Rupert Everett: Scandals, Feuds, and Late-Life Change

He has lived a life few could have imagined that could have been a script for one of his movies. 

shot to fame in 1984, starring in Another Country before becoming a household name while working alongside and Julia Roberts in the comedy My Best Friend's Wedding in 1997.

But alongside his impressive acting credits, he has built a reputation for his wild, hedonistic lifestyle, which saw him experiment with heroin and sex work, as well as having an affair with the late Paula Yates while she was married to .

Now 67, the actor, who stars in the new season of Rivals, has finally turned his back on his wild younger years, claiming he is 'less selfish'.

'My wild days of sex and drugs and being mates with Madonna are over,' he told The Herald last year.

Having survived the excesses and heartbreaks of his past, the Daily Mail takes a look back at the chaotic life of one of Britain's most outspoken actors.

Rupert left his privileged education at 16 and was a movie star by the time he reached 22.

The son of an army major, he dropped out of his posh Catholic boarding school and hotfooted it to London where he got high and had lots of sexual adventures.

'When I was a kid I wanted to smoke cigarettes, suffer and finish off as badly as possible,' he previously told the Daily Mail. 

'It was seeing those faces on screen just living fabulous, dramatic stories. I wanted to be a raw movie icon. Die young like James Dean.'

Rupert enrolled in a drama school in London and to help support his means, he sold sex to make cash before before his behaviour got him expelled for insubordination.

The actor said he 'sort of fell into' sex work when he was approached outside a London tube station.

'I didn't set out to hustle, but this guy offered me such a massive amount of money, well, it was like a year-and-a-half's pocket money,' The Independent reported.

At 18, his parents were worried for their son's future.

'My parents thought I was going off the rails, so they thought the best thing to do would be to send me to a good French family so I could learn French and straighten myself up,' Rupert told The Daily Mail.

During his first day in the French capital, Rupert went out for a walk and ended up down a dodgy alleyway. 

'In the Bois de Boulogne I found a truck with a transsexual sex worker living in it,' he said. I made friends with her and I kind of lived in her world.'

Around this time, the actor was also taking heroin, but his drug use never got in the way of his ambition.

'I moved into some things – just anything that was the opposite to my upper-middle-class kind of classical English upbringing,' he said.

'I took drugs – all the Hoorays took heroin – and adored sex.'

His big break came at 22 when he played Colin Firth's character's lover in Another Country.

Rupert was then Hollywood's next big thing, bagging roles in classic films like Dance With a Stranger and playing Julia Roberts' gay best friend in My Best Friend's Wedding.

When he returned to London, he starred in a production of Noel Coward's play The Vortex, which is about drug abuse in Britain after the First World War.

When a couple wrote to complain about his performance, he replied by sending them a cutting of his pubic hair in the post.

He then had a famous 20-year-feud with his Another Country co-star Colin Firth, who Rupert called boring.

In return, Colin described the actor as a 'monster' and it wasn't until they worked together on The Importance of Being Earnest in 2002 that they reconciled.

Arguably worse than his feud with Colin was his tell-all memoirs, where nobody was let off the hook.

The public didn't realise quite how badly behaved he had been until he published his memoirs Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins in 2006, and Vanished Years in 2012.

He said that Alistair Campbell had 'a big knobbly nose that was made for aggression or at least cunnilingus' and Alan Sugar had 'that blunt insolence peculiar to all barrow-boy billionaires'. 

In his first memoir, he wrote about finding out that his then boyfriend had been diagnosed with HIV and just walking away because he couldn't cope.

He said: 'At the time, a lot of people like him got HIV and died but for a long time you couldn't really test for the disease.'

Rupert recalled how people would treat him during the AIDs pandemic, revealing gay people's plates were taken away to wash separately.  

He previously opened up about the terror he felt at the time, telling The Guardian in 2017: 'My whole world, lots of people that I'd been with, were dying. And dying in a most terrifying way.

'Everybody was terrorised by the disease. Even people who loved you, your family, you'd notice them taking your plate and washing it separately. That was my whole world – of every 60 seconds, 30 were in sheer panic.'

Rupert has also spoken about his nights cruising on Hampstead Heath in London. 

Gay cruising is the practice of seeking casual, often anonymous, sexual partners in public or semi-public spaces.

He explained to The Guardian: 'Hampstead Heath was like being in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

'You'd go down into the darkness, it would be pitch black and you'd hear of someone coming up, and then suddenly you'd see a galaxy of cigarette lights, like stars, a cluster of guys, and you'd hear someone being spanked and the echo of it deep across the heath.' 

Despite being openly gay, Rupert was also having relationships with some of the world's most famous women.

This includes the likes of  Susan Sarandon, Béatrice 'Betty Blue' Dalle, and a six-year affair with TV presenter , while she was married to Bob Geldof. 

In his 2006 memoir, he said Madonna and Julia Roberts smelled 'vaguely of sweat', which he found a turn-on. 

Julia was 'beautiful and tinged with madness', and, when stressed, Madonna 'had power cuts and the old whiny barmaid came screaming out of the defrosting cold room'.

She didn't speak to him for a long time after this was published.

In 2020, he spoke to Stella magazine about his relationship with the singer.

He said: 'She really didn't like it (the book). I think it is very affectionate, and certainly with her I was very careful to only write things that were. But she felt it was an infringement of privacy.

He added: 'Elephants don't forget… She doesn't trust me any more.'

While it's unclear if they made total amends, Rupert told Lorraine later that year: 'Well, no, we are friends.'

He added: 'I'm a great admirer of hers as a person, I think she as well is an amazing woman.'

But the book's most explosive revelation was an account of an affair he had with TV presenter Paula while she was married to Bob Geldof.

Paula and Bob came to see Rupert on stage and, when she went to interview the actor for a magazine the next day, the affair started.

'Her skirts and petticoats were like an overflowing bubble bath, snapping with electricity, and at some point the interview ended and a strange love affair of utter misfits began,' he wrote.

'She was married. I was gay. These constraints operated like a kind of safety net and there were no obstacles between us.'

Rupert has since said that he does not regret having the affair.

He also said how during his six years with Paula he gained an insight into a wholly different way of life. 

'Being straight was heaven, because you fitted in so well,' he admitted, recalling a dinner he and Paula had with the actor Gordon Jackson and his wife which 'felt like the whole restaurant was celebrating the normalcy of two couples getting together'.

'Gordon was telling me about getting a mortgage and I remember thinking, 'God this is fitting in!''

Reflecting on his hedonistic love life, Everett explained 'I loved all my relationships with women. I'm not sure they loved it though. Because I was so slippery. Going off with other people.'

'I just wanted to have more relationships,' he added. 'Pretending to feel the right things when you weren't. I was always shifty. I was always trying to get on to the next thing. No one was ever enough.'

16 years ago things changed when the actor met Brazilian accountant Henrique. 

The couple married in 2024 despite Rupert previously dismissing the institution of marriage and deriding gay marriage in particular as 'a waste of time' and 'beyond tragic'.

Everything about friends' weddings, he explained in 2020, he found 'repellent', and going to stag nights in the early 1980s was 'one of the most appalling things' he'd ever experienced.

'I think making it a legal contract is very, very damaging to a relationship,' reflected the actor.

'A relationship has to breathe and live and change, and turn into a different thing every day,' added Rupert. But he did concede his perspective had shifted.

The couple relocated to Wiltshire in 2018 after the actor spent most of his adult life living abroad. 

They lived with Rupert's mother until her death last year.

Ironically, the life the actor now lives was the one he was so desperate to escape during his teens.

'I've become a country blob,' he explained. 'That's what I am. I walk my dog, I write my books, and I feel I have become my mum and my dad since they died. I feel very much I am them, in one sense.'