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Forty years ago, Hollywood was experiencing a strong generational change. Comedies and dramas aimed at teenage audiences had become the industry’s biggest bet and young people like Rob Lowe, Tom Cruise, Demi Moore, Molly Ringwald, Matt Dillon and Demi More were gaining prominence. However, perhaps due to resistance to the new, certain sectors began to doubt that these newly emerged stars had any kind of talent. In this context, the film was released Another Countrythe British film directed by Marek Kanievska, based on the adolescence and early youth of Guy Burgess, a young homosexual Englishman who would end up emigrating to communist Russia and become one of the members of the spy network known as the Cambridge Five. The protagonists of that film were Rupert Everett and Colin Firth. And although the film was not a success, the American media and some of the industry’s top brass had their eyes on them. These young people, they assured, would have a long career.
“It was a great film, and one of those lucky moments in life,” Everett recalled in a cover story for Tatler magazine this week. He added: “Firstly, getting the role on stage and making friends with Robert Fox, who took the play to the West End and produced the film soon after. We shot it in a hot July in 1983; Mrs Thatcher was on her throne and I was climbing mine, during the most productive year of my career.”
Rupert Everett en el film Another CountryIMDB.com
From that moment on, Everett made it clear that false modesty was not among his characteristics. However, his acid and lucid humor and his loquacity made him one of the most fascinating and beloved personalities in the United Kingdom. Surely, it was not easy for him not to believe all those praises. It was not only Hollywood who noticed him after seeing him in that film; Orson Welles himself said that this boy was his contemporary version.
Today, however, the actor downplays the magnitude of his figure’s importance and, with chivalry, gives the recognition to one of his colleagues: “In fact, in the 80s, Los Angeles was not the place for me. Everything revolved around the Brat Pack boys. It wasn’t until Hugh Grant made his debut that I became a star. Four weddings and a funeral (1994) that the elegant and pretentious English style became fashionable,” he said in the interview.
Rupert Everett and Colin Firth, two new faces arriving from the United KingdomIMDB.com
When he landed in Hollywood in the mid-1980s, he became the perfect companion for Andy Warhol, Bianca Jagger and Joan Collins. He would go out with them to party and chat freely. But not everything was rosy: over the months he saw many of his lovers fall ill and die of HIV. These were difficult times, and he found no refuge in his family either. His mother, who abandoned him at a boarding school when he was 6, washed his plates and cutlery separately and with gloves every time she invited him to dinner.
Everett at the 2022 Toronto Film FestivalMatt Winkelmeyer – Getty Images North America
There are many who claim that if he had decided to stay “in the closet,” Everett would have had a career similar to that of Hugh Grant or his great friend Colin Firth. He neither denies nor affirms it; he simply does not think about it. “I am a gay man who was formed by the last years of illegality. That shaped my entire character. I saw myself outside the central structure of society. So this idea of wanting to be heteronormative, as is common today, is clearly not for me,” he explained.
In the same report that was published this week, the 65-year-old actor made a revelation: in the middle of the year he married Henrique, a Brazilian accountant with whom he has been in a relationship for a long time, a fact that surprised his followers, because on more than one occasion he had said that he did not believe in marriage. “I hate heterosexual weddings. They are grotesque. The cake, the veil, the party and the inevitable divorce two years later. It seems like a waste of time in the heterosexual world, and in the homosexual world I find it tragic that we want to imitate an institution that is clearly disastrous,” he once said.
Rupert Everett with his ex-girlfriend, MadonnaIMDB.com
In a 2020 interview with British publication The Times, he again expressed his dislike for marriage, but hinted that he no longer considered it a crazy idea. “I would marry my boyfriend, although only two or three people would attend my wedding,” he explained. He also said that when the time came, he would be the one to propose to Henrique, who has never abandoned his low profile.
Now, however, he explained: “I’ve always hated weddings, although I love funerals. But when you get older… I’ve seen so many problems that gay couples face, so it’s more a question of thinking ahead as we’ve been together for so long.” He added, with humour: “I don’t know how long I’m going to last. Well, because I’m tall, I’ve never seen a 95-year-old who’s 6ft 5in. You never know what’s going to happen.” The wedding took place in London’s Camden Town, and after the ceremony, the couple and a handful of close guests dined at Italian restaurant Ciao Bella.
Many were surprised by the sparsely attended celebration. For years, his name was associated with nights out and trips with other big stars, such as Julia Roberts, Madonna, Kate Moss and Sharon Stone. All these more or less deep relationships ended when his memoirs, Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins, in which she speaks openly about her sex life, her drug addiction and also about her great friends.
“Julia Roberts is as capricious as a racehorse: beautiful and tinged with madness. On one occasion she offered to take me to the set of My Best Friend’s Wedding aboard Sony’s private jet. So I witnessed all the machinery in action, the grandeur of Hollywood transporting its merchandise from one place to another,” he wrote in his book.
Rupert Everett with Julia Roberts and Dermot Mulroney in My Best Friend’s WeddingIMDB.com
Along with Sharon Stone, he starred A Different Loyalty (2004), the film in which she again played a Cambridge spy. In his book, he describes her as a goddess, but adds: “When rehearsals began, I understood something that had escaped me: that she is absolutely unhinged. But I don’t mean that as an insult, being unhinged is a requirement for working in the film.” show business”.
While there is no record of Roberts and Stone being so offended by her remarks that they no longer spoke to her, it is known that her friendship with Madonna fell apart after the book was published. And with good reason. “She limps around her house for half an hour, then rolls herself up in cling wrap and faces another sleepless night of plotting. Like America, Madonna has changed. She has carefully packed her past into cold storage, but in moments of stress the fuses blow, the cold storage defrosts and lets the old waitress out, complaining loudly,” he wrote of the singer, with whom he filmed the resounding failure An almost perfect couple (2000). He also said he preferred Madonna from the 80s. “She exuded sex and demanded a sexual response from everyone, regardless of whether you were gay. And she spent the whole dinner playing with Sean Penn’s member,” he said.
Perhaps it was the pride with which he always lived his sexuality or the discomfort generated by his direct, sincere and little studied declarations. The truth is that just as one day she fell in love with him, Hollywood decided to stop calling him. His last participation in American cinema was lending the voice to Prince Charming in Shrek the Thirdfrom 2007. “The exciting thing is that it is a character that I would never be able to play in a live-action film,” he said ironically at the time. After the press labelled him “Madonna’s best gay friend”, the only proposals he received were for homosexual characters with no weight in the plot.
Rupert Everett y Sharon StoneIMDB.com
Fed up, he packed his bags and returned to his country. There he participated in several series and films while continuing to work on what was his biggest dream at the time: finishing the script for a film based on the last years of Oscar Wilde, with the idea of directing and starring in it. He made his friends Firth and Emily Watson promise that they would participate in the project. They accepted, laughing, but deep down they were convinced that it would never come to fruition. It took him more than a decade to get financing, but The Happy Prince It was finally released in 2018 and became one of the most praised works of his career.
Rupert Everett, in the role of Oscar Wilde
In writing, he clearly found a second passion. His new book will be out soon. The American Noa series of short stories. “Normally, the whole writing process overwhelms me, but because each story is so short, it’s like being in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, focusing on one story at a time. As a writer, you get to tell your side of the story. In a sense, I’ve always been like an actor when I write, thinking about how I would approach this character. It’s a skill to be able to paint a picture that pops off the page,” he said.
Additionally, Everett joined the cast of Emily in Paris in its final season. There he plays interior designer Giorgio Barbieri. “Although the character is gay, he has slept with almost all the women in the series, including his old friend Sylvie, who I adore.” It was the presence of the actress who plays Sylvie, Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu, precisely, one of the reasons that led the actor to accept the invitation to work on the series, but it was not the only one: “I know well the things I can do, and I knew I could contribute something. Darren Star is brilliant: whether it is Beverly Hills 90210 o Sex and the City“Everything he did was the right thing at the right time,” he explained.
He is already preparing for his new project, a film about the fifth Marquess of Anglesey, Henry Cyril Paget, a picturesque aristocrat of the late Victorian era. “He was a crazy fairy who loved jewels and dressing up. No, I’m not playing him. This time I’m the butler,” he explained. In his long career, he played several members of the royal family. In fact, he played so many dukes, kings, princes and courtiers that at one point he was forced to clarify that he was not a worshipper of the monarchy and that he had voted Labour all his life.
She has made it clear on more than one occasion: for better or worse, sincerity is her thing: “I decided to be a star when it meant saying exactly what you thought, like Elizabeth Taylor did, because her value lay in being genuine. Now, celebrities are mirages, ghostly figures, untouchable, who don’t allow themselves to be anything.”
Conocé The Trust Project
