An actor’s candid memoir of his Wilde ride in showbusiness
by Rupert Everett 352PP, LITTLE, BROWN, £20, EBOOK £10.99
Devoid of the usual actorly gush and gratuitous kiss-and-tell, Rupert Everett’s two previous volumes of memoir – Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins (2006) and Vanished Years (2012) – were widely admired for their often painful candour. Everett was simply telling it like it was, even if it reflected badly on his own behaviour, which it often did, and to hell with the consequences.
The honesty in this third volume – circling around his ambitious effort to produce, write, direct and star in The Happy Prince, a film based on the last years of Oscar Wilde – continues to be lacerating. But it strikes a more melancholy and jaded note than its predecessors: here is a man turning 60 and slowing up, increasingly disillusioned with both himself and his profession.
The book ends as he flunks an audition for a big television series and faces up to the film’s disappointing reception. Retreating to live with his elderly Brexit-supporting, Boris-admiring mother (rows ensue) and a newly acquired black labrador in rural Wiltshire, he muses on “the end of days” (this was presumably written before the virus struck) and resolves to “go with the flow and see where the tide takes me. Maybe it comes back round. Maybe not.” He quotes Julie Andrews, who once wisely said that “while you may love showbusiness with all your heart – dedicate your life and soul to it – showbusiness will never love you back.” If that’s what the incarnation of Mary Poppins thinks, what hope is there for anyone else?
But Everett is no snowflake, and never down for long. His resilient energy, sharp-eyed intelligence and keen sense of the ridiculous, as well as his capacity for short-term enjoyment of life’s sensual pleasures, infuse his writing with a warm glow. Sometimes one feels he is trying a tad too hard – the adjectives come thick and fast (what does he mean by “Wagnerian”?), the bons mots fall flat and the old-school drag-queeny banter can become wearing. But the sheer force of his personality is irresistible and there isn’t a dull moment.
Everett’s obsession with Wilde began when he was aged five and his mother read him the tale of The Happy Prince at bedtime. He calls this “her greatest contribution to my emotional development”, which may or may not be a compliment, and in adulthood he goes on to act in An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, as well as impersonating Wilde himself in David Hare’s play The Judas Kiss.
His picture of his hero is luridly romanticised – he hails him as “the patron saint of anyone who ever made a mess of their life” and even “the Christ figure of the gay movement. Crucified so that our sins may be forgiven.” Such passionate commitment is touching, if not altogether convincing: the character that Everett’s film depicts is far more robust and licentious than the diffident aesthete who emerges from the more critically nuanced biographies of Richard Ellmann or Matthew Sturgis. It also reflects the degree of self-identification that seeps into his performance.
Everett struggles for a decade to get the project financed, and the book offers salutary reading for anyone who thinks that the movie machine runs on well-oiled cogs.
Everett calls Wilde ‘the patron saint of anyone who ever made a mess of their lives’
Here it creaks and wheezes. Everyone may love the screenplay and be charmed by his pitch, but there is always a frustrating “but” or a last-minute withdrawal from the dotted line. Scott Rudin, the hotshot American producer wealthy enough to solve everyone’s problems with one fat cheque, is on board for a time, but wants Philip Seymour Hoffman to play Wilde. Everett balks at that: “I had written the script for myself.”
Roger Michell, first choice for director, withdraws, as do six other front-runners, so Everett suicidally takes the job on himself without any experience of the skills involved, as well as embarking on the appalling challenge of raising €14million for a European co-production. No wonder tempers sizzle as Everett succumbs to pneumonia and unabashedly resorts to drugs and drink. But he bounces back, and along the way (the book darts around chronologically) there are many delightful vignettes and interludes, notably a memoir of Philip Prowse, Everett’s mentor from his early professional days at the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow; a glimpse of the legendary couturier Azzedine Alaia and his bizarre Parisian atelier; and a richly evocative chapter set in Naples, where he hunts down locations including the castle where Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas played out the last act of their catastrophic relationship. Less engaging are pages devoted to louche Parisian trans-something or others.
Despite continuing problems with money, the actual filming on location in Germany and Belgium seems relatively stress-free. Everett hand-picks his cast and pays generous tribute to the likes of Emily Watson, Tom Wilkinson and Colin Morgan. Is it a bit of a tease that he has nothing particularly nice to say about his old sparring partner Colin Firth, who munificently agrees to forego his fee when the production topples over budget?
The Happy Prince is released in 2018, and despite high praise for Everett’s performance and generally respectful reviews (three stars from
the Telegraph’s Tim Robey) for its other elements, it isn’t the big hit hoped for. Being no stranger to Kipling’s twin impostors triumph and disaster, Everett’s upper lip remains admirably stiff in the face of this damp squib and he feels richly rewarded when the film is shown at a festival in St Petersburg, where homosexuality remains legally problematic and the audience has “taken a risk just by showing up”. Here he, says, “the whole thing begins to make sense. THIS is the prize.” And of course, he is right – the standing ovation of young free-spirited Russians is an accolade worth far more than a Hollywood-tarnished gong.
“There’s not much point in telling the truth about showbusiness,” Everett writes, “because nobody listens.” But he has certainly had a jolly good stab at it, and he’s wrong – anyone reading this shrewd and entertaining book is going to lend him an ear.