Rupert Everett

The subsequent film, The Happy Prince, written and directed by Everett, was released in 2018.

In 2017 Everett appeared as a recurring character in the BBC 2 comedy Quacks. He plays Dr Hendricks, the neurotic principal of the medical school.

Everett won the WhatsOnStage Award for Best Actor in a Play, and was nominated for the Olivier Award for Best Actor. In 2016 the production, still starring Everett and with Charlie Rowe as Bosie, ran in North America for seven weeks in Toronto and five weeks at BAM in New York City.

In 2015 it was announced that he would play the part of Philippe Achille, Marquis de Feron, the corrupt Governor of Paris, Head of the Red Guard and illegitimate brother to Louis XIII in the third series of the BBC One drama The Musketeers.

From the age of seven, Everett was educated at Farleigh School in Andover, Hampshire, and later was educated by Benedictine monks at Ampleforth College, Yorkshire; when he was 16 his parents agreed that he could leave school and move to London to train as an actor at the Central School of Speech and Drama (University of London). He claims that to support himself during this time, he worked as a prostitute for drugs and money—he disclosed this information in an interview for US magazine in 1997.

Everett continued his participation in the sex work legislation debate in 2014, writing a long form piece for The Guardian and appearing on the BBC One programme This Week. Everett's January Guardian article was published in the wake of human trafficking raids in the Soho area of London and he wrote:

In early 2013, Everett began working on a film portraying the final period of Wilde's life, stating in the media that he has had a fascination with the playwright since he was a child, as his mother read him Wilde's children's story The Happy Prince before he slept. Everett explained in November 2013:

In 2013, Everett worked on the production of a documentary on sex work for Channel 4 that includes the issue of criminalisation. Both during and after the filming of the documentary, Everett contributed to the discourse on prostitution legislation in the UK. In October 2013, Everett signed an open letter by the English Collective of Prostitutes and Queer Strike—alongside groups and organisations such as the Association of Trade Union Councils, Sex Worker Open University, Left Front Art – Radical Progressive Queers, Queer Resistance and Queers Against the Cuts—to oppose the adoption of the "Swedish model", whereby only the clients of sex workers, but not the sex workers themselves, are criminalised.

In 2012 Everett starred in the television adaptation of Parade's End with Benedict Cumberbatch. The five-part drama was adapted by Sir Tom Stoppard from the novels of Ford Madox Ford, and Everett appears as the brother of protagonist Christopher Tietjens.

Everett then starred as Oscar Wilde in The Judas Kiss, a stage play which was revived at London's Hampstead Theatre beginning 6 September 2012, co-starring Freddie Fox as Bosie, and directed by Neil Armfield. The play ran at the Hampstead through 13 October 2012, toured the UK and Dublin, and then transferred to the West End at the Duke of York's Theatre on 9 January 2013 in a limited run through 6 April 2013.

During the summer of 2010, Everett performed as Professor Henry Higgins, with English actress Honeysuckle Weeks and Stephanie Cole, in a revival of Pygmalion at the Chichester Festival Theatre. He reprised the role in May 2011 at the Garrick Theatre in London's West End, starring alongside Diana Rigg and Kara Tointon.

In July 2010, Everett was featured in the popular family history programme Who Do You Think You Are? Released in late 2010, the comedy film Wild Target featured Everett as an art-loving gangster, and also starred Bill Nighy and Emily Blunt.

In 2009, Everett told British newspaper The Observer that he wished he had never revealed his sexuality, as he feels that it hurt his career and advised younger actors against such candour:

Also in 2009, Everett presented two Channel 4 documentaries: one on the travels of Lord Byron, the Romantic poet, broadcast in July 2009, and another on British explorer Sir Richard Burton.

Everett then returned to his acting roots, appearing in several theatre productions: his Broadway debut in 2009 at the Shubert Theatre received positive critical reviews; he performed in a Noël Coward play, Blithe Spirit, starring alongside Angela Lansbury, Christine Ebersole and Jayne Atkinson, under the direction of Michael Blakemore. and he was expected to tour several Italian cities during the 2008–09 winter season in another Coward play, Private Lives (performed in Italian, which he speaks fluently)—playing Elyot to Italian actress Asia Argento's Amanda—but the production was cancelled.

Since the revelation of his sexuality, Everett has participated in public activities (leading the 2007 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras), played a double role in the film St. Trinian's, and has appeared on TV several times (as a contestant in the special Comic Relief Does The Apprentice; as a presenter for Live Earth; and as a guest host on the Channel 4 show The Friday Night Project, among others). He has also garnered media attention for his vitriolic quips and forthright opinions during interviews that have caused public outrage.

In May 2007, he delivered one of the eulogies at the funeral of fashion director Isabella Blow, his friend since they were teenagers, who had committed suicide. He asked as part of his speech: "Have you gotten what you wanted, Issie? Life was a relationship that you rejected." During this time he also voiced the nefarious, but handsome villain Prince Charming in the first two Shrek sequels.

In 2006 Everett published a memoir, Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins, in which he reveals his six-year affair with British television presenter Paula Yates. Although he is sometimes described as bisexual, as opposed to homosexual, he described his heterosexual affairs during a radio show with Jonathan Ross as the result of adventurousness: "I was basically adventurous, I think I wanted to try everything".

Between 2006 and 2010, Everett lived in New York City, but returned to London, because of his father's poor health. In 2008, Everett purchased a home in the Central London district of Belgravia.

In 2006, as a homeowner in the Central London area of Bloomsbury, Everett supported a campaign to prevent the establishment of a local Starbucks branch and referred to the global chain as a "cancer". Everett protested alongside 1000 other residents and the group compiled a signed petition.

Despite being managed by Simon Napier-Bell (who had steered Wham! to prominence), the public didn't take to his change in direction. The shift was short-lived, and he only returned to pop indirectly by providing backing vocals for Madonna many years later, on her cover of "American Pie" and on the track "They Can't Take That Away from Me" on Robbie Williams' Swing When You're Winning in 2001.

His career was revitalised by his award-winning performance in My Best Friend's Wedding (1997), playing Julia Roberts's character's gay friend, followed by a role as Madonna's character's best friend in The Next Best Thing (2000). (Everett was a backup vocalist on her cover of "American Pie", which is on the film's soundtrack). Around the same time, he starred as the sadistic Sanford Scolex/Dr. Claw in Disney's Inspector Gadget (also 1999) with Matthew Broderick.

Everett has performed in many other prominent films, including The Madness of King George (1994), Shakespeare in Love (1998), Inspector Gadget (1999), The Next Best Thing (2000), The Importance of Being Earnest (2002), Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking (2004), Shrek 2 (2004), The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005), Stardust (2007), Shrek the Third (2007), Wild Target (2010) and Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2016).

In 1989, Everett moved to Paris, writing a novel, Hello, Darling, Are You Working?, and coming out as gay, a disclosure which he has said may well have damaged his career. Returning to the public eye in The Comfort of Strangers (1990), several films of variable success followed. The Italian comics character Dylan Dog, created by Tiziano Sclavi in 1986, is graphically inspired by him. Everett, in turn, appeared in Cemetery Man (1994), an adaptation of Sclavi's novel Dellamorte Dellamore. In 1995 Everett published a second novel, The Hairdressers of St. Tropez.

Everett's break came in 1981 at the Greenwich Theatre and later West End production of Another Country, playing a gay schoolboy opposite Kenneth Branagh. His first film was the Academy Award-winning short A Shocking Accident (1982), directed by James Scott and based on a Graham Greene story. This was followed by a film version of Another Country in 1984 with Cary Elwes and Colin Firth. Following on with Dance With a Stranger (1985), Everett began to develop a promising film career until he co-starred with Bob Dylan in the huge flop Hearts of Fire (1987). Around the same time, Everett recorded and released an album of pop songs entitled Generation of Loneliness.

Rupert James Hector Everett (/ˈ ɛ v ər ɪ t / ; born (1959-05-29 ) 29 May 1959) is an English actor, writer, and singer. He first came to public attention in 1981, when he was cast in Julian Mitchell's play and subsequent film Another Country (1984) as a gay pupil at an English public school in the 1930s; the role earned him his first BAFTA Award nomination. He went on to receive a second BAFTA Award nomination and his first Golden Globe Award nomination for his role in My Best Friend's Wedding (1997), followed by a second Golden Globe nomination for An Ideal Husband (1999).

Everett was born in Burnham Deepdale, Norfolk, to Major Anthony Michael Everett (1921–2009), who worked in business and served in the British Army, and Sara (née Maclean; b. 1934). He has an older brother, Simon Anthony Cunningham Everett (born 1956). His maternal grandfather, Vice Admiral Sir Hector Charles Donald MacLean, was a nephew of Scottish recipient of the Victoria Cross, Hector Lachlan Stewart MacLean.

For the 21st century, Everett has decided to write again. He has been a Vanity Fair contributing editor, has written for The Guardian and wrote a film screenplay on playwright Oscar Wilde's final years, for which he sought funding.

Everett's documentary on Sir Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890) in which he retraces the travels of Burton through countries such as India and Egypt, aired on the BBC in 2008. In the documentary, titled The Victorian Sex Explorer, Everett explores the life of a man who investigated a male brothel frequented by British soldiers in Bombay in disguise; who introduced The Koran, One Thousand And One Nights and the Kama Sutra in their first English translations; who travelled to the city of Mecca, and kissed the Holy Stone of Kaaba in disguise as an Arab; and was able to converse in more than twenty languages. Everett explained in 2008: "I've been interested in him for years. So many contradictions. Such a riveting, show business character. The godfather of the sexual revolution."