Burning his bridges

They have mostly achieved eminence, the original cast members who appeared on stage or in the film adaptation, 30 years ago, of Julian Mitchell’s homoerotic spy fable Another Country. Kenneth Branagh has his coveted knighthood, Daniel Day-Lewis and Colin Firth have won Oscars — and Rupert Everett? I’m not quite sure what has happened to Rupert Everett.

He never quite caught on as a leading man, despite being strapping. He was so languid, you felt his co-stars had to organise their movements in order to nudge him awake, jostling him into coming up with a reaction. It was only when in drag as Miss Fritton, Alastair Sim’s old role in the St Trinians films, that his eyes began to sparkle — and Everett at last came alive as an actor.

He would attribute his own lack of first-rank success to the vodka and pharmaceuticals; to his fondness for mixing with ‘hags and swamp bitches’ or ‘big old sluts’ from Argentina who possess ‘gigantic overtugged nipples’, rather than with the Establishment-approved Richard Curtises of this world. Indeed, Richard Curtis, with his romantic, brightly-lit, smiley-faced and politically correct comedies, is Everett’s nemesis. They met once — an awkward encounter that is described in Vanished Years. The upshot? ‘Richard Curtis was to Blair’s Britain what Leni Riefenstahl was to Hitler’s Germany.’ And for the record, ‘Alastair Campbell was rather nice in person, but so was Hitler.’

He’s something of a bridge-burner, is Rupert Everett. If he doesn’t have a knighthood or an Oscar it may be because he genuinely loathes the show business sphere he is in — he doesn’t have a nice word to say about anyone — and word has got about. Madonna ‘probably sets a time limit on everything, including orgasm’.