I first saw Rupert Everett when he exploded onto the London scene in the late 1970s. He was vegging out at a fancy dinner for Andy Warhol at the recently renovated Casserole restaurant on Kings Road. It used to be a nice ordinary restaurant, populated mainly by stoned members of the British aristocracy, where you could sit at wooden tables and happily fall into your soup. Then Nicki Haslam, the social interior decorator, placed billowing white tents on the roof, transforming the restaurant into a pretentious Bedouin-style setting.
‘The restaurant was full. There was nowhere to sit, but I was about to fall, so I curled up on the edge of a bench and took a quick nap. A few minutes later I opened my eyes to find three extraordinary faces looking at me with amusement. Lady Diana Cooper wore a hat like a medium’s shade with long white tassels. Next to her sat Andy Warhol in a strange peroxide wig, perched backwards on her head, and Bianca Jagger stood sleek and glowing beside me with delicious-smelling pomade in her hair. We introduced ourselves and I squinted apologizing for the intrusion,” is a quote from “Red Carpets and other banana skins,” the recently published autobiography of Rupert Everett.
My memory is that Rupert stormed into the restaurant and shamelessly plopped down next to Bianca and stole the show. All of her eyes were on him as this handsome intruder chatted with her like there was no tomorrow. But, “Red Carpets and other banana skins” is Rupert’s autobiography, not mine.
Rupert Everett is a talented actor whose role as Guy Bennett in 1984’s “Another Country” catapulted him to international stardom. Since then, he has worked regularly on stage, specifically for Glasgow Citizens, and has appeared in countless ‘A’ list movies including “Dance With A Stranger”, “The madness of King George III” and wowed Hollywood for his work. in “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” in which he played Julia Robert’s gay best friend. In 2007, he will be seen in Matthew Vaughn’s new film “Stardust,” in which he co-stars with Robert De Niro and Michelle Pfeiffer, and in “Shrek III,” in which his distinctive voice reprises the role of the prince. blue.
Rupert (‘Roopie Poopie’ to his friends) is unlike most of today’s celebrities who hire ghostwriters to write their life stories. Unlike the Jordans of this world, he has physically written his autobiography, entitled “Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins”, and he has also done a very good job. He is primarily an actor, but his life story is so well written that he could easily become a professional writer if parts of him run out. But, since he’s a character actor as well as a leading man, that concept seems highly unlikely.
I gobbled up the exciting, celebrity-studded life story of Rupert Everett. I couldn’t stop reading it. For me, I thought the first few chapters about his formative years were the most interesting. One really gets to know the writer when he writes playfully about his childhood and upbringing: prep school, followed by Ampleforth, the Catholic public boarding school, where he was educated by monks. Rupert was raised by his upper-class parents on “an old pink farmhouse with a moat, surrounded by Essex cornfields”. His father was a major in the Duke of Edinburgh’s Wiltshire Regiment before he became a stockbroker. It is surprising that Rupert turned out to be so artistic. But, the first movie that his mother took him to see was ‘Mary Poppins’, which made a great impression on him. In later years he would play Julie’s son Andrew in “Duet For One”.
“And then, when Mary Poppins effortlessly flew into the movie, something changed forever. Did Julie Andrews look and behave a bit like my mother? Rupert remembers.
Rupert Everett’s resume boasts a string of beautiful girlfriends, including a tempestuous love affair with Beatrice Dalle, the French actress. Unfortunately for his female fans, he is now fully gay. His showbiz anecdotes about Dalle and his other famous girlfriends – namely Madonna, Julia Roberts, Sharon Stone and Doniatella Versace – are insightful, which is hardly surprising, as these famous women are among the closest of friends. of the. Although Rupert didn’t shoot dirt in his book, he made up for it by writing intrusive anecdotes about famous friends of his. ‘Madonna had a barbecue at her beautiful house on the bay…it was facing a great expanse of sea and sky and had a strange, uninhabited feeling. You wouldn’t know she lived there; there was nothing personal inside it.’
Rupert is an astute observer and witty commentator on the wild escapades in his glamorous life. He is definitely a man who loves people and has the gift of witty writing about them without being vindictive or malicious. He also knows how to laugh at himself. When he tried Internet dating, he writes: ‘In France at the time, there was a thing called mintel, which was like a computer, connected to your phone. There was a screen and a keyboard and you could navigate online, so in the evenings I would connect with people from all over the region, then Mo and I would drive out with our map, to the villages in the Alpes-Maritimes, or to some suburb of Marseille, only to discover that the young Olympian who had written so charmingly about her sexual agility was actually a plump baker who would have a hard time touching his toes, let alone anything else. Mo was his beloved black lab, and when he died, Rupert wrote so movingly about the loss of his best friend that I wept.
“Red Carpets and other banana skins” is a well-written, fast-paced read about the exciting life of an iconoclastic actor, and who knows? A chapter of the book could one day be adapted for Rupert’s coming-of-age story. Ideally, he would like to make a film about his encounter with a drag queen in the Bois de Boulogne when he was a child. If the movie turns out to be as funny, vivid, exciting and sophisticated as his autobiography, it will definitely be worth watching.
Copyright: 2006