The first time I looked at Rupert Everett was when he burst onto the London scene in the late 1970s. He was vegetating at a fancy dinner for Andy Warhol at the newly renovated Casserole restaurant on Kings Road. It used to be a nice ordinary restaurant, populated mainly by drugged members of the British aristocracy, where you could sit at wooden tables and happily dip into your soup. Then Nicki Haslam, the social interior decorator, set up wavy white tents on the roof, transforming the restaurant into a pretentious Bedouin-style setting.
The restaurant was packed. There was nowhere to sit, but I was about to fall, so I pressed myself against the edge of a stool and took a quick nap. A few minutes later I opened my eyes and found three extraordinary faces looking at me amused. Lady Diana Cooper wore a hat like a medium lampshade with long white tassels. Beside her sat Andy Warhol under a strange peroxide wig, placed backwards on her head, and Bianca Jagger was elegant and resplendent beside me with a delicious-smelling pomade in her hair. We introduced ourselves and I narrowed my apologies for the intrusion, ”is a quote from“ Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins, ”Rupert Everett’s recently published autobiography.
My memory says that Rupert broke into the restaurant and blatantly dropped down next to Bianca and stole the show. All eyes were on him as this handsome looking intruder talked to 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” led to international stardom. Since then, he has periodically worked on stage, specifically for Glasgow Citizens, and appeared in countless ‘A’ list films such as “Dance With A Stranger”, “The Madness of King George III” and wowed Hollywood with 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 “Shrek III,” in which his distinctive voice returns to provide the role of Prince Charming. .
Rupert (‘Roopie Poopie’ for his friends) doesn’t look like most modern 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 his roles run out. But since he’s a character actor as well as a protagonist, that concept seems highly unlikely.
I gobbled up Rupert Everett’s exciting celebrity-filled life story. I couldn’t stop reading it. For me, I thought the first chapters on his formative years were the most interesting. One really gets to know the writer when he writes in a funny way about his childhood and education: the preparatory 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 farm with a moat, surrounded by the cornfields of Essex.” His father was a major in the Duke of Edinburgh’s Wiltshire regiment before becoming a stockbroker. It’s 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 Andrew’s son in “Duet For One”.
And then when Mary Poppins effortlessly flew into the movie, something changed forever. Did Julie Andrews look and act like my mother in any way? Remember Rupert.
Rupert Everett’s CV features a number of beautiful girlfriends, including a stormy love affair with Beatrice Dalle, the French actress. Unfortunately for his female fans, he is now totally gay. His anecdotes from show business about Dalle and his other famous girlfriends – namely Madonna, Julia Roberts, Sharon Stone, and Doniatella Versace – are revealing, which is not surprising since these famous women are among his closest friends. Although Rupert didn’t throw the dirt in his book, he made up for it by writing intrusive anecdotes about his famous friends. “Madonna had a barbecue in her beautiful house on the bay… it was facing a huge expanse of sea and sky and it had a strange uninhabited feeling. You wouldn’t know that she lived there; there was nothing personal inside him. ‘
Rupert is a shrewd observer and a witty commentator on the crazy adventures of his glamorous life. He is definitely a man who loves people and has the gift of cleverly 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 that 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 at night I would connect with people from all over the region, then Mo and I would go out in the car with our map, to towns in the Maritime Alps, or to some suburb from Marseille, only to discover that the young Olympian who had written so captivatingly about his sexual agility was actually a plump baker who had a hard time touching his toes, much less 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 cried.
“Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins” is a well-written, fast-paced read on the exciting life of an iconoclastic actor, and who knows? A chapter in the book could one day be adapted to Rupert’s coming-of-age story. Ideally, you would like to make a movie about meeting a drag queen in the Bois de Boulogne as 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
