Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins Excerpt

I first met Rupert Everett at Gold's gym in 2005. He came in and for some reason made a bee-line straight for me. I was doing shoulder shrugs. He was on a mission. For some reason I went from shoulders to legs and for some other reason Rupert followed suit. It was also the very same week my magazine had done a cover story on him in promotion for his performance in Stage Beauty as King Charles II.

Rupert has a great new book coming out September 21st. In it he dishes about Sharon Stone, Madonna, Judi Dench, And Sir Ian McKellan among others. He writes with an abondon that shows no shame. Pick it up, from the mere excerpts I've been reading I can't wait to read the full text. That and run into him once again to comment on some of his exploits.

COLIN FIRTH

I got to know Colin Firth when we were making the film of Another Country in July, 1983. He had been cast in the role Kenneth Branagh played in the stage version.

At first I quite fancied him, until he produced a guitar and began to sing protest songs between scenes. ‘There are limits,’ said my friend Piers Flint-Shipman when Lemon Tree, Very Pretty began. Colin was visibly pained by our superficiality.

It took 20 years for us to become friends. The long and winding river of showbusiness, with its rapids and its stagnant pools, threw us together again in The Importance Of Being Earnest.

Time had worked wonders on us both. He was no longer the grim Guardian reader in sandals; he no longer took the missionary position on everything. And I was perhaps slightly less brash, less nasty, less self-obsessed.

So after all that time, I found him to be one of the most delightful actors to work with. We hit it off straightaway and laughed our way through a beautiful English summer.

Practical jokes and schoolboy pranks were the order of the day, and I played one really good one. As part of my research, I was smoking a lot of pot during The Importance Of Being Earnest. Strictly for the role, of course.

I was always trying to persuade Frothy, as I now called him, or Collywobbles, that he would find the day less boring, and Oscar’s bons mots less laborious on the lips, if he had a puff or two.

He always refused, until finally, after a long hot afternoon at the end of the shoot, he came into my trailer just as I had constructed a big wind-me-down joint. We settled down for one of those long waits that inevitably punctuate the filming day.

I didn’t bother to offer Frothy the joint — his abstemiousness was legendary by then — but he suddenly asked for it and paced around the trailer, smoking. He soon became giggly and unusually animated (in other words, camp).

There was a knock on the door, and he opened it with a flourish, exhaling a huge gust of smoke and holding the joint up by his face like a character from a Noel Coward play. In clambered the producer Harvey Weinstein with a school of executives.

Poor Collywobbles was caught in the act. During the brief explosion of chit-chat that ensued, the mutual compliments, the casual discussion about the marketing strategy, we all looked at Frothy, wondering what he would do next.

He was determined not to be shown up, and was quite giddy at the same time, so he defiantly took another couple of puffs, as he chatted to a bemused Harvey, before handing the joint to me. ‘Here, Rupert. Do you want this?’ he said in his coolest voice.

‘Actually, no thanks, Colin,’ I replied in my most understanding voice. ‘I’d love to another time, but I just can’t do it while I’m working. I wish I could. I’m so envious that you can get high and still work.’ Colin was like a cartoon character who had just overshot the edge of a cliff. After Harvey left we laughed until our eyes were red from crying and our stomachs hurt.