CRAIG BROWN: The Wilde confessions of ‘an old freak on the Hollywood dust heap’

To The End Of The World: Travels With Oscar Wilde

Rupert Everett                                                                                    Little, Brown £20

Rating:

Actors’ memoirs are invariably tales of triumph. There may be a few ups and downs, but when the curtain falls, the audience rises to its feet and delivers thunderous applause. 

Most of these books could be packaged with the same subtitle: ‘Darling, I Was Wonderful.’

But for all his camp, light-hearted image, Rupert Everett has always been more at home with disappointment. In his memoirs the curtain tends to fall abruptly, usually some time before the play is over, by which time the audience has tiptoed away.

But for all his camp, light-hearted image, Rupert Everett has always been more at home with disappointment (above, Everett as Oscar Wilde in 2018's The Happy Prince)

But for all his camp, light-hearted image, Rupert Everett has always been more at home with disappointment (above, Everett as Oscar Wilde in 2018’s The Happy Prince)

This, his third volume of autobiography, starts as it means to go on. ‘Twelve years ago, I had a dream. Fatal in middle age.

‘I decided to write, direct, star in and produce a film. I would be Oscar Wilde in exile. A gigantic leading role, pages of flighty dialogue, a Visconti-meets-CCTV aesthetic, all those friends and relations from a 30-year career press-ganged into supporting roles, the dream seemed as clear as yesterday and went all the way to the Oscars where, receiving my second award of the night, I would hold one glittering statuette up to each ear and scream, “Are these earrings too garish?”

‘The dream soon turned into a nightmare. This is the story of that bad trip.’

Over the years, Everett had acted with Julia Roberts and Judi Dench and Helen Mirren and Madonna (both above in 2000), but by this time his career was in freefall

Over the years, Everett had acted with Julia Roberts and Judi Dench and Helen Mirren and Madonna (both above in 2000), but by this time his career was in freefall

In fact, though Everett’s film, The Happy Prince, took ten years to make and was beset with all sorts of problems, largely to do with financing, it was pretty well received when it finally appeared in 2018. 

By and large, the critics loved it, and though it was not a great commercial success, it picked up various awards on the international circuit and did Everett no harm at all.

But of course this narrative arc doesn’t suit his jaunty relish for disaster. So he begins his tale back in the days when he is a young actor, summarily expelled from drama school for bad behaviour.

He begins his tale back in the days when he is a young actor, summarily expelled from drama school for bad behaviour (above, Everett in the 1987 musical drama Hearts Of Fire)

He begins his tale back in the days when he is a young actor, summarily expelled from drama school for bad behaviour (above, Everett in the 1987 musical drama Hearts Of Fire)

‘I had skipped every fencing class. I didn’t want to learn to tap. I never bothered to go to the zoo for animal studies. I wore pink tights and drop earrings at movement class, but so what?’

The book swings back and forth in time: 30 years on, he is starring in a David Hare play, The Judas Kiss, in a theatre 100 yards from his old drama school. Happily for the reader, Everett has always enjoyed biting the hand that feeds him. 

‘Before the show, our author slouches into my dressing room like the school bully from If. I always feel a bit like a new boy with David Hare… During the first catastrophic run-through of The Judas Kiss his face quickly clouds over. 

By the end of act one all moisture has drained from it, and he fixes me with a diabolical glare of undisguised repulsion… The actors hide in the coffee nook during the break, a gaggle of geese honking in the corner of the pen as the wolf prowls the perimeter.’

As it happened, Everett delivered one of the most memorable performances I have ever seen in a theatre: in a strange way, he seemed to become the funny and tragic character he was playing.

This character was Oscar Wilde, with whom he had been obsessed since the age of five, when his mother first read him Wilde’s fairy tale The Happy Prince. Wilde is, he now believes, ‘the patron saint of anyone who ever made a mess of their life’.

Over the years, Everett had acted with Julia Roberts and Judi Dench and Helen Mirren and Madonna, but by this time – at least by his account – his career was in freefall. 

‘The last ember of my Hollywood career by this stage having irretrievably crumbled to ash. I was just another old freak on the dust heap.’

As a safety net, he had written his own screenplay about Oscar Wilde. ‘I turned my attention to screenwriting, my dream being to create work for myself as an actor since no one else seemed to be very keen to do so.’

In normal Hollywood style, the screenplay whizzed from in-tray to out-tray to wastepaper basket, over and over again. His big mistake, he now acknowledges, was to reject the late Philip Seymour Hoffman as Wilde. 

‘I should have said yes. Hoffman, of course, would have been brilliant and my career as a screenwriter would have been established at the highest level. However, I declined. I had written the script for myself and I still had grandiose plans.’

His lofty refusal to play ball meant that six different directors refused to come on board, and finally the powerful Hollywood producer Scott Rudin dropped out, too.

IT’S A FACT

Rupert Everett wore a wig for most of The Happy Prince shoot, after filming the scene when Oscar Wilde got his head shaved at Reading Gaol.

The first half of To The End Of The World is a chronicle of the endless ups and downs of trying to raise enthusiasm, and, as importantly, money for his film. The second half describes the film in production, though the financial problems are still not over, with backers dropping out even as the cameras are whirring, and scores of executives demanding money-saving cuts.

‘Ah sink zis Bosie ees nat so essential, ya?’ says a German script editor, suggesting they save money by getting rid of Oscar’s boyfriend Bosie, around whom the story revolves.

In the hands of a less lively writer, this tale of plummeting finances and dodgy backers might have been a bit of a grind, but Everett is wonderfully sharp, and alive to all the comical absurdities of the movie business. 

Nor, for the most part, does he care who he offends. Of the head of acquisitions of the French distributor, Gaumont, he writes: ‘At a glance the man – François – seemed typical of his breed and profession: arrogant and disdainful. 

As he leant forward slightly, a hand cupped to his ear, I thought how funny it would be to slap him really hard. That would get the meeting going.’

He is also able to see himself through the same comical lens with which he regards others. ‘Of course I am self-centred and egotistical,’ he declares at one point. ‘I wouldn’t be trying to make a film if I wasn’t.’ 

Later on, he sympathises with the film’s producers, who finally lost patience with him. ‘They have had to deal with me for the last six years, tricky, deceitful, hot and cold, smart and stupid.’

My favourite book concerning the movie business is Final Cut: Art, Money And Ego in the The Making Of Heaven’s Gate, by Steven Bach, about the self-indulgent and wildly expensive Michael Cimino film that lost so many millions of dollars that it bankrupted United Artists.

Reading Everett’s book, I found myself half-wanting his film to fail as disastrously as Heaven’s Gate, just for the good of the story. But The Happy Prince was never the all-out flop that makes for a gripping story: it may have lost a certain amount of money, but, then again, so do most films, and, from an artistic point of view, it was pretty successful.

So we never get to witness the crash- bang-wallop nightmare that Everett promised at the beginning. In movie terms, the book is a light comedy, not a horror. Nonetheless, there are many incidental pleasures along the way.

For instance, he turns out to be a masterly travel writer, with the magical ability to make a city or a building or a group of people burst into life in a few words. St Mark’s Square in Venice is ‘a vast drained swimming pool in need of a good scrub’.

The ladies at the train station in Naples ‘are not afraid of weight, and wobble about like huge quivering jellies on six-inch clogs. Builders’ bums and breasts are displayed with pride as they scream down diamond-studded cell phones clutched in baubled, water-retaining claws’.

And, within the train, ‘everyone backs off when a priest or bishop swishes over the horizon on his pilgrimage to first class’.

Like Everett’s other books, To The End Of The World is also very funny and revealing about the shallow nature of stardom. Of actors, he writes: ‘With the first twinkle of stardom we exist more on the silver screen than at home behind the kitchen sink. 

For example, NEVER ask a movie star to say I love you. They just can’t. They have given it their all in close-up on a sound stage dressed as an Apache.’