De Profundis: the agony of filming Oscar Wilde’s last years

Somewhere or other Martin Amis remarks that the reason we have very little idea of what it feels like to go into space is that no astronaut so far can write. If we know very well what it felt like to go through a tropical typhoon, that’s because there was a Joseph Conrad able to tell us about it.

Something similar might be said about the experience of real stardom. Although many great actors have published autobiographies, with or without the help of ghost writers, there are vanishingly few that combine honesty with an ability to write. Since David Niven’s unreliable but brilliantly authentic autobiographies, such as The Moon’s a Balloon, most of the compelling accounts of Hollywood existence have been fictional — Martin Amis’s Money, Elmore Leonard’s Get Shorty or James Lever’s splendid mock-memoir, Me Cheeta, the autobiography of the chimp in the Tarzan movies.

One of the very few exceptions is Rupert Everett, who has been passing through the best showbusiness circles for 40 years now, doesn’t mind telling his readers some of the very worst things he has seen, and, best of all, has the gift of a good turn of phrase. He has published two ludicrously entertaining novels and two scurrilous memoirs. Of the first of these, we are told by an outraged Amazon reviewer from the Netherlands:

Mr Everett gratuitously employs occasional four-letter references to male genitalia and completely random sexual innuendo (‘It blew my new career out of the water and turned my pubic hair white overnight’).

If that is not a solid recommendation, you may wish to turn to the memoirs of Major Tim Peake instead.

Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins excels in the exact portrayal of recherché social settings, from the 1970s travelos aux Bois to the rough trade boyfriends of English dukes (‘Oh, lucky Rupert! I’m afraid Darren is insisting we go to that rubber thing at Mile End.