LONDON - Rupert Everett hates Hollywood. The British actor, whose screen hits include "Another Country," "Shrek" and "My Best Friend's Wedding," says he's sick of the movie industry's hypocrisy and homophobia. He's even tired of celebrity — the whole glittering illusion deliciously evoked and eviscerated in his candid new autobiography "Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins."
"Hollywood is a mirage," said Everett, 47, reclining in jeans and plaid shirt on the sofa of a London hotel suite.
Movie stars are "blobs who don't say anything, aren't allowed to say anything. They are paid to shut up."
Fortunately, Everett can't help talking.
The book, for which he reportedly received a seven-figure advance, is a string of glittering anecdotes with edge, bonbons with a bitter center.
Everett is a waspish observer of the celebrity A-list, from Madonna ("she oozed sex appeal") to Julia Roberts ("beautiful and tinged with madness") to Sharon Stone ("utterly unhinged").
The book is a sort of Rough Guide to late 20th-century highlife — and lowlife — that moves from London to Paris, New York, St. Tropez, L.A.'s Laurel Canyon and Miami's South Beach. There are walk-on parts for Andy Warhol, Elizabeth Taylor, Orson Welles, Bob Dylan, Donatella Versace and a host of other luminaries. Everett seems to know everyone, remember all and recount everything.
Almost everything. Everett skates quickly over his brief stint as a London rent boy, although he cheerfully admits that he stalked the actor Ian McKellen.
A feast for gossip fans
The openly gay actor also discloses his handful of heterosexual affairs — with Paula Yates, wife of Bob Geldof, French actress Beatrice Dalle and Hollywood star Susan Sarandon.
The book is a feast for gossip fans, and Everett is an articulate and charming raconteur with a knack for a memorable image. At one point, a swimming pool is described as "shaped like a Xanax."
"I think what people will be really surprised about is the writing," said Antonia Hodgson, Everett's editor at British publisher Little, Brown. "It's not just another celebrity book.
"He's not so much interested in spilling the beans about a particular celebrity, but about showing what celebrity does to those people."
Everett says he was inspired by "The Moon's A Balloon," David Niven's literate, witty memoir of Hollywood's golden age.
"I also loved the prewar frenzy of Evelyn Waugh, that feeling of the end of the world coming," said Everett. "It seems to me that, especially through show business, everything is getting more and more feverish and faster and nastier and scarier.
"Entertainment is becoming the great decoy — we are so entertained, it's almost impossible for us to think about anything else. The only thing that has continuity in the news is Jennifer Lopez's bottom."
The book is also the story of Everett's lifelong flight from the conformity of an upper-class English upbringing that saw him sent away to a Catholic boarding school at the age of 7.
He recounts his early career as a youthful rebel and party animal, friend of prostitutes, addicts, divas and thieves. He says he has always been drawn to "the freaks, the overdoses and the suicides."
He says being gay "certainly wasn't acceptable in any of the arenas that were on offer to me. So I think I had an instinct to escape into a world that I thought would be more friendly
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14953089/
I
NEED to know when he was banging Sarandon...who was she cheating on???
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