As well as a screenplay on Oscar Wilde, Rupert Everett is planning a sequel to his gossipy autobiography - let Hollywood beware. Everyone in show business is a bit unhinged, he tells Michael Dwyer.
Movie star autobiographies do not come much more candid than Rupert Everett's book, Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins. He knows everybody and drops names as liberally and casually as a whole coven of gossip columnists. Given his candour, however, surely some people were unhappy with what he wrote about them? "I don't think anyone was that unhappy," he says, drinking tea in an upmarket Dublin hotel. "I was quite affectionate about most people." What about his good friend, Madonna? In the book he describes his beloved dog Mo sniffing the superstar's body and he remarks: "Any form of sexual adulation was an affirmation to the material girl." Or his former co-star Sharon Stone? He says that she is "utterly unhinged" and that she claimed she could "turn a gay man straight in five minutes".
Everett smiles. He came out as gay in 1989, but admits in his book to some youthful heterosexual flings with Susan Sarandon, Beatrice Dalle and Paula Yates. "I think those girls have a sense of humour. The women I wrote about are people I adore. For me, to say someone's unhinged isn't an insult. It's a compliment. It's a fact that everyone in show business is a bit unhinged - especially if you are pretty, you become even more unhinged." Are people reluctant to confide in him now, just in case he might quote them in a sequel to his autobiography? "I am doing a sequel," he says, "but nobody ever confided in me in the first place. The book just kind of happened. I have a friend who's a journalist and I was telling her these stories about my life. She kept encouraging me to write about them.
"Finally, I did write down a few of the stories. We went to her agent, who became my agent, and it just went from there. I got a deal from those few chapters I wrote. I'm thrilled that the book has done really well. It's been a great success for me in the sense that it has moved my life along into a different area."
He writes very well, and had two novels to his credit - Hello Darling, Are You Working? and The Hairdressers of St Tropez - before turning to his memoirs. Reviewing Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins in the Guardian, actor Simon Callow referred to it as no less than a "continuously brilliant memoir, the best theatrical autobiography since Noël Coward's Present Indicative."
Everett and Callow go back a long way. "You know, though, we didn't talk to each other for about 20 years. Simon wrote about that in his review, saying how he was pissed off with how badly I behaved years ago. We became friends again after his review was published. I had to take him out to lunch to thank him for his very nice review."
Now 48, Everett was born into an upper-class English Catholic family. He was, in his own words, excessively egocentric and difficult in his early years as an actor, and he was expelled for insubordination at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London.
His screen breakthrough came in 1984 when he played a character based on gay British spy Guy Burgess, in Another Country. His subsequent screen career has seesawed from the heights of Dance With a Stranger, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, The Comfort of Strangers, The Madness of King George and My Best Friend's Wedding, to the lows of Duet For One, Hearts of Fire, Pret-à-Porter, B Monkey and The Next Best Thing.
Everett was in Dublin for the Irish premiere of his new movie, Stardust, which was released yesterday. The cast list of this tongue-in-cheek romantic fantasy-adventure reads like a page from his memoirs: Claire Danes, Michelle Pfeiffer, Robert De Niro, Ricky Gervais, Peter O'Toole and Sienna Miller, along with relative newcomer Charlie Cox in the central role. Everett spends most of his scenes as a ghost.
"It's an unusual part because I get chucked off a balcony in my first scene, so it's not a very promising role," he says. Knowing everyone, as he does, he's a friend of the film's director Matthew Vaughn and his wife, German supermodel Claudia Schiffer.
"It was sweet of Matthew to put me in the film," he says. "He's a very clever director. I love the film. I can't say very much about my performance because I was on the set for only four days. I had to wear prosthetics all the time, so I couldn't talk or eat or pick my nose. The atmosphere was very light-hearted on the set because Matthew is so easy-going, although he's extremely driven.
"I loved working with Peter O'Toole for the first time. He is fabulous. I adored him in Venus. We talked about everything, and a lot about Bob Dylan. He's very clued-in. When we weren't filming, he would go off into a corner with this plastic bag full of sweeties and pills.
"Matthew created a very good environment. It was very old school in a way because we used to go and stay at his house in the country before filming. It was like being with the Oliviers. We had Claudia Schiffer entertaining us in this grand hall. I'm pleased it turned out so well."
After more than 20 years in movies, what advice would Everett give a young actor such as Charlie Cox, who is 24 and has his first leading role in Stardust? "I think no one should listen to advice, or give it. To be quite honest, I think it's gross. I never listened to advice as a kid. Anyhow, I don't think Charlie needs any. He's a lovely guy and has so much charm. My only advice for him would be to do another film. It's a difficult business, especially now that an 18-month career is a long one."
In that context, I mention the current release Mr Brooks, which features three actors who used to be Hollywood stars and now have fallen far off the radar - Kevin Costner, Demi Moore and William Hurt. "Well, none of them was ever very good," Everett declares. "I think those three are lucky to be still there now. Demi Moore could never act, could she? She was lovely looking, though, and still is, thanks to technology. But it's tough for anyone to survive in the business now."
In his book Everett is remarkably frank about his own various ups and downs in the film industry. He used to divide his time between London and the US, but now lives in London. Has he had enough of Hollywood? "Well, it had enough of me before I had enough of it, but there's nothing much going on there. The type of Hollywood movie in which I could have performed had I been lucky was the romantic comedy, but they're so lame now." He is enthusiastic about his next movie, St Trinian's, based on the 1950s British comedy series, with Everett in the dual role first played by Alastair Sim as the school headmistress Miss Fritton and her ne'er-do-well brother, Clarence. Everett insists he is "much better" at doing drag than Robert De Niro, who plays a cross-dressing sea captain in Stardust.
Following Sim in St Trinian's is "a thankless task", he says. "Actually, it's unconquerable. It's better to do remakes of mediocre films, I think. Alastair Sim was wonderful in the St Trinian's films. It was my idea to make the film, so I always knew that it would be difficult. You can't copy Alastair Sim, who was one of our greatest actors."
Everett's Miss Fritton is "quite a goer", he says. "She wears Juicy Couture - pink tracksuits and headscarves. She's quite Camilla Parker-Bowles. And she's based somewhat on my mother - that type of empire-ruling English matron that is disappearing now. I was pleased with my Miss Fritton. She looks fantastic. I'm quite grand in it. I don't know if it's the same in Ireland, but the English love drag. There's so much drag happening now - John Travolta [in Hairspray], Eddie Murphy [in Norbit] - that drag is the new frontier."
So man is the new woman? "Indeed. Wouldn't it be fun if men played all the women's roles like they did in Shakespeare's time? But it's tough enough for women to get decent roles as it is, especially when they get older, after 25 or 30."
St Trinian's is Everett's third movie with Colin Firth. They made their film debuts in Another Country and were reunited for The Importance of Being Earnest in 2002. "I adore Colin," he says. "We have such fun together. He plays my boyfriend in St Trinian's." However, Firth has contradicted Everett's claims in his book that Firth used to bring his guitar to the set of Another Country and sing the folksy Lemon Tree, and that Firth wore sandals with socks underneath.
"He's a liar," Everett laughs. "We're still getting on, but I'm sure he did bring his guitar on the set." Since completing St Trinian's in June, Everett has been immersed in writing his screenplay based on the last three years in the life of Oscar Wilde. "I hope it gets made into a film and that I will play Wilde," he says. What did he think of Stephen Fry's portrayal of the Irish writer in the 1997 film, Wilde? "Rubbish," he says. "I thought Jude Law made a great Bosie in that, but I didn't see Oscar like that at all. He was too family valuesy. I don't think he was like that at all."
How does Everett see Wilde? "Well, my story takes place after he comes out of prison and he's a broken man. The rest is only in flashbacks. I think he was a much more loud and irritating man, and sweaty and lascivious and raunchy. Of course, he had an amazing turn of phrase. And he had a compassion for poor people and outcasts, even before his downfall, and he was very sweet to hookers, male hookers."
Asked how he researched his screenplay, he reels off a long list of biographies and references such as Wilde's own letters. "The title of the film will be Sebastian Melmoth, which was Wilde's alias when he was in exile after he came out of prison. I've finished the screenplay and now I want to get it made." His preference to direct the film is Roger Michell, whose diverse credits include Persuasion, Notting Hill, Changing Lanes, Enduring Love and Venus.
On the day we met, Everett walked through Merrion Square to see the statue of Oscar Wilde. "It is a horrible statue, isn't it?" he says, "but at least you have a statue of him. We don't have any statues of Oscar in England."
Stardust is on general release. St Trinian's opens on December 21st. Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins is published in paperback by Abacus