Everett gets the claws out for a top lesson in acting up
There have now been more than 100 episodes of Piers Morgan’s Life Stories (ITV), but this one must have been the first where Morgan was superfluous to requirements. The actor Rupert Everett has lived a life of almost entirely public hedonism and glamorous Hollywood excess – if he hasn’t told-all in an interview, he’s written about it in a book. There are no skeletons in Everett’s closet, no secrets to be prised, no tears to be wrung. Everett’s strength is his refusal to feel ashamed for a life of sex, drugs and diva tantrums. What was Piers to do?
Well, the first thing he did was to remind Everett how the actor had once described him: “He reminded me exactly of all the people I was terrified of at school… He’s kind of slobby and elephantine, probably hung like a budgerigar.” Everett chuckled, Morgan chuckled. It set the tone – here were two old stagers, claws sheathed, happy to luxuriate in each other’s company.
What company Everett is though and Morgan was content to let him take the floor. When another star begins an anecdote with “I was in a sex shop in Miami” it is the start of a tear-streaked mea culpa. With Everett, it’s the opening to a witty story about how he told an elderly autograph
hunter to f--- off as he bought some pornography. Morgan teased him onto thornier subjects, noticeably the Aids epidemic. As a young gay man in 1980s London, Everett was at the heart of it. His lover contracted the disease and died. “I was terrified of it,” says Everett. “Some of my friends were so amazing to their lovers who caught it. I wasn’t. I ran in the opposite direction.”
It was also fascinating to hear how Everett’s sexuality – he is openly gay, but is also very happy to regale us with the legions of A-list women he has slept with – hampered his career, most obviously when he was cast in Basic Instinct 2 in 2006, only for the head of MGM to intervene because he didn’t want a gay man playing Sharon Stone’s lover. The one time Morgan made Everett uncomfortable was when he asked why he continued his affair with Paula Yates, even after she married Bob Geldof. Everett, of course, had a sizzling riposte: “It was up to her to feel guilty – I wasn’t married to Bob.”
Everett did not want to discuss his period as a rent boy – another thing that hamstrung his Hollywood career – or his partner, Enrique, leaving Morgan to pump well-heeled anecdotes and finely tuned witticisms out of the actor. The hour slipped by, but you always felt it was an interview with Everett the star, rather than the man.
There are straightforward arts documentaries and then there’s DH Lawrence: Sex, Exile and Greatness (Sky Arts), a resolutely fibrous plod through the life and works of the author, which made me feel like I was at school again, desperately taking notes. Born in 1885. Right. Dad was a drunk collier. Got it. Became a teacher. Ok. Stopped being a teacher. Ok...
Every now and then a Methodist looking professor in a shirt would pop up to quietly talk about sexual anguish or Freudian psychological despair, but, as if afraid of its own racy subject matter, the film took on the air of a Victorian schoolmaster daring his class to snigger at the rude bits in The Bible. Never has passion been rendered so passionless. As Lawrence wrote: “We’ve denied the life of our bodies, so they, our bodies, deny life to us.”
My, if ever a documentary needed to borrow a bit of oomph from its subject, it was this one. It focused mainly on Lawrence’s relationships and how they fed into his works – a failed early romance became Miriam and Paul in Sons and Lovers, the sexual liberation Lawrence found with his wife, Frieda, was channelled into Lady Chatterley’s Lover. He had stolen Frieda from his old modern languages professor, when he chanced upon her at home alone one day and she smothered him in Freud. He wrote Chatterley while Frieda was having an affair with their dashing Italian landlord. The academics popped up to remind us not to get hot under the collar, this was a serious literary exercise.
There were nuggets of interest – how could their not be, given Lawrence’s tumultuous life? – but it was all presented with no gravy or butter. I was mainly tickled by two things: one, Lawrence describing how he “hated humanity” and wanted to shoot people with “invisible arrows of death”, like a moody teenager. And, two, the woman caught by a reporter in 1967, coming out a bookshop with a copy of Chatterley in her hand. “I’m buying it for someone else,” she said, hurriedly. She would have appreciated the strenuous tact of this documentary.