Rupert Everett

Rupert James Hector Everett, born on 29 May 1959 in Norfolk, England, is an English actor whose career has spanned stage, film, and television across more than four decades. His father, Major Anthony Michael Everett, served in the British Army, and his maternal grandfather was Vice Admiral Sir Hector Charles Donald MacLean DSO. Through his maternal grandmother, Opre Vyvyan, Everett descends from the baronets Vyvyan of Trelowarren and the German Freiherr von Schmiedern, giving him English, Irish, Scottish, German, and Dutch ancestry. He was raised Roman Catholic and from the age of seven attended Farleigh School in Andover, Hampshire, before studying under Benedictine monks at Ampleforth College in Yorkshire. At sixteen, with his parents' consent, he left school and relocated to London to train at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

Everett's professional breakthrough arrived in 1981 with a production of Julian Mitchell's play Another Country at the Greenwich Theatre, which later transferred to the West End. He played a gay schoolboy opposite Kenneth Branagh, and the role led directly to the 1984 film adaptation alongside Cary Elwes and Colin Firth, earning Everett his first BAFTA Award nomination. He had also acted at the Glasgow Citizens Theatre in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and his first film credit was the Academy Award-winning short A Shocking Accident (1982), directed by James Scott and based on a Graham Greene story. Further film work followed with Dance With a Stranger (1985), though his co-starring role opposite Bob Dylan in Hearts of Fire (1987) proved unsuccessful. That same year, in May 1987, he released a single titled "Generation of Loneliness," managed by Simon Napier-Bell, who had previously guided Wham! to prominence, though the musical direction did not take hold with the public.

In 1989, Everett moved to Paris, where he wrote his first novel, Hello, Darling, Are You Working?, and publicly came out as gay, a disclosure he has said may have affected his career. A second novel, The Hairdressers of St. Tropez, followed in 1995. His film career was substantially revived by My Best Friend's Wedding (1997), in which he played Julia Roberts's character's gay friend, a performance that earned him both a second BAFTA nomination and his first Golden Globe Award nomination. A second Golden Globe nomination came for An Ideal Husband (1999), the same year he played the sadistic Sanford Scolex/Dr. Claw in Disney's Inspector Gadget alongside Matthew Broderick. He went on to appear as Madonna's character's gay best friend in The Next Best Thing (2000), and provided backing vocals on her cover of "American Pie," which appeared on that film's soundtrack, as well as on the track "They Can't Take That Away from Me" on Robbie Williams' Swing When You're Winning in 2001. During the mid-2000s, Everett voiced the villain Prince Charming in Shrek 2 (2004) and Shrek the Third (2007).

In 2006, Everett published a memoir, Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins, which included the revelation of a six-year affair with British television presenter Paula Yates. Two years later, his BBC documentary The Victorian Sex Explorer retraced the travels of Sir Richard Francis Burton through India and Egypt. In 2009, he presented two Channel 4 documentaries, one focused on the travels of Lord Byron and another on Sir Richard Burton.

Everett made his Broadway debut in 2009 at the Shubert Theatre, appearing in Noël Coward's farce Blithe Spirit alongside Angela Lansbury, Christine Ebersole, and Jayne Atkinson, under the direction of Michael Blakemore. He returned to Broadway between 2009 and 2012, also starring in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? During the summer of 2010, he took on the role of Professor Henry Higgins in a revival of Pygmalion at the Chichester Festival Theatre, with Honeysuckle Weeks and Stephanie Cole, reprising the role in May 2011 at the Garrick Theatre in London's West End alongside Diana Rigg and Kara Tointon.

In 2012, Everett appeared in the five-part television adaptation of Parade's End, adapted by Tom Stoppard from the novels of Ford Madox Ford, playing the brother of protagonist Christopher Tietjens alongside Benedict Cumberbatch. That same year, he starred as Oscar Wilde in a revival of The Judas Kiss at London's Hampstead Theatre, co-starring Freddie Fox as Bosie and directed by Neil Armfield, which opened on 6 September 2012 and ran through 13 October before touring the UK and Dublin and transferring to the West End at the Duke of York's Theatre. In 2016, he played John Lamont/Mr. Barron in Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children. Everett has also been a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and has written for The Guardian, and he wrote a film screenplay focused on Oscar Wilde's final years.