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Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins
Review

Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins

February 2 2007

Red Carpets and other banana skins - the autobiography
by Rupert Everett
Little Brown - paperback

Famously gay, famously handsome, famously outrageous and famously famous, Rupert Everett is coming to Sydney for Mardi Gras 2007. He'll be appearing "in conversation" at the Seymour Centre and heaven knows where else.

The ostensible reason for his visit to Emerald City is his 2006 autobiography, but the fact is, Everett is a larger than life glamour figure in a world where glamour has largely given way to tawdry celebrity. As well as having the god-given attributes of considerable height and beauty, Everett is also a good actor - dramatic and comic - who could have been a contender if he hadn't always been so busy dragging defeat from the jaws of success.

The book chronicles his fatal knack with excruciating honesty and detail and, consequently, is fascinating. Born into a Catholic, military, upper class and well off English family, young Rupert knew he was different from an early age. As well, that deathly combination of neurosis triggers was topped off by parents so hilariously unsympathetic to the strange little boy, they could have turned Arnie Schwarzenegger gay.

But Rupert was not for turning - he was the only gay in the household and he was an energetic and self aware gay too. Not that it stopped him having women squealing from every orifice - including Susan Sarandon, Paula Yates (possibly the love of his life, if such a thing were possible) and Beatrice Dalle.

He is a born - if wildly self-indulgent - writer with the useful ability to both observe and analyse situations and people. He's perhaps a little too fond of glorious sunsets - which always seem to turn pink around Rupert (along with most of the gay male and a large proportion of the female population of any given Rupert location) but more often than not, each page gives up a passage of description, a wry anecdote or a clear-eyed observation of something searing and sad that makes you gasp: he's very, very good.

Not that Rupert has ever been bothered about being very, very good. Rather, from the day he was kicked out of drama school and headed north to the fabled Glasgow Citizens theatre, he was much more interested in being just as bad as possible. The result is a career that has faltered at the big jumps (My Best Friend’s Wedding remains his only major Hollywood success) while personal loneliness is a recurring theme in a book that's superficially all about laughter and naughty bits.

Despite attention to detail that sometimes tips into repetition, and despite woeful editing and the already-mentioned self indulgence, Red Carpets is a virtually unput-downable. He doesn't really name-drop - it's more that he barely knows anyone who isn't a name; he doesn’t reach for melodrama: his life really has been an incredible rollercoaster. If he dwells more on the ups than the downs, it's probably because that’s the way Rupi has survived.

Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins

For anyone in Sydney wondering whether to try doing to Everett what he did to Ian McKellen when the young hopeful was the theatre ticket collector and McKellen was the star (stalk him unmercifully until McKellen gave in and they had an affair), you might like to know that everett said this in an interview with the London Telegraph last year:

"Unfortunately, I am single, yes, but I’m too exhausted for anything else and being gay is a young man’s game." (Everett is now 47.)

"Now no one wants me. Being gay and being a woman has one big thing in common, which is that we both become invisible after the age of 42. Who wants a gay 50- year-old? No one, let me tell you. I could set myself on fire in a gay bar, and people would just light their cigarettes from me. I don't want to be carried out of a club wearing a tie-dye T-shirt and a cap on the wrong way around when I am 70."

Now you know.

Rupert Everett in conversation with Bob Downe and Mitzi Macintosh, York Theatre, Seymour Centre, February 26; ph: 02 9351 7940.

 

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