Rupert James Hector Everett (; born 29 May 1959) is an English actor. 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 received a second BAFTA 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). He voiced Prince Charming in the animated films Shrek 2 (2004) and Shrek the Third (2007). He also played John Lamont/Mr. Barron in Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2016).
Rupert James Hector Everett was born on 29 May 1959, to wealthy parents. His father, Major Anthony Michael Everett, was in the British Army. His maternal grandfather, Vice Admiral Sir Hector Charles Donald MacLean DSO, was a nephew of Scottish recipient of the Victoria Cross, Hector Lachlan Stewart MacLean. His maternal grandmother, Opre Vyvyan, was a descendant of the baronets Vyvyan of Trelowarren and the German Freiherr (Baron) von Schmiedern. Everett is of English, Irish, Scottish, and more distant German and Dutch ancestry. He was raised a Roman Catholic.
Everett has also disclosed that he identified as transgender during his childhood and dressed as a girl from age 6 to 14. When he turned 15, he ceased to identify as female and embraced his identity as a gay man.
From age seven, Everett was educated at Farleigh School in Andover, Hampshire, and later 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 Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. In an interview with Us magazine in 1997, he said that he supported himself during this period by doing sex work for drugs and money.
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. In 1982, he had an early screen role in "The Manhood of Edward Robinson", a play in The Agatha Christie Hour series. He also acted at the Glasgow Citizens Theatre in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
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 unsuccessful Hearts of Fire (1987). Everett also sang two songs in Hearts of Fire, having released his first single "Generation of Loneliness" earlier that year in May 1987.
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.
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.
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 gay 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.
For the 21st century, Everett decided to write again. He has been a Vanity Fair contributing editor, written for The Guardian, and he wrote a film screenplay on playwright Oscar Wilde's final years, for which he sought funding.
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 gay, during a radio show with Jonathan Ross, he described his heterosexual affairs as the result of adventurousness: "I was basically adventurous, I think I wanted to try everything".
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 died by 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.
Everett's documentary entitled The Victorian Sex Explorer 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 2009, Everett suggested, in an interview with the British newspaper The Observer, that coming out was not the best career move for a young actor.
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.
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 family history programme Who Do You Think You Are? Released in late 2010, the comedy film Wild Target features Everett as an art-loving gangster, and also starred Bill Nighy and Emily Blunt.