‘I feel thrilled not to be young’ … Rupert Everett at the Theatre Royal, Bath. Photograph: Sam Frost/The Guardian
Rupert Everett: 'I'd have done anything to be a Hollywood star'
Arifa Akbar
Tuesday 30 July 2019
He lit up the screen in the 80s – but things did not go as planned. As he takes on Chekhov, Everett speaks about stardom, midlife crises and penis padding
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upert Everett is directing his first play and a few unfortunate incidents have occurred before opening night. It is David Hare’s new version of Uncle Vanya, in which Everett also stars, and all did not go as planned in its first preview. “In a fight scene I elbowed the leading actor, John Light [who plays Dr Astrov],” says Everett. “He really hurt his eye and had to go to hospital. He came back and then, leaning around the stage with his one eye, he fell off it and really hurt his leg.”
The play’s opening has been pushed back a week, until Light is back on his feet, but if this production returns Chekhov’s 1898 play to the farce that Everett says it was written to be, and not a straightforwardly bleak tale of midlife ennui and angst, then the mishap has an edge of black humour, too.
Rupert Everett: 'Sex is over. I'm not motivated by it any more'
Rupert Everett has long been a martyr to his passions, but lately he's had something else on his mind. Victoria Coren, a lifelong fan, joins him for dinner to talk about his excoriating memoirs, his portrayal of Oscar Wilde and his urge to be a serious man
Victoria Coren
Sunday 21 April 2013
Rupert Everett
When Rupert Everett dies, he won't have a funeral. He has given this serious thought.
"I'll go on the bonfire," he says. "That's what I'd like."
At the risk of spoiling his cheerful plan, I feel obliged to point out that it's against the law to put corpses on bonfires.
Rupert Everett's new memoir has landed him in hot water. Again. But he thinks we just need to lighten up
Decca Aitkenhead
Friday 28 September 2012
P
oor old Rupert Everett thought he'd taken every care to say nothing in his first memoir that could upset his friend Madonna. Then the book came out, she threw a strop and stopped talking to him. His new memoir is less scandalously gossipy, so further fallings-out had looked unlikely – but before its release this week, he was already in hot water again. Everett can't understand it. "What's happened to humour? We're becoming American. Everyone gets so angry over everything."
Rupert Everett as Oscar Wilde in his film The Happy Prince, which premiered in the UK on 5 June. Photograph: Allstar/Lionsgate
The importance of being Oscar: how Rupert Everett found a cause
The Happy Prince, the acclaimed biopic of Oscar Wilde, is more than a career-reviving film for the actor and director, it is an avowal of an enduring literary love
Vanessa Thorpe Arts and Media Correspondent
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he surprised delight that met Rupert Everett’s second volume of memoir, Vanished Years, six years ago was a hint of what might be to come. The calibre of the writing matched any living diarist, according to a broad cross-section of reviewers, from Julie Burchill in the Guardian to the Telegraph’s Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, who awarded five stars and revelled in the way the author “repeatedly slips the gears of genre, moving between scenes of farce, elegy and melodrama”. He predicted more “seriously good books” ahead, if only Everett would take himself “seriously enough”.
Well, now we know exactly what Rupert wrote next – a screenplay. And his new film biography of Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince, has wowed film criticsin much the same way. To add to his triumph, Everett also produces, stars and directs, appearing alongside Colin Firth and Julian Wadham, two of his oldest theatrical buddies. “I loved working with me as an actor,” Everett quipped to red carpet reporters at the film’s London premiere last Tuesday.
Rupert Everett, at the UK premiere of The Happy Prince, has played his hero Oscar Wilde on stage. Photograph: Mike Marsland/WireImage
Yet the real love affair here is not between Everett and himself, as he regularly teases. The truly enduring relationship is with Wilde, whose plays Everett has now appeared in on stage and whom he has played in productions, and whose tragic personal story the actor has struggled for years to bring to the screen.
The Happy Prince shares its title with Wilde’s melancholic children’s classic and is a sensitive, passionate tribute to a fallen literary idol. It covers the period after Wilde’s imprisonment in Reading, once he was forced to flee England. Living in near penury in the south of France in his mid-40s, he looks back at his great successes and squalid defeats at the hands of the establishment.
The great Irish writer’s descendant, Merlin Holland, often called upon to judge fresh interpretations of his grandfather’s life, has already pronounced Everett’s incarnation to be the best so far. He was “terribly moved”, he told the Guardian last week, adding, “In Oscar, there’s both the intellectual and the emotional. But, at this stage of his life, he’s living on what’s left of his emotions, and that’s where Rupert wins.”
Everett first played Wilde in the Hampstead Theatre’s revival of David Hare’s play The Judas Kiss in 2012, succeeding in a role inhabited less comfortably by Liam Neeson in the original 1998 production. He went on to become the toast of the West End and then New York. The Hollywood Reporter thought Everett’s performance “deserves to become legendary”.
When The Judas Kiss opened, Everett spoke candidly of his feeling for Wilde: “For me, he’s a patron saint figure, or even a Christ figure, because in one sense he was crucified and then came back to life and, for the gay movement, he was the beginning.” Later, Everett, who came out as gay in 1989, spoke of his joy at playing the part on the night gay marriage became legal in Britain.
This link to Wilde and a commitment to fight homophobia have fuelled Everett’s determination to make The Happy Prince. His co-stars have expressed wonder at Everett’s infectious zeal for the project. Edwin Thomas, who plays Robbie Ross, found him “inspirational”, while Tom Colley, who also appeared with Everett in The Judas Kiss, said: “I don’t know how he has [had] the energy through the whole process.”
Talking to the press after the premiere, Everett downplayed his achievement, saying: “I just did it. I got on with it”, but more lyrically added that the story of this “fallen star speaks for me as well, in some strange way”.
Certainly, the tone of pained nostalgia in The Happy Princeresembles passages in Vanished Years, particularly a description of lost sun-kissed months spent in the south of France, although the poignant title of Everett’s memoir actually comes from a poem by Noël Coward:
When I have fears, as Keats had fears,
Of the moment I’ll cease to be,
I console myself with vanished years…”
The book followed a 2006 memoir with the less romantic title, Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins. It was also well-received and chronicled his success at the age of 21 in the hit play Another Country.
A Catholic boarding-school boy, he had run off to train as an actor, funding his fees with work as a rent boy. His early film roles peaked with Dance with a Stranger, about the Ruth Ellis case, and film industry interest was renewed in 1997, when he starred with Julia Roberts in My Best Friend’s Wedding, but faltered after his appearance opposite Madonna in the failed comedy The Next Best Thing. Treading water, Everett voiced Prince Charming in two of the Shrek movies and turned up in two St Trinian’s films, before emerging recently with highly rated cameos on TV, including in Parade’s End and the comedy Quacks.
Oscar Wilde, pictured in 1882, scandalised and fascinated 19th-century London society in equal measure. Photograph: Apic/Getty Images
His old friend Wadham remains in awe: “I have known him since he was 14 years old, when he played piano to grade 8, sang in the choir and acted. He excels at everything and has tremendous fidelity to his artistic vision and to friendship,” he said last week.
Wilde and Everett also share a dangerous habit of saying what should not be said. Six years ago, when Everett naughtily cast some doubt on whether a modern child would enjoy being brought up by two gay dads, he was villified in the press. In his time, Wilde expressed equally unpalatable views about family when he wrote darkly that “children begin by loving their parents; after a time they judge them; rarely, if ever, do they forgive them,” though his words were recognised as a witty inversion of bland domestic cant.
As a gay man who lived through the ravages of Aids in the 1980s, Everett might feel he has the right to speak. “People have forgotten about all that. It was absolute terror,” he said recently.
Everett’s friends clearly feel he has earned his spurs as both a survivor and a campaigner. The soul of the new film, Wadham believes, is a moment in which Wilde unexpectedly rounds on a gang of bigots in Paris, shouting: “The natural habitat of the hypocrite is England! Go there and leave me in peace!”
“This venom reflects the anger Rupert himself rightly feels for people who have that kind of prejudice and cruelty.”
The Happy Prince review – Rupert Everett is magnificent in dream role as dying Oscar Wilde
Directed by and starring Everett, this poignant dramatisation of Wilde’s final years in exile is a powerful parable of passion and redemption
Peter Bradshaw Monday 22 January 2018
Rupert Everett in The Happy Prince
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t is a part he was born to play, and he does it with exactly the right kind of poignantly ruined magnificence. Rupert Everett has written, directed and starred in this gripping drama about Oscar Wilde’s final years: his disgraced exile-agony in Naples and Paris on being released from prison after the conviction for “gross indecency”. This was the result of his indiscreet affair with Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, whose enraged, reactionary father, the Marquess of Queensberry, had provoked Wilde’s catastrophic libel action following an accusation of his “posing as a somdomite”. Queensberry’s famously odd misspelling is silently corrected in this film’s opening titles. Over the closing credits – like The Imitation Game, about Alan Turing – it gives us the infuriating information that its subject has been posthumously “pardoned” by the British authorities. It’s Wilde (and Turing) who should be doing the pardoning.
Everett’s movie is expertly interspersed with flashbacks to Wilde’s great days and to his initial wary optimism on first arriving in France on the boat train. But the movie shows him living and dying in squalor and illness, succumbing to the delayed shock of his prison nightmare, jeered at and spat on by the expatriate Brits who recognised him, unprotected by his quibbling pseudonym “Sebastian Melmoth” – that two-word creation which was his final literary work of drollery.
Out of prison, Wilde had horrified his friends by resuming the destructive relationship with the exquisite, duplicitous Bosie (Colin Morgan), which causes the termination of the tiny allowance from his humiliated ex-wife Constance (Emily Watson) and endangers Bosie’s own income, leaving them nothing to live on. It’s the beginning of the end. Oscar treats his loyal allies Robbie Ross (Edwin Thomas) and Reggie Turner (Colin Firth) with ungrateful negligence, but Everett imagines him, in extremis, befriending a young Paris rent boy and his tough kid brother and whimsically holding them spellbound with his fairytale The Happy Prince. In happier times, he would recite to his equally entranced sons this story of a statue who allows a swallow to denude him of all his gold to feed the poor. In Everett’s hands, the tale becomes an ambiguous parable for Wilde’s passion and (possible) redemption, the unhappy prince who makes a lonely discovery that love is the only thing worth worshipping.
The story of Wilde’s post-prison ordeal is something most movies nervously turn away from. Stephen Fry’s film Wilde (1997) halted after a sentimental embrace between the reunited Oscar and Bosie in Naples; Ken Hughes’s The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960) had Oscar – played by Peter Finch with the trace of an Irish accent – coolly refusing to speak to Bosie on the railway station platform before he headed off to his unimaginable future. As in those films, Everett likes to give us the famous lines from The Ballad of Reading Gaol in voiceover: “Each man kills the thing he loves …” But Everett takes us through the moment-by-moment horror of humiliation and poverty, which Wilde brazens out with gallows humour and wit as best he can. He vomits in agony on his deathbed before declaiming: “Encore du champagne!” Everett has clearly been influenced by David Hare’s 1998 stage play The Judas Kiss, in which Everett played Wilde, and also perhaps by Peter Ackroyd’s 1983 novel The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde.
Everett has a great moment when Oscar bursts into tears on being reunited with Bosie – and another, when he is recognised in France by a bunch of British rowdies who are hateful and homophobic (although that second concept is not something that anyone present would have recognised, perhaps not even Wilde himself). The hooligans chase Oscar, Robbie and Reggie into a church where Oscar faces them down by yelling: “The natural habitat of the hypocrite is England! Go there and leave me in peace!” Hypocrisy is the key. Polite society was prepared to turn a blind eye to homosexual assignations if they were conducted within a proper carapace of secrecy and shame. There was no immediate objection to casual sex with the lower orders, who could be bought and bought off. A flaunted connection with the Queensberry family was a class transgression. Shrewdly, Everett shows Wilde with a portrait of Queen Victoria by his deathbed. He died one year before her, and the film hints that Wilde’s vindictive treatment was part of the ugly sense of shame and mortification at Romantic and aesthetic indulgence which the manly slaughter of the first world war was supposed to redeem.
What was Wilde’s life in exile really like? Has this movie imagined a world of tragically defiant barbs where, perhaps, none existed? Were his final days actually spent in a kind of defeated silence, the theatrical facade of his former celebrity blowtorched away? It’s impossible to know. But this film is a deeply felt, tremendously acted tribute to courage.
•This article was amended on 22 January to correct the surname of the lead actor in The Trials of Oscar Wilde.
Rupert Everett has long been a martyr to his passions, but lately he's had something else on his mind. Victoria Coren, a lifelong fan, joins him for dinner to talk about his excoriating memoirs, his portrayal of Oscar Wilde and his urge to be a serious man.
'An engaging perspective': Rupert Everett. Photograph: Tom Dymond/Rex Features
This second volume of autobiography from Rupert Everett charts the actor's meandering path through the often vapid world of showbiz, deploying a largely detached tone; yet somehow reading it is akin to being held in the vice-like grip of a demon. Everett's perspective is so engaging and his descriptive powers so arresting that his words become about more than his own experience. By the end, he has haphazardly painted a detailed picture of our times – as he may well have sneakily intended to do.
Like that other naughty diarist Alan Clark, Everett's intentions are not clear, although his distaste for himself is beguilingly evident. We see him flunk friendships, charity stunts, TV deals and romantic obligations, and all the while something he dubs his "special needs charm" keeps the narrative thread motoring along. There is no hint of regimented structure and the book veers anarchically from short story to anecdote to memoir.
It does not matter, though, with an author who is able to offer so many fresh and unexpected episodes; like a Channel ferry voyage he takes with his ailing father at the beginning of a trip to Lourdes, or the sun-kissed months he spent living with a changing cast of young friends in a caravan in the south of France. Everett confesses to borrowing trinkets compulsively during a "magpie" phase and his comic writing also glitters with stylistic gems swiped from his heroes – Wilde, Waugh, Greene, Mitford and Coward – but the actor also has his own, committed way of seeing around the conventional expectations of a scene.
Some of his best descriptive passages are saved for a portrait of Isabella Blow, the late society designer, who is now a ghost in Everett's mind "like the image that an electric light bulb – too closely scrutinised – brands across the optic nerve". Blow's giddy transgressions and descent into madness are painfully rendered, from the time she flounced out of a Dulux consultancy deal during a freebie abroad, leaving him "to deal with the lemon-lipped ladies of paint", to a bleak visit to her London asylum.
Everett's grim outlook comes across most directly when he looks at a photograph of his dying father holding a newborn baby. He admits there is wonder in the contrast of two unknowing beings at either end of life, yet he feels "the thought of the long hard slog, getting from one end to the other, is shattering when you're in the middle".