Rupert Everett never thought he’d make it to middle age, said Rebecca Hardy in the Daily Mail (U.K.). “When I was a kid I wanted to smoke cigarettes, suffer, and finish off as badly as possible,” the actor says. “I wanted to be a raw movie icon. I wanted to die young like James Dean.” He gave it a good try. Everett dropped out of his posh private school at age 16 and moved to London, where he discovered the gay scene, took drugs, and partied furiously. “I [did] anything that was the opposite to my upper-middle-class kind of classical English upbringing,” he says. “I wanted to brand myself on the world. I was obsessed [with] being the person I saw in the movies.” But when he did eventually make it big in Hollywood, “everything became a disappointment. I thought the whole business was bohemian and it wasn’t. Show business is a military occupation, more or less.” Now, at 53, he finds himself back in England and closer to his family—and everything he hated at 17—than he has ever been. “Youth drags you out to sea and then middle age drags you back to reality,” he says, sitting in the garden of his mother’s picturesque farmhouse in the English countryside. “I love being here.”
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