“I was in basic terror for my life”

Rupert Everett burst into public view as the youthful star of the film Another Country. Confident and handsome, he seemed to have the world at his feet, says Zoe Williams in The Guardian – but he wasn’t happy. Since his teens, he had been highly promiscuous, and all around him gay men were suddenly dying painful deaths. “That whole period, I was living in basic terror for my life,” he says. “Everybody was terrorised by the disease. Even people who loved you, your family, you’d notice them taking your plate and washing it separately. That was my world – of every 60 seconds, 30 were in sheer panic. Especially in front of a camera; I lived in fear of a cameraman saying: ‘What’s that on your face, Rupert?’” Later, he came out as gay – precipitating a swift turn in his fortunes. Career death, he says, is a bit like real death. “One minute, you’re careering round the corridors of power, and everybody’s going: ‘That’s a fabulous idea.’ The next, you’re like the Canterville Ghost: everybody’s walking through you; you’ve died, and you didn’t realise. You build up this character for yourself as a successful person, and it feels indestructible, especially when you’re young, and then suddenly, the only person who will treat you like the big star you were is your mum... And you think, who am I? Am I that old person who everyone treated like this one thing, or this new one who has three seconds to get his point across and get out?”