"It's amazing the clarity that comes with psychotic jealousy." -- Rupert Everett
Rupert James Hector Everett (born 29 May 1959) is an English actor. He first came to public attention in 1981, when he was cast in Julian Mitchell's play and subsequent film Another Country as an openly gay student at an English public school, set in the 1930s. He has subsequently appeared in many other films including My Best Friend's Wedding, An Ideal Husband, The Next Best Thing and the Shrek sequels. He currently lives in London.
"I seem to have been everywhere in the last 30 years, maybe not in the epicenter but flying around the periphery of extraordinary events and equally extraordinary people."
Everett was born in Norfolk, England to Sara (née MacLean) and Major Anthony Michael Everett (1921—2009), who worked in business and served in the British Army. He was raised Roman Catholic. Through his maternal grandparents, Opre Vyvyan and Vice Admiral Sir Hector Charles Donald MacLean, he is a descendant of the baronets Vyvyan of Trelowarren and the German Freiherren (barons) von Schmiedern, as well as a great-nephew of Donald Duart Maclean, the Soviet double agent, and a great-grandson of the Liberal politician Sir Donald Maclean, who was leader of the parliamentary opposition in the years following the First World War. He has a brother, Simon Anthony Cunningham Everett (born 1956).
From the age of seven, Everett was educated at Farleigh School, Hampshire, and later was educated by Benedictine monks at Ampleforth College, Yorkshire, but he left school at 16 and ran away to London to become an actor. In order to support himself, he worked as a male prostitute for drugs and money as he later admitted to US magazine in 1997. After being dismissed from the Central School of Speech and Drama for insubordination, he travelled to Scotland and got a job at the Citizens' Theatre in Glasgow.
Everett's break came in 1981 at the Greenwich Theatre and later West End production of Another Country, playing a gay schoolboy opposite Kenneth Branagh, followed by a film version in 1984 with Colin Firth. Following on with 1985's Dance With A Stranger, Everett began to develop a promising film career until he co-starred with Bob Dylan in the huge flop Hearts of Fire (1987). Around the same time, Everett recorded and released an album of pop songs entitled Generation Of Loneliness. Despite being managed by the largely successful pop svengali Simon Napier-Bell (who also managed Marc Bolan, launched and managed Japan, and steered Wham! to international fame), the public didn't take to his change in direction. The shift was short-lived, and he would only return to pop indirectly by providing backing vocals for his friend Madonna many years later, on her cover of "American Pie" and on the track "They Can't Take That Away from Me" on Robbie Williams' Swing When You're Winning in 2001.
In 1989, Everett moved to Paris, writing a novel, Hello, Darling, Are You Working? and coming out as gay, a disclosure which he has said may well have damaged his career. Returning to the public eye in The Comfort of Strangers (1990), several films of variable success followed. The Italian comics character Dylan Dog, created by Tiziano Sclavi, is graphically inspired by him. The English actor, in turn, later appeared in an adaptation of a novel based on Sclavi's novel, Dellamorte Dellamore. In 1995 he released a second novel, The Hairdressers of St. Tropez.
His career was revitalised by his award-winning performance in My Best Friend's Wedding (1997), playing Julia Roberts's friend. In 1999, he played Madonna's best friend in The Next Best Thing (he also sang backup on her cover of "American Pie", which is on the film's soundtrack). He has since appeared in a number of high-profile film roles, often playing leads.
In recent years, Everett has decided to write again. He has been a Vanity Fair contributing editor and wrote a film screenplay on playwright Oscar Wilde's final years, for which he seeks funding. In 2006, he published a memoir, Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins. In it he revealed he had a six-year affair with British television presenter Paula Yates. "I am mystified by my heterosexual affairs ... but then I am mystified by most of my relationships," he wrote. Although he is sometimes described as bisexual as opposed to homosexual, at a radio show with Jonathan Ross, he described his heterosexual affairs as resulting from adventurousness: "I was basically adventurous, I think I wanted to try everything" and in an interview on This Morning he simply described himself as homosexual, making a joke of any suggestion he might find a woman attractive.
Since then, Everett has participated in public activities (leading the 2007 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras), played a double role in the film St. Trinian's, and has appeared on TV several times (as a contestant in the special Comic Relief Does The Apprentice, as a presenter at Live Earth and as guest host at Channel 4 show The Friday Night Project among others), but has made much news for making shocking comments and remarks at interviews that have caused public outrage.
In May 2007, he delivered one of the eulogies at the funeral of fashionista Isabella Blow, his friend since they were in their teens.
Everett recently told British newspaper The Observer that he wished he had never come out of the closet as he feels that it hurt his career and advises younger actors not to:
Everett presented the Channel 4 documentary on Romantic poet Lord Byron's travels, broadcast in July 2009 and has a part in the comedy film Wild Target, starring Bill Nighy. He recently made his Broadway debut at the Shubert Theatre to good critical review, performing in a Noël Coward play, Blithe Spirit, starring alongside Angela Lansbury, Christine Ebersole and Jayne Atkinson, directed by Michael Blakemore. He was also expected to tour several Italian cities, during the 2008—2009 winter season in another Noël Coward play, Private Lives (performed in Italian, which he speaks fluently), playing Elyot to Italian actress Asia Argento's Amanda. However, production was canceled and the play never opened. He played in a revival of Pygmalion as Professor Henry Higgins next to English actress Honeysuckle Weeks, with Stephanie Cole in the role of the Professor's mother, at the Chichester Festival Theatre during the summer of 2010.In July 2010, Everett featured in the popular family history programme Who do you think you are.
