Shakespeare in Love is a wonderful movie but it’s never really believable that Joe Fiennes is a writer – he plays Shakespeare like an actor, all hot pants and running around like an idiot. However Rupert Everett’s Marlowe in the same movie did seem like a real writer – watchful, disdainful, smart. But it still comes as a surprise that Everett’s memoirs would be so well written – not that an actor can’t be a brilliant writer (Simon Callow leaps to mind) but Everett’s not been known for his writings til now.
It’s a marvellous book, written in a style consistent with Everett’s on screen persona: lush, educated, decadent, witty, brilliant. (Everett complains that his homosexuality saw him not cast in About a Boy, but he would have been wrong in that part – the lead in About a Boy is essentially a hopeless person, and Everett is too strong, too confident to convey hopelessness).
He luxuriates in words, as he seems to have done in life: affairs with Ian McKellan, but also Paula Yates (his portrait of Yates and Bob Geldorf is a classic), Susan Sarandon and Beatrice Dalle; he also has spent lots of time in Miami and Europe rather than London, has had an erratic but long career. He really should have been in better movies, had at least Jude Law’s career (maybe he was too metrosexual too soon) but he still did pretty well; anyway as he himself admits he was a prat. Great writer, though.
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