“There aren’t many of us left,” he says amiably. We are the same age; both know a few people from a hard-living decade: a wacky girl writer, a pop star, a performance artist who died – club people from 20 years ago who were far too wild and worrying for me, but who matched his need for devilment just fine. Having recently written an autobiography packed with brassy archetypes – Bois de Boulogne trannies, junkie aristos, Julie Andrews – and reversals of fortune, his past is sitting right here with us. For the posh boy from grand Catholic schools and a Wiltshire home where “grooms” were employed, the hedonistic mid-1980s clubbers at Taboo, Kinky Gerlinky, the Fridge were a relief, a way of escaping himself. “I devoted myself to the romance of it.” The search for identity has obsessed him. He found it and lost it as a posh young actor, a druggie raver, a gay movie star, a part-time libertine, a Hollywood “player” in a mansion, none of which labels ever really fitted the bill. One of the most telling things he says is that he doesn’t speak much to his elder brother who rents helicopters in Nairobi; his real history seems like an encumbrance, vaguely annoying.
Everett has played Sherlock Holmes, Oberon, a dissolute Prince Regent, had a huge hit with My Best Friend’s Wedding, but I remember him best as the floppy-haired, sardonic, beautiful boy (though he always made me think of a giraffe: the long, thick neck and eyelashes) from Another Country. Playing Guy Bennett in Julian Mitchell’s story of upper-crust spies, he was the sort of young actor who might easily have spent a lifetime playing exaggerated versions of himself – lovely in cricket whites or on horseback. He might play effete, or cruel, or simpering, but would never be less than smoulderingly upper-crust. Actually, that wasn’t what he wanted either. “I wanted to suffer like James Dean, to play iconic, to be complex on screen.”
Within two weeks of Another Country’s 1982 West End debut to rave reviews, its self-destructive star had become bored, an early symptom of problems in store. “Whatever I had, whatever I was given, I always wanted more and better,” he says. “In Another Country, I felt immediately so jaded that I couldn’t go on. I started f***ing up on stage and not trying. When I was young I felt that every day on Earth might be my last; I always thought I was about to miss the great romance which would pass me by.”
At 47 he is still a restless soul, innately nomadic, quickly bored. His PR had called me to suggest that we meet in Glasgow, where he once worked at the Citizens’ Theatre. Then the location shifted to Berlin, about which I must have sounded lukewarm, not realising how important that city had become to him. He wrote much of his forthcoming autobiography, Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins, there, staying in a student hotel that cost E40 a night. He loves its grungy affordability, the flowers growing through the cracks in the pavements, the wild nightlife including the “mixed fetish” KitKat Club, the way it reminds him of Notting Hill in the 1970s. And like everything he most enjoys, his love of Germans, with their seriousness and inclination to strip off whenever possible, is subversive. “When I was a kid, my family talked about the war so much, I thought I had been in it. The first time I got hit by another boy, it was because I insisted I’d been in the Blitz.”
In 1982, the promising young actor was so grand at 22 that he ordered a limousine to take him from his basement flat in Chelsea to the theatre. Twenty-four years later, he rides a bike around London, wears jeans or a tracksuit every day, and his hidden depths have erupted before you have started the first course: if he doesn’t stop talking about the politics of aid in the Horn of Africa, for God’s sake, you are never going to get in your questions about Madonna’s fertility crisis and whether he goes cruising on Hampstead Heath.
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Movie stars do not as a matter of course seek connections with interviewers or lavatory attendants (same difference to them): their job is to remain on a pedestal, but the years of swanning and jostling seem to be over for Everett. Talking to him is like talking to someone who has suffered a mighty fall from grace but has mended his ways and emerged into the light. He talks about his former ambition as a dangerously wayward lover out of whose clutches he has been born again. He refers repeatedly to the “violence” of wanting to be a movie star. “It’s about trying to get away from the rest of the world and be better than other people. That was totally my motivation,” he confesses like a group-therapy veteran. Besides, he thinks he wasn’t much good at it. “To make a movie-star career, you have to work it , work it, work it. You have to have conversation and banter. I’m blind at parties even with my contact lenses – I’m not sharp and witty at a Hollywood party, I’m terrified.” Who is good at them? “Lots of actors. Colin [Firth, his co-star in the film of Another Country] is good at them: he’ll go on and on about the production of Hamlet he wants to do, and nobody dare not be impressed.”
No catastrophe ever befell Everett to change his perspective, though there has been heroin and unemployment and dashed hopes. What happened is that he saw the limitations of his once golden horizons, realised that the stardom he chased, the glittering crowd he longed to join, were maybe not his destiny after all. “It’s a job you have to stretch your imagination to take seriously,” he says now, and he was always too wry, too blatant, too awkward, too naughty (he once publicly called the Queen a “stubborn cow”) to accept the rules of a studio town like LA. Besides, one of its attractions, the drop-dead Hollywood male, was a disappointment to him, a neurotic wuss – “All men have become faggots,” he says, emasculated by the need to stay young, chatting like girlies about their red-carpet ensembles. As a young man he was desperate to be part of it; at a party with Andy Warhol, the artist wrote on Everett’s nodding, drug-addled head “I Love You” in Bianca Jagger’s lipstick, a token of the belonging he desired. “I wanted to be them.” Later he was twirled on the dance floor of the Paris club Le Sept by his hero Nureyev, an arriviste’s heaven. Over the years, he has hopped from Hollywood to France to Miami and back, the first gay star to come out in the 1990s and still expect star billing, but who learnt that it just didn’t happen.
Everett’s inbred confidence has been bruised. After his Hollywood success as Julia Roberts’s confidant in the 1997 hit My Best Friend’s Wedding, by which time he was open about his sexuality, there were offers and fans but also people shouting at him in the street: “Look, there’s the gay guy!” “I realised that it was a nail in the coffin. How would I get out of it before I bored people to death playing gay best friends?” He has been allowed to play straight in European and period pieces. Oscar Wilde has provided a comfortable niche; he played the charming idler Algy in The Importance of Being Earnest, and a dangerously maverick Lord Goring in An Ideal Husband. And he was brilliantly repellent as the immoral son-of-the-manor who steals Emily Watson from her stuffy husband in Julian Fellowes’s 2005 film Separate Lies. But he has never won the studio crowd-pleasers that make powerful megastars; if he had wanted mainstream success, he probably should have remained as closeted as Rock Hudson. Everett’s turnaround moment was the disaster of The Next Best Thing (2000), of which he was originally producer, writer and star. The story of a gay man and a friend who have a baby, it also starred Madonna, with whom he had been smitten since meeting her as Sean Penn’s girlfriend (her lack of manners impressed him: “She left them at base camp”), and was directed by John Schlesinger. The production was a train crash in slow motion: he was fired as writer and producer; everyone fell out; the movie bombed. 0
Around the same time, he was up for another film in a straight role; the agents for another actor considered for the part gave the casting director a warning. If they chose Everett, they couldn’t use the image on the book jacket for promotion, because it featured a boy between the legs of a man, commercial death if the star were a known homosexual. (Everett will not name the parties involved for legal reasons, but this was almost certainly the film of Nick Hornby’s book About a Boy, whose lead role went to Hugh Grant, the actor with whom, ironically, Everett is often confused by Americans.) Similarly, he was turned down flat by the studio management for the male lead in Basic Instinct 2 – despite the support of Sharon Stone – for being a “a pervert”. “What was more appalling than that,” he sighs, “were the people claiming amnesia about what happened. That was the biggest revelation to me in the end. I never really understood Hollywood before: I believed my friendships were real, but friendship doesn’t exist there. It leaves you very much on your own.”
Everett was born the second son of a major in the Duke of Edinburgh’s Wiltshire Regiment and an aristocratic mother in whose love (and occasionally frocks) he wrapped himself. His first infatuation was Mary Poppins, for whom he was so overcome with admiration that he had to be carried out of the cinema, missing Let’s Go Fly a Kite. “I adored Julie Andrews – she was like my nanny and my mother at the same time. And the cinema was a forerunner of nightclubs, sexiness, darkness, toilets.” His first meeting with his fragrant heroine 20 years later was inauspicious. Though they are now friends who publicise the Shrek movies together, when Everett was cast as her protégé violinist in Duet for One (1986) he pretended he was a natural virtuoso to make himself look impressive in her eyes, “a horrible trick”; worse, he based his performance on punky Nigel Kennedy, strutting and preening in a jacket borrowed from Adam Ant while Julie looked on horrified.
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His mother didn’t know he was gay until he published his first loosely autobiographical novel, Hello Darling, Are You Working?, in 1992. “She probably still doesn’t realise.” Hadn’t he wanted her support? He snorts: “All that American stuff was 10 years later. In my day people just moved to another place. It was all, ‘I think you should keep that to yourself, darling.’” Not that he minded the social ostracism: he revelled in the pre-viral 1970s gay scene with its disco bunnies, convicts and High Court judges passing the amyl nitrate in classless communion. He must have been a horrible worry to the mother who warned him not to ride his bike near the house of a local man who might give him sweets and abuse him; but little “Roo” couldn’t think of a more delightful double treat than that. For her sake he didn’t write about his teenage interlude selling sex in London, once confessed to an American magazine. Not that the morality of the transaction would have bothered him: he writes frankly about stealing cash from a friend’s house in LA, and clothes from a shop where he worked, even the proceeds from the programmes he once sold at the Donmar Warehouse, and lying to friends as a would-be actor to make himself seem more glamorous. Frankly, his description of his early, pompous, pretentious self makes him sound vile. Having worshipped the director Franco Zeffirelli as a schoolboy, he met him at a party but was rude and condescending to him because he believed him to be an antiques dealer. Such stories are recounted with a hint of apology and regret; he is latterly careful about feelings. “I don’t want to hurt anyone,” he says. “If I feel hatred these days, it’s a full-blooded affectionate one.”
At seven, his mother abandoned him to the loneliness of a boarding school, a betrayal he never quite forgave. At the grand Roman Catholic institution of Ampleforth he was theatrical, a tiny, skinny boy hiding from the sports field – playing Elvira in Coward’s Blithe Spirit – but he left to study for his A-levels in a London college, where his on-off love affair with “the unruly rich” and the nightclub guttersnipes began. He frequented leather-scene dives like the Coleherne pub; was accepted and then thrown out of the Central School of Speech and Drama, where he claims he was an “upper-class joke”. His break (and his revenge) came in Another Country on stage, and then in the film, where the earnest, Guardian-reading Colin Firth “strumming ‘Lemon tree, very pretty…’ on his guitar” and talking about giving away his money to the communists provided a neat antithesis to all Everett chased: a mink-lined cocoon of success. Adopted by his mentors, the director Philip Prowse and Tony Richardson, Vanessa Redgrave’s former husband – father of Joely and Natasha – he felt nurtured in greatness, which created tensions on his next film. In Mike Newell’s Dance with A Stranger (1985) he played the boyfriend of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain. “I was very difficult with Mike Newell, I had a lot to prove… You weren’t taken seriously being a hooray poof. I felt I really had to fight for it. I also thought I knew everything much better than anyone else. I’d met my mentors early, and they were brilliant and uncompromising; I got drunk on them and everything they said. When it came to ex-BBC people [actually Granada] like Mike Newell, I felt they were mediocre by comparison.”
He was launched into a theatre of a radicalism that despised plummy privilege and cast posh boys as chinless buffoons or Brideshead throwbacks or consigned them to provincial tours of Coward and Rattigan. And yet part of him loved this potentially hostile world. “When I became an actor, Vanessa and Corin Redgrave were hanging round stage doors trying to convert people to socialism. They thought they’d get the revolution going through us because we were so committed to holding up a mirror to society. Imagine anyone’s motivation being more than having alligator-skin car seats today.”
After Stranger, he didn’t work in Britain again for nearly a decade, though acknowledges those two early films were his best work, “what I’d be remembered for if I died”. His book is rich with fallings-out, spats, best friends like his Hollywood co-writer Mel, not spoken to for years; Maria Aitken, with whom he starred in Prowse’s 1988 staging of Coward’s The Vortex, ended up calling his mother to complain that the darling boy was out getting wrecked. Though he was embarrassed by his hunting, sailing background and in flight from his right-wing parents, his friends were the sort of upper-class pin-ups one saw in Tatler’s society pages: Natasha Grenfell, Lucy Helmore, wife of Bryan Ferry, and the wildly dissolute Marquess of Bristol, John Jermyn, who bankrolled and mesmerised his entourage as it followed him in an opium cloud. Everett “did smack” with Jermyn, but insists he was never in danger of addiction. “I was too self-obsessed. I was hellbent on being successful. I just wanted to meet a producer – another kind of drug – and I never knew where it might happen, so I never wanted to be too out of it.”
His call to Hollywood was an invitation from Orson Welles in 1983 to play the legend’s younger self in a film that would never be made; Everett was left high and dry but, as always, found a well-connected friend – Richard Harris’s screenwriter son, Damian – with a spare sofa. Wherever he has travelled, his wit and looks have eased his passage with stellar admirers such as Gianni Versace, or Warhol’s business manager Fred Hughes, with whom he stayed in New York. After making The Far Pavilions, he was to be found living in Blakes hotel with the star Amy Irving, and (best of all) he even incurred the displeasure of Bryan Ferry by leaving his dirty socks on the singer’s drawing-room floor. When there were no suitable invitations, he outdid himself by living for three years in the 1920s elegance of the Lancaster hotel off the Champs-Elysées, having lots of sex, partying with his transsexual friend Lychee, who was later murdered. He made interesting movies like Altman’s Prêt à Porter, rubbish like Dunston Checks In, in which he was eclipsed by an orang-utan, more recently played Sherlock Holmes, made money, bought houses in New York, Miami, the south of France. He has never found personal contentment. While he defines himself as gay, he has intermittently had affairs with women; the Betty Blue actress Béatrice Dalle was the most important of these, though it lasted for only months until she left him. “I’ve always found it difficult to be with anyone for a long time,” he says. “I’ve found every relationship claustrophobic, gay or not.”
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But he also knew how useful a girlfriend could be, how dumping or exchanging them gives a publicity boost to an actor’s career, and, more personally, how soothing it feels to fit in with the world. His early friendship with Paula Yates gave him a taste for conventional coupledom he has always remembered. They were adopted by the veteran actor Gordon Jackson and his wife, Rona, who took a shine to the “young couple”, a game Everett loved to play. “With Gordon we’d be talking about mortgages. I was still gay but I felt the whole weight lifting off my shoulders. As a gay man you are in battle mode, you have to watch out. But even now, when I have a girl next to me, the world goes colour, everything fits, I feel mutely supported by everyone in a restaurant. Suddenly it’s your world. Of course, none of it works out because you’re eyeing up some waiter.” Everett does not believe he has ever been in love – or only with his much-missed dog Mo – not in his early fling with Ian McKellen, or his later one with the designer Antony Price, not with Dalle, or even his longest romance with a handsome man called Martin with whom he lived in New York. In the past he has ascribed his emotional disengagement to the early separation from his mother; but he also thinks he was cauterised by the fear and cynicism of the first Aids generation. “I spent a lot of my time in clubs in the ’80s, laughing too hard at everything instead of facing it, cackling because it was such a scary time. It blunted my emotions. I don’t think I have been a serious person emotionally. I’m just a showgirl, really.” Everett doesn’t just sleep with women: he actually likes them, especially his hit parade of demon-divas, the nuttier and grander the better, including the “divine” Elizabeth Taylor, and the Dunston star Faye Dunaway, who, he reveals, has a contract that stipulates she is not allowed to spend more than two hours in the make-up chair. Julia Roberts was “tender” towards him, but will be furious to read that in his view she felt threatened on My Best Friend’s Wedding by the younger Cameron Diaz, which makes her even more lovable in his eyes. “They just didn’t get along.” Was he trying to broker a peace? “No,” he laughs, “I was trying to broker myself into more of the movie.” According to Everett, Sharon Stone believes that she is possessed by a spiritual force before her best performances. And what’s wrong with that? “We don’t want normal movie stars.” Madonna is another fabulous monster: he writes that when her attention turns away from you, the feeling is like sunbathing when the sun disappears behind a cloud.
As a recovering egoist and a former Catholic who thinks the devout, genuflecting papist “ridiculous”, Everett can thank the shallowness of his chosen industry for one thing at least. It has shown him the futility of the struggle to become, and remain, a desirable commodity. “One year you are in People magazine’s 20 Sexiest People,” he laughs, “and two years later you are No 97 in The Independent’s Gay Power List… and, oh, the horror of losing your place in the sexy list and finding yourself under Julian Clary instead.” As he talks of how religion, movies and fashion have distorted modern identity, his phone chimes with text messages but he never even glances at it, too involved in his point. It is not so much that he is brainier or better read than other actors, just that his hunger to interpret the world has sharpened with middle age, unburdened by the responsibilities of family and wage slavery, by the desire to conform, or even settle in one place. A bit of him couldn’t give a damn about hustling for big roles any more; not in a sulky way, but because he wants to work for fun and the cash; he has never been inundated with offers for big-league romantic comedies. “Thank God!” he laughs. “ Most of them are much worse than the ones Colin does: Nanny McPhee is Titus Andronicus compared to that Jennifer Aniston film The Break-Up. They are terrible, with terrible characters, and they are forcing the world into an addiction much worse than drugs. The whole of America talks like they do in Friends, that awful snippy, campy, ‘ee-oow’ language. If you have casual sex these days, you find yourself doing a ballet of the last gay porno movie.”
Later this year he will revisit Cambodia with the UN-linked Global Fund to highlight the crises of Aids, TB and malaria; the actor who once worried about catching scurvy from African children on his fist visit with Oxfam is now a committed if flatly realistic campaigner, doing what he can with not much hope of change. Meanwhile, once finished with Shrek 3 he will work on the movie of St Trinian’s, to which he and his producer friend Barnaby Thompson have secured the rights, and tour with Wet Weather Cover, a new play about two actors in a trailer making a B-movie in Spain during a rainstorm. Who will take the other role? He smiles: “Some American star can come over and do it.” But his fantasy is of a quite different production, a camp classic – if only he could pull it off – with Everett as the prince and Julie Andrews as Gertrude in a Hamlet set in Buckingham Palace in the 1980s. “To be or not to be” would be delivered in a strangulated Prince Charles voice in front of a flagpole. Will Dame Julie go for it? “She likes it but she said, ‘I just don’t know if I could.’ But imagine, Rupert Everett and Julie Andrews in Hamlet…” Surely he has the billing wrong? He laughs. “Come on, Gertrude can’t get top billing, can she?”