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Chatting up Thierry Henry, being sick on Colin Firth ... and the saga of an obsession with Oscar Wilde, told in this third memoir with Everett’s usual seductive style
There are, for reasons both simple and obvious, certain literary figures who inspire a kind of hero worship that invariably says a lot more about the worshippers than it does the heroes. Charles Dickens obsessives often fancy that they share their idol’s famed energy and brilliance, or at least faintly reflect it. The wan young women who adore Sylvia Plath ignore her happy poems about domestic bliss and focus instead on the angrier, sadder parts of her work. Oscar Wilde obsessives go that one step further: they don’t just understand Wilde – they are Wilde, with all the wit and woe such a package entails. Stephen Fry went through a Wilde phase, and Rupert Everett has been going through one for some time.
This has been more to the audience’s benefit than Everett’s: he was wonderful on stage as Wilde in The Judas Kiss in 2012, and The Happy Prince, the 2018 film he wrote, directed and starred in about Wilde’s last days, is excellent. Easily the most thoughtful and least gilded depiction of Wilde yet, the film is far from the self-indulgent exercise in narcissism for Everett it could have been. Continue reading...