed by rimless spectacles.

Script Doctor Goebbels!’ my friend David whispers to me as we all sit down. It only takes five minutes in the presence of Germans for the English to reference the war. (This should have given me a hint.) Dr G thinks the script is ‘bvilliant’, but that it falls apart halfway through.

‘Oh really?’ I try to look reasonable. ‘In what way, exactly?’

He looks at me over his bifocals as if I’m a naughty student. ‘Ah sink zis Boosie ees nat so essential, ya?’

‘Non,’ I replied. ‘I mean ja. Very essential.’ I know the trick is to remain calm.

A sudden picture of my father seething about ‘bloody Jerry’ on a ferry packed with Germans in the Sixties flashes across my mind.

‘Well, many people would agree with you,’ I say, trying the expansive approach.

‘But of course my story is about Bosie and Oscar and the end of their relationship.’

We are all going to need a lot of patience.

A few months later, Jörg calls to say that I have to come to Germany for the Berlin International Film Festival.

‘We have a lot of interest. People are crazy about the script. We have a lot of meetings set up.’

Film festivals can be hellish affairs. The powerful flex while the powerless grovel, and the rest of us juggle our way up or down.

All this is played out in theatres and halls and hotel lobbies, at dinners and screenings, at breakfast meetings and focus groups.

The stars run by, draped in borrowed jewels, followed by flotillas of their ‘people’. The whole thing goes on year after year, and nothing ever changes except the faces get bigger (fillers) and the movies get smaller (budgets).

One thing not to do at a film festival is business. Nobody concentrates. Everyone is looking over their shoulder.

This is where I first meet Philipp, the man setting up all our meetings with distributors. He’s like an overgrown schoolboy with an unbroken voice, and glasses covered with fingerprints.

Before our first meeting with ‘the most important guy at [French TV channel] Canal Plus’, he pumps me up like a boxer’s manager in a B-movie.

This is a really important meeting, yeah? He already loves the script. It could be great.’

We squash around a greasy Formica table cluttered with squeezy bottles of ketchup and mustard. Our man from Canal Plus is late and Jörg breaks into a muck sweat.

Philipp makes frantic calls on three different phones. He pecks at one with nibbled fingers, firing off messages while his face observes another with a kind of perplexed horror, his eyes gigantic through the thick lenses of his spectacles.

It’s the mesmerising ritual of a showbusiness shaman summoning the spirit of Canal Plus into the room — and finally a tiny creature appears waving from the escalator. He is wearing a Doctor Who scarf.

Panting and apologising, he collapses at the table, uncoiling himself from the scarf, talking all the time — the plane, the luggage, the hotel — while a grumpy waitress dumps a cup of tea in front of him and we all fix sympathetic smiles on our faces.

He says straight away that he hadn’t had time to read the script but that it sounds exactly what they’re looking for. Jörg wipes his drenched face with a napkin.

I describe the film for the 15,000th time and he sounds pretty enthusiastic, so we arrange to meet soon in Paris and he winds himself back into his scarf and down the escalator.

We never hear another word.

After a few more disastrous meetings, I realise that absolutely no one is interested in getting into the ‘Rupert Everett business’ as they say in the States. I leave without a single deal.

But the film refuses to die, and somehow we manage to raise nine million euros.

Unfortunately, we need 14 million. We’re standing on the edge of a cliff. Money has been spent and it’s too late to stop. Equally it may be impossible to go on.

I’m on a train to Paris when I suddenly have a fabulous idea. If our budget is unachievable, why don’t I set the film now, in the present day? I’m serious! Why not the Normandy ferry, instead of tearing what’s left of our hair out trying to find a packet ship? A modern courtroom instead of the Old Bailey.

Euro Disney instead of Dieppe. Just imagine Oscar being chased by Minnie Mouse. Maybe that’s going a bit far but-you-know-what-I-mean. It could be fantastic.

Sitting on the Eurostar, as we plough through the frosty Kent marshes, I turn my attention to the amazing-looking black man who is sitting opposite me.

He’s decked out in Gucci and Prada, with bangles, rings and chains, diamond-studded shades on an exquisite shaved head.

Soon we’re chatting. He says he’s a footballer but I don’t believe that for a moment. Still, he does seem vaguely familiar.

Needless to say, when I reach the producers on the phone, they’re horrified by my idea. At first they think I’m joking and then they get shirty. They think I’m making fun of them. (Germans!)

I explain how we could make the film for a quarter of the budget, and we could probably clean up at awards season. I’m screaming down the phone but nobody is impressed except the footballer.

‘I’d watch it,’ he mouths with a wink. It’s only after I arrive in Paris that I realise who he is. Thierry Henry. Damn. I should have got his phone number.

Days turn into weeks turn into years — and the tide turns again. Some Belgians come onboard with funds and a producer. I manage to get the BBC involved, scoop up a great distributor and persuade Colin Firth to play Oscar’s friend Reggie.

Lights. Camera. Action. We’ll be shooting half the film in Germany and the rest in Italy, Belgium and France. First stop Franconia, a province of Bavaria. This is where our Royal Family flapped in from, so a lot of people look like Prince William.

Like a circus, the film crew crash into the village of Thurnau, where we’re shooting in a castle. Strange things begin to happen.

The local telephone box is disguised as a tree stump. The roads are covered in sand and the local supermarket is suddenly swamped in foliage, its blinking sign removed for a week.

The village is invaded by men with walkie-talkies telling local people where they can walk.

Six Roman seamstresses magically appear and sit at sewing machines making costumes all day long. They cook pasta on spirit burners for lunch.

We ask the village mayor to turn off the church bells that clang every quarter of an hour. Bemused smile. The bells have rung consistently since 1640.

But he stops them. This is enormously empowering and I feel like Elizabeth Taylor.

I rush back to London because suddenly there’s a problem with Colin ‘Frothy’ Firth’s dates and maybe he can’t do the movie.

My heart flutters like a trapped bird banging against my ribcage. Our whole financial plan relies on poor Frothy.

When we meet for breakfast in Chiswick, West London, I’m ready to beg and weep but straight out he says, ‘I think I can work things out. The only thing is I can’t do more than two weeks.’

Two weeks? I was thinking of two days. I say nothing, of course. Then the tears come anyway.

It’s terribly humiliating and I think Frothy is rather shocked. I’m already a nervous wreck and we haven’t even started shooting.

Flying back to Germany, I take two large suitcases containing the two precious fat suits I’ll be wearing as Oscar. At Munich airport, I get a good frisking as a potential terrorist.

I haul open the cases under the beady eye of the security guard, a white rat with tiny red eyes and green teeth, suddenly alert as I pull out my fat suits. He scrutinises, prods and squeezes their c****.

Obviously he thinks they may contain something explosive. Only my performance, I say — very Oscar — but he’s not on my wavelength.

He takes a swab. It’s like being in a VD clinic. The other passengers are fascinated as the poor lifeless suits are put onto the conveyor belt. Officials crowd round the TV screen as they tumble obscenely through the hatch, all arms and legs.

Meanwhile, the guard examines my false teeth with rubber gloves and gingerly frisks my wigs as if they might be sprayed with polonium rather than Elnett.

Colin Firth arrives in Thurnau on a hot Sunday morning. He checks into the rather chic room I picked out myself. Champagne and chocs are on the bedside table.

His movements are constantly monitored and snatches of his progress can be heard in peculiar, truncated conversations — back and forth — between assistants on their walkie-talkies, recounted in grave Germanic detail and punctuated by explosions of static.

‘Colin loves the room.’

‘Copy that.’

‘Colin’s going for a wonk.’

‘A wonk?’

‘A walk.’

‘Copy that.’

We all wait nervously for Colin to arrive for lunch at the Greek restaurant under the castle and he doesn’t show up. ‘Goodness, he’s late,’ I say at about 2pm. ‘Who’s collecting him?’

Nobody. In the frenzy of micromanagement, we forgot to have him picked up.

Panic attacks all round. Where is he? Apparently pacing up and down outside the hotel.

‘Colin is waiting. Over. What should I tell him, Rupert?’

‘Maybe he should go for another wonk.’

‘Copy that.’

By the time Colin arrives, I’m reduced to a fawning over-spanked dog. ‘Colin, darling. Thank you thank you thank you,’ I yap.

‘Don’t worry,’ he says evenly. ‘I wouldn’t miss this train crash for anything.’

Colin is with us for the most important week of the shoot. We’re working in the room at the Hôtel d’Alsace where Oscar dies, surrounded by faithful friends.

I am nervous. All my stars are here. Tom Wilkinson plays the Irish priest who will administer me the last rites. John Standing is the doctor and has been practising with his stethoscope all morning. Emily Watson, as Oscar’s estranged wife, will appear in a dream sequence.

The crew is jammed into one corner of the small room, the performers in another. I lie on the bed lurching from a death rattle to screaming at whoever is talking in the corridor outside.

From Oscar Wilde to Orson Welles and back again. I’ve finally managed to make myself the complete centre of attention.

Sadly, our ship hits a rock the following week. There’s a new 800,000-euro hole in our budget and we’re sinking.

I start to feel faint. We could be closed down. I’ve got to have a stroke this morning — we’re not shooting in sequence. At this rate it won’t be acting. As part of my stroke, I puke all over Colin, but my heart’s not in it. ‘Are you OK?’ asks Colin. ‘You look a bit done in.’

I’m acting!’ I snap. It’s quite lonely being the director because you can’t tell the others what’s really going on.

At lunch, the Belgian producer Sébastien has a suggestion: he’ll put in an extra 500,000 euros if I put in up to 300,000 and get the actors to accept pay cuts.

The actors all amaze me. Colin Morgan [playing Bosie] agrees to give back a part of his fee. And Colin Firth does the film for nothing.

It’s time for the film crew to leave Thurnau, which isn’t sorry for our departure. Even the sweet couple who own the guest house look exhausted, firstly because a group of Neapolitan actors smoked like chimneys and talked all night, then because I screamed about the church bells.

On the day we leave, the bells are switched back on and clang non-stop. It feels like the liberation. But as we move on to new locations, I feel like death. Bloated, frenzied and foul-breathed, I’m drinking and smoking to keep going. But eventually the film is locked into place, like a body in its tomb, never to be revisited, each frame in its sequence for eternity.

In Italy, it does reasonably well. In Germany, it’s put out at the same time as the World Cup, the premise being that people who don’t like the football can go to the cinema.

But the football trumps everything. And so my dream of making a wonderful German film goes down like a sinking ship as the box office collapses within a matter of days.

In London, we get some excellent reviews. The audiences are good. Harper’s Magazine give a party at the Café Royal on the night of the premiere. Ruby Wax comes. Colin Firth, too.

And so — very shortly after —does a gigantic heatwave. Nobody goes to the movies when it’s hot outside and so we wilt across the country along with everything else.

In Los Angeles, we last five days in West Hollywood. After that, you have to trek out to Pasadena. In short, there’s no interest, and the distributor’s enthusiasm flickers and dies.

Finally, just before I return to London, there’s a screening at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Backstage, the rep from Sony whispers, ‘We’ve got a great crowd in there for a Sunday.’

I swell slightly. Something is at last going well. The music swells and I’m ushered into the impressive theatre. Two gigantic Oscars stand guard either side of the screen. I fix on my friendliest smile and turn to face the crowd.

There’s hardly anyone there. It’s like a drizzly midweek matinee in the West End, a vast auditorium dotted with people. And Joan Collins wearing a huge cowboy hat with her husband Percy beside her.

Say whatever you like about Joan, she’s a loyal friend.

You slave through ten years over an idea and nobody likes it. So what? We’re all dealt an unfair hand. Maybe I’m hopelessly out of date, out of sync, out of touch. And maybe I’m not. But actually, now, writing this — my scars healing nicely — I don’t care so much.

I painted Oscar Wilde as I felt him to be. I adore the film, warts and all, and some strange weight has lifted from my shoulders.

We throw the dice for immortality in this crapshoot and are quickly forgotten, even the most illustrious of us. But this film will remain — somewhere, lost perhaps, seen only by a Martian cleaning out his mother’s spaceship, but still there.

[quote]And Colin Firth does the film for nothing.

Why Colin iFirth > Rupert Everett.

Plus Colin Firth will never write a whiny article about how awful his creatively fulfilling, movie-star life is.

R11, Colin iFirth, the flagship device of Apple corporation.

Everett is such a narcissistic windbag. As if he’s the only thing in the universe that matters.

tiresome and self self centred.

I never could stand Rupert. She needs to go crawl back under her rock.

IDK, I still like Rupert somewhat, bitter old queen and all.

Cont.

Julie Andrews once bleakly remarked that while you may love showbusiness with all your heart — dedicate your life and soul to it — showbusiness will never love you back.

It waits for the moment you are down and it kicks you carefully in the teeth.

But this dismal forecast only goes halfway to describing the weird relationship we performers have with the strange profession that we never willingly relinquish.

Becoming a star is an addiction and a mirage, a pretty picture at first, but quickly stained by the thick hairspray of power and paranoia that slowly dulls our features, freezing them into our favourite ‘f*** me’ grimace and calcifying the central plumbing system so that, after a bit, the hot water starts gushing from the cold water taps and general disorientation sets in.

With the first twinkle of stardom, we exist more on the silver screen than at home behind the kitchen sink.

For example, NEVER ask a movie star to say I love you. They just can’t. They have given it their all in close-up on a sound stage, dressed as an Apache.

And don’t say I love you to one of them either. They can’t cope. They will either reply ‘OK’ (Madonna) or ‘Thank you’ (Michael Douglas).

Once the fresh knickers of nubile fans start sailing through the letter box with the post; once you have felt the power of your (lack of) personality projected onto a screen, backcombed and backlit, your view of yourself and the world around you changes for ever.

It’s a hall of mirrors. Your eyes are suddenly the shadowed and glinting windows of a tortured soul. These eyes bore through the footlights into the very heart of the spectator — and once you have felt all that, there is no going back.

In the wonky mirror of everyone’s eyes, you believe it’s all you, all that depth — but actually you’re nothing much more than the undead waiting for another fix. (It’s true what they say: the camera steals the soul — none of us has any left by the end.)

Hopefully, you become a star, and time briefly falls away in the waves of endless adulation that even has your own mother treating you with caution. You are in equal measure omnipotent and a victim.

Everyone loves you, but they’re out to get you, too. Everyone wants a piece, but who cares — as far as you’re concerned it will last for ever. You’re totally immersed and will never escape.

Movies, movies, movies. You know it all, who is doing what, why it’s all happening and where. You’re in total control.

And then suddenly everything falls away. It’s a game of snakes and ladders, and you’re back to square one.

You may not notice at first. But then one day you discover that people actually laughed at that great dramatic performance you gave in X. They always thought you were mediocre, screechy, shallow. Cute maybe, but talentless and tricky.

And now? Oh no! You’re 25 or 35 or 45 and washed-up. The fabulous character you developed in the Eighties is suddenly a clunky old battleship in shoulder pads disappearing over the horizon.

So you widen your net to survive. Italian films. TV. Voice-overs. Supermarkets. Teaching. And of course, rehab.

Rehab is the downbeat in this syncopated rhythm, and why not? Your face in a mirror hoovering up a delicious line is the only one that reminds you of the misunderstood anti-hero you once were.

Now you reject everything that’s happening. But showbusiness is still your whole life even if you never see a film and you hate the theatre. This is the worst circle of the inferno. You are undead. The years shriek by.

You may grab onto a passing movie and briefly be catapulted to the top, like some cartoon fish that is suddenly caught in the jet of a fountain and shoots sky-high, but it’s a balancing trick that requires the whole universe to be in tune.

The tune changes and soon you’re back with the bottom-feeders moping around the pond floor. Before you know it (or have time to find a reliable surgeon), you’re 50. They say that sometimes ghosts don’t realise they’re dead and wander around screaming because no one is paying them any attention. Well, in showbusiness you may have been ‘dead’ five years before you finally twig.

You howl around the corridors of power while the elect march straight past you. Then one day you catch yourself in a mirror and there’s nothing looking back.

The new you, limping from the crash, held together by steel pins, a hacking cough developed from ten years of gasping with disappointment, will need to re-train those crushed limbs into new life, another start.

In 2015, my new agent, Sue, tells me I’ve been offered a role in Tim Burton’s latest film, Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children.

Well, for some reason, I get it into my head that the character I’m being offered is called Mr Barron.

How I could have known the name Mr Barron if no one had said it to me is anyone’s guess, but anyway I gloomily set about reading the script.

‘Trust me,’ I groan to my long-suffering boyfriend. ‘It’s going to be one line.’

Well, I can’t believe my eyes. Mr Barron is a rather good part. Actually, it’s a very good part. Next stop Hollywood.

So one evening in March, I arrive at Tim Burton’s office in Belsize Park [North London] and the door is opened by a legendary casting witch called Susie Figgis.

We sit down on a leather couch in a big empty studio where our bottoms make embarrassing sounds against the cushions, and she informs me that Tim is looking for the ‘real thing’ for this role ‘and that’s why we want you!’.

A little alarm bell tinkles and I wonder what about me is the real thing. In the script, Mr Barron is an alien. I suppose I am, too?

Tim Burton arrives, a bundle of raw energy.

‘Tim. Are you really offering me this part?’ I ask, incredulous.

‘Yes.’ He laughs.

‘I don’t have to audition?’

‘No, of course not.’

I am overwhelmed. I haven’t been offered a good part in at least five years. Not a really good part. I begin to talk about Mr Barron. I’m giddy with excitement. Tim seems to love everything I say. ‘That’s so true,’ he screams, pointing at Susie victoriously.

I continue smoothly: ‘I just felt reading the script that his character completely disappeared once they got to Blackpool.’

‘Exactly,’ gasps Tim.

‘Stop!’ shouts Susie, and we both look round. ‘You’re not playing Mr Barron,’ she cries, breathless. ‘Your part is the Ornithologist.’

Silence. Freeze-frame. They both look at me, smiling, eyes glittering. I can’t even remember the Ornithologist.

‘Samuel L. Jackson is playing Mr Barron,’ says Tim apologetically.

I slam into dinner-party overdrive. ‘Oh well, of course, yes. How silly of me. He’s absolutely marvellous. Golly. I’m sure the Ornithologist will be very exciting, too.’

‘Oh, yes,’ agrees Tim. ‘He’s absolutely perfect. He’s a typical English gentleman.’

‘Great. Well, let me have a read again.’ I funnel a sob into a burp and beat a retreat.

Back in bed that night with the script, my previous suspicions are confirmed. I have just one line — well, ten actually.

And so we hobble along on our Zimmer frames, rushing for the bus to the next audition. Either that or we succumb to that flickering existence of Dancing With The Stars and daytime soaps, flashing on and off like an old bulb.

And so we live more and more in the past. It’s 2010. I’m sitting with two young men in J Sheekey’s restaurant in the West End of London.

They’re from Paramount Pictures or 20th Century Fox, I can’t remember which.

What I can remember is that this is the last meeting I have at such an exalted level — actually feasting with the high priests of Hollywood — to discuss my possible involvement in a picture.

I’m at a comfortable corner table holding forth. The men, Andy and Loeg, lean in black suits, white shirts, thin ties and neon teeth, are producers. Thunderbirds are go.

Andy and Loeg are as unfathomable as Martians, downloading my every gesture, as we talk about the project — a family-viewing fairy story in which the villain is a giant.

I babble on while the men fix me with their Paul Newman eyes, pupils like pins, unwavering in their scrutiny, ready to play it back later in a satellite link-up with their superiors back at the studio.

I’m used to this by now, although I’ve already hoovered up a couple of dry martinis to conjure up a bit of sloshed sparkle — the dregs of my star quality.

But I’m strutting my stuff, acting butch and generally giving the impression of being a no-nonsense, take-charge kind of giant and things seem to be going pretty well. I grind to a halt in my pitch and they stare back — no helpful chirrup of encouragement — and there’s a moment of silence.

What you say is true,’ proclaims Loeg finally. ‘This picture will die without soul.’ (Translation: It’s so bad we’re going to need some good actors.)

‘There’s got to be a three-dimensional quality to all these characters. We need actors who know how to do that,’ he continues. (Take the money and don’t ask too many questions.) ‘Otherwise they’re just... ’

A long, important pause. ‘Giants?’ I say. I have a terrible habit of finishing everyone’s sentences, but I can’t stand silence. A shadow of impatience scuds across Loeg’s face.

‘What we need is a bit of rehearsal,’ I surge on regardless. ‘Will there be any time for rehearsal, Loeg?’

I’m intense now, a humble craftsman, Daniel Day-Lewis in fact. Simple. Direct. And deep. (The polar opposite to interior me right now, which is devious, superficial and bored.) It works.

‘Oh yeah. Sure. We’re gonna rehearse out there at Pinewood.’ He beams at me, reassured.

He’s about to say ‘You got the part’ when Johnno, the queen dee (new word incorporating maître d’ and queen bee) of the restaurant, a man camper even than me, sashays over with his little finger up at his mouth and baby eyes twinkling.

‘Houston, we got a problem,’ he hisses, bending towards me in a vaudevillian aside. Everyone looks up.

‘What?’ I snap. I cannot be put off my stride at this delicate stage. It would be fatal.

His eyes narrow slightly. ‘Well. Get this. Joan Collins is waiting for you at The Ivy. You stood her up. She’s FURIOUS!’

‘Oh no! I completely forgot,’ I moan, cancer cells replicating.

I’ve double-booked myself when I was supposed to be dining with Joan, her husband Percy and Christopher Biggins.

Always desperate to please, like a toothless old circus dog, I yap yes to everything and then forget all about it until it’s too late and I’m doing something else.

‘Joan Collins?’ Andy lights up. ‘Is she still around? Maybe we could get her in the movie.’

‘Maybe?’ barks Loeg. ‘She’s been circling the studio in a helicopter, ready to drop in, fully made-up, since the last episode of Dynasty.’

The Americans explode with mirth. Queen Dee watches with a delighted smile. He’s got the party going, and the Martians are coming out of their shell.

Then Johnno trills like an alarm clock: ‘They’re on the phone now. What do you want me to say?’

‘Can’t you just say I’m not here?’

‘No. Not really. They already know. I told them. I’ll tell them you’ll come after dinner.’

‘Let’s get them over here right now,’ says Loeg. ‘I’ll send my car.’ Johnno minces off.

I try to get the business side of things going again: ‘Yeah. As Loeg was saying. It’s important to get a dimensional feel to these characters. Otherwise they’re just... ’

Listen,’ beeps Andy. ‘We love you. We want you in the picture, but you know what? None of the giants are right for you.’

I am about to protest, but he ploughs right on. ‘What could be BRI-lliant — don’t you agree, Loeg — is the role of the hairdresser!’

I feign puzzled.

‘He has this cute little salon right high up in the branches. It’s really neat, all made out of leaves.’

I fix an excited glow onto my face as an image materialises with alarming clarity. On the edge of a vast sound stage, there’s a little set all made of leaves — leaf sink, leaf hairdryer, leaves through the windows with leaf curtains — and me in the middle, hipsters and a green quiff , backcombing an ogre. I nearly puke.

Out of the corner of my eye, I can see Johnno skimming back over the horizon.

‘You’re in deep s***,’ he says, swivelling to a halt. ‘They don’t want a car. I’ve got an idea. Why don’t I nip over with your credit card and pay their bill?’

Anything to get him away. I hand over my card.

I’m quite drunk now and longing to be at the other restaurant with Joan and Biggins and having a good chinwag about the old days instead of a***-licking my way up the beanstalk, when Johnno reappears.

‘They refused!’ he proclaims to the whole restaurant, waving my credit card over his head.

‘Oh my God. She must be really angry. What did they say?’

‘They said they could pay for their own dinner, thank you.’

Needless to say, I do not get the role of the giant, or any other role for that matter. And Joan and I don’t speak for years.

As actors, we are dragged in and out with the tide, back and forth to Hollywood, occasionally crashing in on the crest of a wave but mostly beached or swept out too deep, while trying to make it ashore for pilot season, clinging to a scrapbook of faded reviews.

I can feel the pull of the current right now, but this time I’m not going to exhaust myself trying to swim back. This time, I’ll go with the flow and see where the tide takes me. Maybe it comes back round. Maybe not.

Tonight I’ll record an audition on my iPhone. I’ve constructed a little set: a Turkish cushion, a stone wall, a shadowed light courtesy of my dad’s old desk lamp.

In the scene I play King Gallarhorn — a part in a gigantic series I’m up for. I haven’t got a clue what the story is, nor any idea who King Gallarhorn might be. I’ve only been sent two pages of dialogue.

But this could be the moment of truth. My agent tells me the series is going to be as big as Game Of Thrones. I could suddenly be the new witch on the block.

After about 30 attempts at the scene, I take a deep breath and press send. I imagine my audition twirling through cyberspace and into the virtual hell of the casting director’s inbox.

Needless to say, I never hear back.

[quote] This is where our Royal Family flapped in from, so a lot of people look like Prince William.

That doesn't make any sense.

Prince William is at most only 3/8 German--the rest is almost all fully British.

One grandparent is almost all German; one is half German, but also half Scottish; the other two were both as English as it gets.

R24 the genetic soup does not always boil up the way you would expect.

It made sense to complain about the British royal family being too German fifty years ago, but after Diana married in to bear heirs and now Kate has married in too to carry William's heirs, it doesn't make much sense any more.

Ugh! Rupert Everett annoys me. I'll give him credit for being one of the first actors in the business to publicly come out of his own choosing and not because he was about to be out by tabloids. But then he has spent years complaining about coming out and even says he regrets it. He moans that it cost him parts, which is probably not untrue, but I am leaning towards that fact that his being difficult to work with as the leading cause why no one wants to hire him. And it's too bad he fucked up his face, cause he was a good looking guy.

He led such a harmful, unhealthy life and now he is trying to make up for the damage done and realizing its too late. If he keeps getting turned down for acting roles he should pursue some other line of work.

Are you copy and pasting the entire book?

Maybe he'll write about Unconditional Love and declare what a cunt Kathy Bates was like on set.

After Muriel and My Best Friend, he PJ Hogan should have found another matrimonial tale to direct.

TL: DR.

Rupert, one of the keys to successful writing?

Editing.

She has bingo wings.

I didn't wade through all of the excerpts, but what he says at R17 and R18 is probably some of the most self-aware, brutally realistic descriptions of stardom I've read yet.

[quote]Becoming a star is an addiction and a mirage, a pretty picture at first, but quickly stained by the thick hairspray of power and paranoia that slowly dulls our features, freezing them into our favourite ‘f*** me’ grimace and calcifying the central plumbing system so that, after a bit, the hot water starts gushing from the cold water taps and general disorientation sets in.

Holy crap. Pick a metaphor--just the ONE, for the love of god--and stay with it.

R29 I’m copying and pasting the excerpts that are published by DM because I prefer to read without page crashing every five seconds due to megatons of ads. You, however, are not obliged to read it, so feel free to scroll past.

I want to hear some goddamn dish. Not this horseshit about his movie script.

R30 He actually did write about Unconditional Love in his first autobiography Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins. At that point (which was late 2000s) he said that he felt Unconditional Love was one of the best films of his career and he said he loved working with Kathy Bates and he said he had a fantastic time with Stephanie Beacham whose part was mostly cut from the film.

[quote}[R30] He actually did write about Unconditional Love in his first autobiography Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins. At that point (which was late 2000s) he said that he felt Unconditional Love was one of the best films of his career and he said he loved working with Kathy Bates and he said he had a fantastic time with Stephanie Beacham whose part was mostly cut from the film.

Oh I'm surprised he was positive about Kathy Bates, I'm sure I read him saying it was an unpleasant shoot because he and Bates mostly filmed at night and she was not happy.

I really enjoyed the film. Everett's take on the bello Napoli ragazzi for hire was spot on and quite amusing.

I made it through five sentences of that crap and lost interest.

He’s a tedious, pompous wind bag.

Who is, or rather WAS, this person again?

Rupert’s desert island discs is very good and probably available on a podcast in your respective countries.

He picks one of the same songs George Michael picked.

He's a fabulous writer. Have read all his memoirs. Clearly most of you haven't.

Saw this guy several times in the 90s NYC at clubs stumbling drunk. I hate to make generalizations but, Brits can't seem to hold their liquor.

He destroyed his face. Being gay had little to do with his failing career. Being hard to look at did.

As she sang in [italic]My Best Friend's Wedding[/italic], she am woman, hear her roar.

Well, Miss Thang, that makes one of us.

What did he think was going to happen when he came out in 1989? Even today, male actors have a tough time coming out and maintaining career momentum. It was ten times worse 30 years ago. If he wanted to stay a leading man, he needed to play the game. If he wanted to live truthfully, he needed to realize that being James Bond just wouldn't be in the cards, and turn to writing, producing, etc. like Stephen Fry did.

[quote] What did he think was going to happen when he came out in 1989?

Hopefully, the news would have turned Kirk Cameron into a pillar of salt.

If he'd stayed in the closet and bearded convincingly he could be where Colin Firth and Hugh Grant are now. That's the sad truth of the matter.

37 years have just flown by.

I'd like to have seen Everett and the late Dirk Bogarde cast together.

37 years ago people said pretty Everett would make an excellent young Dorian Gray. And Bogarde could be the monstrously old Dorian Gray.

Does he compare himself being a washed-up actor to Laurence Fox being a washed-up actor?

[quote] being a washed-up actor

I'm sure the egotistical Everett never said that.

[quote]If he'd stayed in the closet and bearded convincingly he could be where Colin Firth and Hugh Grant are now. That's the sad truth of the matter.

Can you name 3 roles that would have give his career a huge boost had he been cast in them? Pride and Prejudice? Four Weddings?

Colin Firth and Hugh Grant were/are inoffensively good-looking and rather bland.

Everett had an air of dissolution right from the beginning. See R51.

I met him in Monte Carlo in 2003 when he was presenting the World Music Awards.

He was charming and graceful.

R57 Did he move like Harlow through Monte Carlo? And showed them what he’s got?

Hehe R58

It was a bizarre evening. I remember he was lovely though. I had a bizarre conversation with 50 Cent and Prince Albert!

Anyway, Rupert was very nice.

This thread is so old I may have posted this before, but he worked out in the Archives building on Christopher St. Crunch Gym in NYC during the late 90s. He was in good shape and looked healthy at that time. I also caught Paul Rudd in the lockeroom looking at himself in the mirror without a shirt, he was preparing for a role and needed to be shirtless so he was getting in shape.

Nice. Thanks for sharing R60

Mary!

Poopert Everett.

I actually appreciate his honest descriptions of fame and the realities of the “career”. People need to understand how unglamorous it is - and how fame is not something that is healthy to pursue.

His self-pity in this is ridiculous. I don't know why he ever thought he was somehow owed a continuing stardom--he got good roles when he was young because he was beautiful, not because he was talented; and when hard living wrecked his looks relatively early, the roles dried up.

At some level he knows this; but at the same time the tone of the excerpts is, "I am such a victim! This is so unfair! I deserved to be an even bigger star than I was and to have retained that level of fame forever!" But he never was a very good actor: he Euro-mumbled all his lines. Whatever opportunities he had depended on his looks, and he was not careful enough to preserve them better than he did.

[quote] If he'd stayed in the closet and bearded convincingly he could be where Colin Firth and Hugh Grant are now. That's the sad truth of the matter.

[italic]Maybe[/italic] you can say about Hugh Grant, because Grant has also did a number on his looks through hard living, and Grant did not become a very good actor until he was into middle age (before then, he depended far too much on being bashful and beautiful)--but Grant is now a much better actor than he was in the past, and a much better actor than Everett. I don't think Everett could have pulled off Grant's performance in A VERY ENGLISH SCANDAL.

But Firth has always been a much better actor than Grant--that was clear going all the way back to ANOTHER COUNTRY.

And Firth kept his looks for much, much longer than Grant did because he didn't party as hard.

Richard Armitage stole his career.

Richard Armitage is indeed also very handsome, but again he is a much better actor than Everett.

I think that the roles for upper class, attractive Brits were pretty limited once Grant and Firth had established themselves in the late 90s and early 00s.

Film makers stopped making those sort of rom-coms by the 2010s and Everett's looks had gone by then anyway and Grant and Firth had naturally matured into other roles.

Oscar Wilde and upper class characters are his forte. Maybe remake the Lord Peter Wimsey series with him leading.

He fucked up his face pretty badly with plastic surgery, which translates worse in the UK than in the US, since almost none of their serious actors do it. It's going to limit the good character work he can do.

Tiresome queen.

I thought the film was brilliant. Sad it seems to be slipping under the radar. One of the best things I've watched In a long time. Now he's older I think Rupert Everett is evolving into a fine actor. His portrayal of Oscar captured everything I like, love, dislike about Oscar Wilde. Wonderful.

Has anyone worked with him?

He writes very well. Thanks for posting OP.

I think he just miscalculated with his coming out and thought Hollywood would finally come around and welcome him with wide open arms to score brownie points with the mainstream becoming more and more gay friendly. But Hollywood talked a big game but didn't deliver when it comes to gay acceptance in the casting process of big movies. I seem to recall in the audio commentary of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe the director mentions that Rupert got the voice-over role because he cornered the director one day, they knew each other from a previous project, and asked him point-blank if he has a part for him. And that's what he got out of it. A voice-over role.

R69- I NEVER thought that Rupert Everett ever had LOOKS.

When he came out, there just wasn’t enough gay roles for him. Even those who have come out so publicly after him seem stuck with playing just gay.

He should do something for television— Netflix, Hulu, and HBO. No more movies for him

Is there any sex in the book?

Brutally honest writing; I’m curious to read more.

“The Happy Prince” is for rent on Amazon Prime.

R76 You didn't see "Another Country" @ R51.

I just watched The Happy Prince, and it's mostly a dreary dirge. Some good sequences, mostly when Bosie shows up, but Everett's performance drains any possible sympathy you could have for Wilde. Stephen Fry played it much better.

The actor who plays Robbie Ross ( Thomas) is very cute and appealing.

R33 Yes, I thought the same! The rest was dreck, but that passage about stardom piqued my interest.