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Rupert Everett was born into an upper-class family on May 29, 1959. He was what Brits call a consummate "public school boy," which Americans would call a privileged boarding school boy. It was a life of high tea and fox hunting, though as he described one fox hunting trip to Gay.com UK, he did not fit in from an early age: “I was trying to whistle a Mary Poppins tune to keep calm. They say ‘Come on, Everett’ and try to swash blood over you. Everyone applauded.”

This tender lad was sent at the age of seven to the prestigious Catholic boarding school Ampleforth, and he told Gay.com UK that growing up away from your family "calcifies your heart." Of his parents, he said that "the most lasting effect of my childhood is the rejection I felt by my mother." A comment about a recent trip up the Amazon with his ex-Army father is very revealing about their relationship: “We’d so often been at loggerheads, hating each other. But in the end, when you’re stuck in a creek in the rainforest, it doesn’t really matter.”

Rupert did not last even two years at London's Central School for Speech and Drama in his mid teens, being expelled for "insubordination" (an early sign of his fiery, independent spirit). As soon as he moved to London he began exploring his sexuality. At seventeen he joined the flamboyantly campy and avant garde Glasgow Citizens' Company. Over the next few years (in the late 70s and early 80s) he worked in theater and modelling.

It was during this period that the boy born with the silver spoon started working as a prostitute, or "rent boy." In an interview with Attitude he claimed it was rebellion against his posh upbringing and said that he "sort of fell into" the lifestyle after being propositioned outside a Tube (i.e., subway) station. "This guy offered me such a massive amount of money--well, it was like a year-and-a-half's pocket money--and it just came in real handy."

Everett's first breakthrough success came in 1982 at the age of 23 in a London production of the play Another Country. He reprised his role as the young, gay Soviet spy in the critically acclaimed film adaptation two years later. He was suddenly a rising British star, confirmed when he played opposite Miranda Richardson in his next movie, 1985's Dances With Strangers.

During these heady days of partying and newfound fame he dated Bianca Jagger, Cher, and Madonna. As his ex-girlfriend Paula Yates wrote in The Sunday Times, "I've been close to Rupert for 20 years. In the early days, he looked down sulkily from posters on the side of every bus in London. He was the toast of the town, starring in Julian Mitchell's play Another Country. He shampooed his carpets and wandered up the King's Road barefoot. He has always been good at being a friend. Even now with the books, the parties and the movies, he is always the first to call or send cheques when a friend (me) is in trouble. The other thing I remember is that he wore five pairs of tracksuit bottoms because he worried that he had skinny legs. Now he's so big, lumberjacking in the Yukon surely beckons."

His reputation at the start of his career was as a professional dilettente, but as he told the Pink Paper, "I grew out of that, I think, when I realized that I wasn't going to be 22 forever."

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