Rupert Everett laid bare

5 April 2012
The Weekender

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Tonight, Rupert Everett will be on the red carpet for the film premiere of St Trinian's, in which he plays the heroine headmistress Camilla Fritton. Last week, he was inside an old Wiltshire church for the funeral of his father, a former Army major. His life, he reflects, takes place at the extremes.

Age concern: Rupert Everett turned 50 this year — "I am a bit more Prisoner Cell Block H now"

We meet in Soho, where Everett, who turned 50 this year, blends in easily with his fashionable beard, beanie hat and aura of fame. Yet he says his father's death reminds him of his genetic inheritance and his affection for it.

"It was a nice funeral. My father is [sic] 89 so it was sweet to have all that thing of being in the Army, war, rationing, an entrée from the Army to the City, the old boy network. It is a world that is on its way out, or gone.

"You define yourself through rebellion, but the thing about middle age is that life is like a spring tide pulling you back until you end up on the beach where you were born.

Drag queen: Everett reprises his role as St Trinian's head

"Your attitude at 25 to the death of your father is different from when you are 50. There is a different kind of ­frisson; it is fear for yourself as well, and a sense of all generations being one person.

"In a way, I was pleased that he died because he had been ill for years, just wear and tear, so that, little by little, his faculties had deserted him. He had lost his sight and become more cut off from the world but the way he dealt with it was admirable and touching. He was very stoic. And at the same time he got everything he wanted. He had the old country life, which will disappear soon."

Best buddies: Madonna's friendship with Everett has, however, since cooled

Everett talks of his father fondly but with a writer's detachment. Major Everett was a fully realised character in his son's autobiography Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins.

"My father put on his stiff collar, his City suit and his bowler hat on Monday morning and left the house at eight-fifteen. He came back on Friday at about six," wrote Rupert.

Even in his eighties, the Major turned up for a trip down the Amazon with Rupert, wearing his City suit and with a copy of the FT — "an old soldier at attention, ready for trouble if it came".

Rupert read from the Amazon chapter at his father's funeral. He tells me this and then his lips curl upwards: "I had to stop myself from selling copies outside the church."

Everett has a writer's insouciance about life's up and downs. It is all material now, and the disasters more fruitful than the triumphs.

Success is a slim volume. He is halfway through his next book, which will be about his world view and characters he has known, from Nicky Haslam, the interior designer, to Isabella Blow, the fashion muse, to his father.

But what is really exciting him now is his next film project, in which he will play Jeremy Thorpe, the former Liberal leader accused and acquitted of conspiring to murder his alleged lover, Norman Scott. The film, which is planned for the BBC, will hand Everett, he hopes, his first award-winning role. He has claimed in earlier interviews that his homosex­uality has stopped him getting the big Hollywood role. Since then he has noticed an even more dispiriting career development.

"What has happened now is that if there is a serious gay role then they bring in a straight actor to play it."

He has just been to see his friend and St Trinian's co-star Colin Firth in the much acclaimed film Single Man. "I realised then that the game was up. Colin playing a gay character, that should be my role! He was fabulous but I realised that Colin was going to get the gay roles and I would have to do drag or television presenting."

So the chance to play someone as charismatic as Jeremy Thorpe, in a film directed by the marketable Ben Ross, is a happy twist of fate for Everett.

"What a part! One of my first memories is of my grandmother saying to my mother in a sotto voce voice that the first Mrs Thorpe had died at a level crossing, according to my grandmother with tears in her eyes, because she had just found out that Jeremy Thorpe was a bender. I remember vividly saying: Why? Why? Why did she have tears in her eyes?'"

The story of Jeremy Thorpe suits Everett perfectly because it is not just a gay drama but an irresistible glimpse of English social history, when homosexuality was still an illegal act.

"It is so English, so farcical. It is a better story than Profumo, I think, because Jeremy Thorpe was one of the first glamour politicians. Like Blair, he was too clever for his own good. And then you have this homosexual world so different from now. It was the Vaseline jar and the towel on the bed. Really, the sex scenes are like sticking a pig."

Vanished English worlds are Everett's speciality, which is why he is so brave and ludicrous in the part of Camilla Fritton, the headmistress of St Trinian's. He based the role on Camilla Parker Bowles, who has taken it in good part.

"I wrote to her to ask her to the premiere of the first film. I had this fantasy about the film being about to start and both of us arriving together in a mini, me in drag, and just chatting away like two girlfriends, then leaving straight-away at the end of the film. She turned me down but she was very nice and said that she gathered the role was based on her and she wished us luck. Then I met her and she was very nice. So she is still my role model."

The filming of St Trinian's was also a chance to torment his old friend Colin Firth again. During the making of the first St Trinian's film, Everett insisted that Firth had, in his youth, bored everyone by singing Lemon Tree accompanied on his guitar, with his eyes closed. This time, his chosen slander is that Firth has suddenly become a "bitchy old queen" who was finally ostracised by the rest of the cast because of his unceasing "malicious gossip".

There is no teasing of the other star of the film, the villain played by David Tennant. "David is very nice," says Everett carefully. "Very, very serious. He is very serious and he has very serious intentions. All hail to him."

The joy of Everett is that he is rarely very serious for long. Life is a theatre of the absurd and he plays his part in it.

"When I grow old there will be no one to wipe my bottom, so I might as well have a fatal heart attack on stage, playing some cameo role in Shakespeare, as my dresser wrestles off my prize amethyst ring. Noooo, my liege, aaargh'."

He is both larky and perturbed about age. He has noticed, for instance, that he is not as pretty as he was. "I am a bit more Prisoner Cell Block H now. I think my Camilla Fritton may need a face-lift. Not the other Camilla, of course "

He is determined not to fall into the middle-age trap of becoming irritated by the culture of youth. He is very deliberately enthusiastic, for instance, about The X Factor. He has been to watch the show and is going back to see the next one. He says "I could be Louis Walsh", which is actually an inspired idea for the next series.

"I am totally into it, the way that the spectators have taken charge. I love Simon Cowell. I love Cheryl Cole, because she's so beautiful. If I were straight, she would be my kind of guy, I mean girl. I love Dannii Minogue. She is now one of the most famous women in the country, because from now on at drama schools they will be doing classes on presenting the weather, as well as Chekhov and Shakespeare. Acting has become reality."

I wonder if his embracing of positive thinking is complete. Could he love Piers Morgan, from whom he fled when they were on the same team in Celebrity Apprentice?

"Piers Morgan has done an interesting thing in the last year or so," observes Everett. "He obviously took some good advice, because being too nasty isn't right for a TV career. He's obviously after the Parky [Michael Parkinson] slot. Piers used to be nasty and tear people to shreds but now he does these interviews where he has taken that amazing thing of Parkinson's, which was to say nothing funny or interesting and be loved for it.

"I don't know if Piers can pull it off, though, because underneath that pink, soft exterior there is still the iron claw. I have been terrified of him since Celebrity I Am an Apprentice, or whatever it was called. It was like going back to the first day at public school. I could smell the disinfectant and the oncoming crowd of bullies. Whenever I see him, I just want to run a mile."

One of Everett's role models for the next phase of his life is the society designer Nicky Haslam, who has "moved on the crest of each wave" of social change. "He surfed the Thatcher surge with his feather cut then, during Cool Britannia, he turned himself into a Gallagher brother. From 100 yards he looked like the person he wanted to be. And he has such an amazingly large circle of friends. I love going out with him, not in high society but to a trawler bar in Stepney."

I ask Everett how his old friend Madonna, who has cooled towards him since an unflattering mention of her "sweat" smell appeared in Everett's autobiography, is dealing with middle age.

"I don't think she has taken it on board. Well, I suppose she has a 23-year-old boyfriend, and if you have the stamina But one's life becomes more constructed in middle age, whereas at 23 everything is a pasture to graze. Both Madonna and Sam Taylor-Wood are control freaks with a capital C. I don't know how they manage to let a young partner breathe. They macro-manage their time. Maybe it is easiest for us queers to have young relationships because we don't have that structure to our lives."

Shrewdly, he observes that Madonna and Taylor-Wood are probably attracted to youth for professional reasons as much as personal ones. "It's how you keep up with fashion. You watch what they watch."

Rupert will be spending Christmas with his mother in Wiltshire, with their shared memories. And after that?

"Brazil!" he says, eyes bright. What happens in Brazil? "Oh, you know, sex change, surgery, shopping, all the Ss."

And, gurgling with laughter, he pulls down his beanie hat and heads out into the Soho rain. There is uproarious life after 50.

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