My wild days of sex and drugs and being mates with Madonna are over
He's up before six in the morning and in bed with the light off before 10 at night.
'I feel a totally different animal certainly, now,' he tells me as we sit together in a plush room in Ayrshire.
He looks well on it. But then he always did. When he first started appearing on our screens in the early 1980s - in films like Another Country and Dance With a Stranger - he was clearly pin-up material for girls and guys who liked the floppy-fringed posh boy archetype.
Actually, he thinks otherwise. 'I wasn't that handsome,' he says when I suggest as much. 'I was 6ft 5in, a beanpole. I was odd looking as well.
Read more
'I took a very good picture,' he concedes, 'I was photogenic. But if you saw me in the street I was weird looking.
'I was pretty in a way, but I didn't feel very pretty and my vanity was not the vanity of thinking I was good looking. It was an inverted vanity of trying always to look more like a normal man.'
I've read that he tries not to look in the mirror now. 'Never if I can help it,' he admits. 'It's like sex. I looked in the mirror for so long it got boring.'
It's early May, a Friday, and Everett and I are at Dumfries House, near Cumnock. He's here to appear at the Boswell Book Festival later this evening. (If you've never been, do go. It's a great festival.)
Everett has come to talk about his latest book, The American No, a fine collection of short stories that is an enjoyable reminder that he's always been at least as good a writer as he is an actor.
Not that he thinks so. 'I'm not particularly proud of being either at the moment,' he tells me. 'They're both a work in progress, really. But I find being an actor much more enjoyable. Let's put it that way. Being a writer is a headf***, don't you find?'
Acting is communal, he adds, and that's some consolation. You can at least share your misery. In writing that misery is yours alone.
'Don't get me wrong; to be a writer and to have a second thing to do - particularly as you get older and the jobs don't come along with the same regularity - it's an amazing gift.'
But, he says, it can seem like hard work at times. 'I would love to be able to come up with something less laboriously.'
Rupert Everett in Vortex at the Citizens Theatre in 1988 (Image: unknown) He's trying to work out how. 'I'd just like to have something like hypnotism to break through some kind of threshold. I think I could break through some kind of threshold.
'Writing my latest book I've stopped drinking and taking marijuana oil, which has been my staple for years, just to see if it's not the up and down of being jolly in the evening and feeling grumpy in the morning that is stopping me from being able to do it.
When you say 'stopped, Rupert …?
'Stopped,' he says with some finality.
And how are you finding it?
'Fine, actually. I'm sleeping better than I used to, which is good, and I feel that my brain mist is to a certain extent lifting.'
But older is older, he says. He's now in his mid-sixties (he'll say he's both 65 and 67 in our time together I think he's 66. His birthday is at the end of May).
'Obviously I suppose one gets a bit slower. And it's weird with words and names and things like that. They're locked in little bubbles underground and sometimes they take a while to come up.'
Life today is mostly rural. He spends his time in the English countryside with his labrador and his spaniel, a rescue dog, and his mother. 'She is mute. She has dementia. She just sits. I look after her, which I quite enjoy, and that's it.'
At the weekends his husband Henrique will come down from London - or sometimes he'll go up to the city. He still has a place there but doesn't visit it often. 'I've become a country blob,' he says. He's content with this development.
'I've become much more, I suppose, conservative as I've got older. Alan Bennett said everyone did. Well, I did, definitely.'
In many ways he has now conformed to the world he grew up in. His father was a Major in the British Army. His grandfather, on his mother's side, was a Vice-Admiral in the Royal Navy.
'I think I came from a very particular collapse-of-empire family. It was very military, very frosty, very unemotional - all the things I really admire now by the way - and I felt that life was meant to be something completely different.
Rupert Everett at the Citizen's Theatre before its renovation (Image: Mark F Gibson) 'Like everyone in our generation I felt that life was meant to be more emotional, more straightforward, more confrontational. I rejected everything that they stood for.
'I felt that sexuality was liberation. I felt that f****** everyone was somehow my way out of the background I was in, out of the prison I felt I was in. Actually, it was just another kind of prison in a way.
'And now that we've become what I wanted us to be all those years ago I really hate it because I think we're way too emotional. I really respect people who don't show too much feeling all the time. I'm so sick of people bursting into tears on television.
'I think we've completely lost the way; both sides of the border by the way. We've got what I dreamt was going to happen and it looks to me like a mess.'
Has he turned into his father, I wonder? 'Umm … I understand him so much more. I definitely do. He was so careful about money and turning lights off and freezing cold rooms - all the things that we just gave up on after that generation. I now think freezing cold houses are nice. I like freezing cold houses with one warm room.'
I think central heating is a good thing on the whole, I tell him. 'But central heating is like being a lettuce. You feel yourself wilting.'
Born in 1959, Everett had the typical childhood of the British upper classes; packed off to prep school at an early age. It was to shape who he would become.
Read more
'The reason I became an actor is because I became a terrible show-off as soon as I got to school. My way of dealing with the terror you have of other boys en masse, all together, running around screaming, hitting you if you were too wimpy.
'My way - without understanding quite what I was doing - was to become a kind of class pest and show-off, whereas before I'd been an incredibly quiet, reclusive child. I used to like hiding in cupboards, for example, and doing fun things like watching dust particles.'
Hmm, I say, weren't you already cross-dressing even before you went to public school?
'I was cross-dressing. I really thought I was a girl. School changed all that, so I think it had a huge effect on me. It made me into just a show-off really. A show-off on the one hand. And I broke down like a little girl on the other. I found those two qualities have kind of gelled into the person I am in a way. They're both not quite who I feel I really am. So It's taken me years to work through them.'
He paints a portrait of the British prep school as a form of continuous conflict. 'The fallout from the war was so funny in the British prep school. All the teachers were basically people who had been in Burma or in India or in the war and had wooden legs from being blown up. They weren't really teachers in the ordinary sense of the world. They used to get into terrible tempers which I think was what we now call PTSD.
'I don't regret any of it because I think the only resilience I did have came from that Spartan type of education. Because those schools in those days were much more rigorous than they are now. They were tough places. They weren't comfortable.'
He left to go to London at the age of 15. 'I was allowed to go and rent a room from a family and that's when I really discovered myself and became a kind of sex maniac.'
Everett now seems very distant from the young man he once was. 'I don't recognise myself,' he admits.
Rupert Everett with Julia Robert's in My Best Friend's Wedding (Image: unknown) His younger self certainly embraced the hedonistic lifestyle - 'showbusiness was my cruising ground,' he suggests - but he also worked too. He won a part in Julian Mitchell's stage play Another Country and then turned up in the film version too, alongside Colin Firth. He also spent formative years in Glasgow working at the Citizens Theatre.
For a while he even tried to be a pop star, but that didn't work out.
Still, he has often said, sex was the driving force for him in his twenties. He was a gay man, but he had affairs with women such as Paula Yates and Beatrice Dalle, the star of Betty Blue. What were you getting from those relationships, Rupert?
'Attention. And you know being turned on by people and turning people on. That was all I really cared about. I think the tragedy of my career - if it has been one - is that it was really all about that. I should have been more serious about it.'
Plus, he points out, 'my gayness was very self-loathing too. It was very wrapped up in my Catholicism and my non-acceptance of myself. So, it took me years to be in relationships with men. It was easier for me to be in a relationship with women.'
Did the women you went out with know you were gay?
'Yeah, no one really cared in those days. Anyway, you're only gay when you're gay. I don't think it's that big of a deal. I always loved girls liking me because they were so attentive. Much more attentive than men.
'If you went out with a guy they'd go off to the loo and meet someone else. When you went out with a girl they were so lovely. They'd roll you little joints and make breakfast and dinner. I loved going out with girls. You got a full experience.'
He mentions Dalle. 'She was an amazing girlfriend. She would have killed for her guy. And in my gay world that was unknown really.
'All the girls I went out with were so committed. Guys, all of us, we were always looking over our shoulders at something else coming along.'
Careerwise, Everett was ambitious enough to go to America and try to make it in Hollywood in the 1980s. It was, he says, the most depressing period of his life, 'because I could never get on. And that was because, even though you very kindly said I was good looking, they just thought I looked like a freak. And the aesthetic in those days was much more Brut aftershave. Men with moustaches, hairy chests; big, proper men. So I was way out of the zeitgeist. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And so I don't think I ever got a job in those days. I was there for years. I was so ambitious to become something I couldn't be.'
What did you want to be, Rupert?
'I wanted to be Tom Cruise. I wanted to be something I couldn't possibly have been, just from my physique. I looked like a wine bottle, one of those characters in Cluedo. So I was bashing myself against a brick wall every day in auditions and never getting anything. If I'd arrived in the late nineties I would probably have done very well. When the standards had changed for men. They were interested in gawkier, geekier, weirder types of people.'
Rupert Everett starred with Madonna (Image: free) If you had become Tom Cruise, I begin… 'I wouldn't have joined scientology.'
He did finally see some Hollywood success in the 1990s when he appeared in films like My Best Friend's Wedding, opposite Julia Roberts, and The Next Big Thing, alongside Madonna. But now he is in his sixties roles are sparser. He made his directorial debut with The Happy Prince in 2018, a biographical film about Oscar Wilde which he also wrote and starred in. He has other projects he would love to make but he is not confident he will ever be allowed to. 'Films aren't happening. They're just not happening.
'People aren't going to the cinema. The pandemic knocked everything on the head. You've got to hope it's going to come back, but it's probably not going to come back to the kind of things I like.'
Still, he is not unhappy. 'In general I feel incredibly lucky. I've got a bit of money, I've got a nice home. I'm married. I have a husband.'
As for the world, though, well, let's just say he's not optimistic.
'I feel very concerned about our country and the world, so I don't feel that good, no. And also I feel impotent in the sense that it's too late. I don't know what you can really do, aged 65? No one really listens to anyone. What would you say? But I never imagined I could care much about how things are going but I find now that as I get older …'
You're ranting at the radio? 'I'm not ranting. I decided at the last election never to vote again.'
Did you vote in that one?
'No. I decided if no one ever mentioned Brexit on either side I wasn't going to vote for any of them and now I'm never voting for anything ever again.
'They're all useless. Useless people. Useless ideas and everything going so badly I don't see who is going to pull us out of the hole we've dug for ourselves'
He thinks for a moment. 'I guess when you're younger you're busy doing things more, so you don't notice.'
Maybe this is a good time to talk about death. He has often spoken about it in the past. Now I wonder as it comes closer (for both of us) as a consequence of time passing is he nervous, afraid?
'I think death is easy. It's being ill that's not easy. Death itself … I don't want to drown very much and I don't want to die from not being able to breathe and, God, I have so many friends now who are going through chemotherapy … I don't know what I would do if I develop cancer.'
But the idea of not being here doesn't bother you? We live in a world where billionaires want to move to Mars and live forever, after all.
'I don't want to go to Mars. I think Elon Musk can go to Mars and Harry and Meghan can be the king and queen of the crown Nebula. And everyone can pay 10 million dollars a shot for a pod up there.
'That's not for me. I think one of the great things is disappearing. And showbusiness, funnily enough, prepares you for death. Because you die so often in showbusiness and you have many different ways of dealing with your career deaths.
'I'm not afraid of not being here. I love the idea of not being here. And anyway our consciousness is something - it doesn't stay around as you or me - but it's part of some whole. An intelligence.'
Of course Everett will live on in his films and books. Does he ever watch any of his own movies? He is horrified by the very idea. It also reminds him of a story.
'One of my agents once lived in a flat opposite Bette Davis and one day he said, 'You've got to come over.' Now Voyager was on television, on Turner Classics. We could see her watching it in her flat and that was kind of amazing.'
These days Rupert Everett is not drinking. These days Rupert Everett is not a sex maniac. These days Rupert Everett is staying at home and reading a book. If we're lucky he might even write one or two more of his own.
The American No by Rupert Everett is published by Abacus Books
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Herald Scotland
4 days ago
- The Herald Scotland
Why do men hate Nicola Sturgeon? What would Maggie have made of it?
Who was that author? Boris Johnson, JD Vance, Sarah Vine? It was Nicola Sturgeon, whose publicity juggernaut for her memoirs is revving its engines and preparing to flatten all in its path. Says one blurb: 'From a shy childhood in working-class Ayrshire to wielding power in the corridors of Holyrood, Scotland's longest-serving First Minister shares her incredible story.' I'm guessing our man on Sauchiehall Street won't be first in the queue for a signed copy. Ditto Rupert Everett, the actor, who used an interview with The Herald at the weekend to call Ms Sturgeon a 'witch'. Read more According to Everett, he once loved Nicola but now cannot bear her. The reason: she ruined the arts in Scotland. Before Sturgeon, the country's arts scene had been internationalist and outward-looking, but after that, oh dear. 'As soon as the witch Sturgeon came into power … everything had to be about being Scottish'. That must have come as a surprise to all those performers who took part in Edinburgh International Festivals and Fringes while she was First Minister. Ms Sturgeon was having none of this. She wrote on Instagram: 'What is it with (some) men who can't disagree with a woman without resorting to deeply misogynistic tropes? His substantive point is baseless rubbish too.' Kate Forbes, the Deputy First Minister, yesterday joined in the condemnation of Everett's remarks, calling them 'misogynistic' and 'abhorrent'. I would like to report that there was a general outpouring of support for Ms Sturgeon on this, but most of the responses on social media were worse than Everett's original remarks. It is the same whenever she appears in the media, mainstream or social. What is going on here? Before her book is published is as good a time as any to ask. Is there a problem with Ms Sturgeon in particular, or with assertive women in general? Is misogyny limited to 'some' men, or is it rife in society and becoming worse? And what would Margaret Thatcher have made of it all? That last one is more pertinent than might at first appear. Margaret Thatcher on a walkabout in George Square, Glasgow in February 1975 (Image: STAFF) In a strange twist of fate, the girl from Irvine who grew up opposing everything that Mrs Thatcher stood for has ended up in the same place. Both women political leaders, both subject to levels of personal and political abuse that no male politician has had to endure, both considered by many to have been in the wrong. In Mrs Thatcher's case, the comments from her colleagues were jokey at first. Attila the Hen. That Bloody Woman (TBW). By the time she was forced out of office she had been called worse. Much worse. But unlike Ms Sturgeon she did not have to contend with social media. If she had, one wonders how the famously non-feminist Prime Minister would have reacted. Would she have seen it as just another example of the free market in operation, however grisly, or would she have been appalled and taken action? I reckon a few rude tweets about her son and words would have been exchanged behind the scenes. Mrs Thatcher operated in a political environment that was male-dominated and, as we know from revelations since, deeply misogynistic. New institutions, including the Scottish Parliament, were supposed to change that. How is that working out? Not well, according to a survey of women MSPs by Holyrood magazine. It found 'almost all' who responded had experienced online abuse, including death threats and rape threats, and the situation was becoming worse. One said Holyrood was becoming 'a hostile environment for women'. What a depressing development. And how dispiriting that a quarter of the way into the 21st Century, (some) men are still calling women witches. Not only that, they are being cheered on by other men, and (some) women too. Read more It would be nice to ignore Rupert Everett. He's an actor for pity's sake. You might as well listen to an angry gerbil (although I have enjoyed his memoirs). But we cannot turn the other way because misogyny is on the march everywhere, the clocks are whirring backwards. Kate Forbes was speaking at a Women in Public Life event in Edinburgh. Chairing the session was one Cherie Blair, herself no stranger to misogyny. There is a lot of it about, and as Ms Forbes agreed, it has only grown worse with time. If you haven't experienced it, you are either incredibly fortunate, not a woman, or you haven't been paying enough attention, because it is out there. It is in every walk of life, on every street. It used to lurk in the shadows or hide behind a mask, but now it is bolder. Misogyny has gone mainstream. So no, Mr Everett, it is not okay to call a woman a witch. I don't care how much you miss the Citizens and the European theatre tradition of Peter Stein and Nina Bausch (and what do you think Bausch would have thought about your language?), or how disillusioned you are with politics today (yawn), your language is not on. While we are on the subject, what are the chances of Scotland keeping the heid when Ms Sturgeon's book eventually sees the light of day? It is a political memoir, but these things are inevitably personal too. Words will be exchanged, accounts traded and opinions challenged. It will be a very boring memoir if it doesn't provoke a reaction, but let's at least try to keep our cool. And for gawd's sake, no one send Everett a copy. Alison Rowat is a Herald feature writer and columnist
Metro
4 days ago
- Metro
10 action movies which we'll never get to see – and the reasons why
Caroline Westbrook Published June 16, 2025 12:17pm Link is copied Comments Whether you're a fan or not, there's no denying that action movies are massive. With summer on our doorstep and blockbuster season underway, we're set to welcome a whole load of them into cinemas in the coming weeks. Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning and John Wick: Ballerina are already out there, but you can expect the likes of F1, Jurassic World: Rebirth, Nobody 2, Predator: Badlands, and The Fantastic Four: First Steps to come along before the season is out. But for every action epic that smashes onto the screen, the path is littered with the ashes of others that might have seemed like box office gold at the time, but for whatever reason just never made it out of the starting blocks. Imagine what might have been if some of these had been made... (Picture: Warner Bros/Everett/REX/Shutterstock) Superman might be about to fly on to screens yet again this summer but this particular incarnation of the man of steel didn't even get off the ground. The movie, which was due to go before the cameras in the 1990s, was to be directed by Tim Burton, with Nicolas Cage donning the infamous red and blue suit to play Clark Kent/Superman. And with a cast which was also due to include Chris Rock as Jimmy Olsen, Sandra Bullock as Lois Lane, and Christopher Walken as Braniac, what was not to like? Sadly the film suffered production issues and script rewrites, with Warner Bros pulling the plug just weeks before shooting was set to begin - despite having already spent $30m (£23m) on costumes and promotional material. For those still wondering what might have been, a documentary, The Death Of Superman Lives: What Happened?, was released in 2015 and can be seen on YouTube There's no shortage of video game to movie adaptations, although some have proven more successful than others (take a bow, Super Mario Bros and Minecraft for example). But others didn't achieve the same rise to stardom. Among those is the proposed adaptation of Halo, despite an impressive pedigree which would have seen Peter Jackson producing and Neill Blomkamp (District 9) directing a screenplay by Alex Garland (Civil War, The Beach). What happened? Lack of financing is what happened, with Fox and Universal both interested in the project, and work beginning on props for the film, before disagreements over the spiralling budget led to it being shelved. While the game did later get a live-action web series, we'll always be left to wonder what might have been (Picture: Microsoft) Back in the 90s, Arnold Schwarzenegger ruled the box office with hits including Total Recall, Terminator 2, Kindergarten Cop, True name it. So it seemed as if one planned project - a big-budget epic set during the titular Crusades which would reunite the Austrian star with Paul Verhoeven - would be big screen gold. And it might have been if it ever got made. Sets for the film were already being built in Spain for the epic but makers Carolco pulled the plug amid budget concerns, after the cost threatened to spiral. Instead, they went on to make pirate adventure Cutthroat Island - which did so badly at the box office it proved to be the death knell for the studio. Had Crusade made it to cinemas things could have been very different. And speaking of Arnie... (Picture:) One of Arnold Schwarzenegger's most popular 90s movies was True Lies, the 1994 summer smash in which the actor plays a secret agent hiding his true profession from his family. Plans were afoot for Arnie to reunite with director James Cameron on a follow-up, but both found themselves busy with other ventures. At one point it looked as though it might go ahead, with True Lies 2 tentatively slated to go before the cameras in 2002, but like the Forrest Gump sequel, the impact of the 9/11 attacks caused the director to change his mind about making the movie altogether. We can only imagine what might have been (Picture: Zade Rosenthal/Lightstorm/20th Century Fox/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock) This one might have seemed seemed like a no-brainer at the time, given it came from the imagination of Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton - but somehow it never materalised. Airframe, a novel about a quality assurance officer investigating a mysterious in-flight accident on a plane, was published in 1996 and was set to follow other Crichton adaptations including Congo, Rising Sun and Disclosure to the screen. Touchstone Pictures - a subsidiary of Disney - had snapped up to the rights to the novel before it was even published, with the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow and Demi Moore tipped to star. So what happened? Well according to the LA Times, Crichton was unable to find a script he liked - leading to the project being taken out of development and the author returning the $10m (£7.3m) advance he had been given by the studio. To this date it remains one of the few Crichton novels not to be made into a movie (Picture:) Here's another 90s movie which could well have raked in the millions. Crisis In The Hot Zone, based on a New Yorker article-turned-novel by Richard Preston about a US Ebola outbreak, was all set to go before the cameras with Ridley Scott directing, and Robert Redford and Jodie Foster starring. Except makers Fox struggled with budget constraints, as well as casting issues, leading to delays in the project. At which point Warner Bros stepped in with their own virus actioner, Outbreak - and despite the tendency in the 90s for two movies with very similar subject matters to compete with each other, it didn't happen this time. Fox pulled the plug on Crisis and it was never made You might wonder what's going on here because hasn't there already been a film of Dune? Well yes. Several in fact. And a sequel, one which even nabbed itself a best picture nomination at the Oscars. But there's one version of the Frank Herbert novel which ended up dead in the - how shall we put this - dunes - that director Alejandro Jodorowsky was all set to direct. And this one was certainly different, with the El Topo director keen to give viewers a psychedelic experience. Ultimately though Jodorowsky's project - and its 1,200 storyboards - failed to make it to the screen due to lack of financing. Producer Dino De Laurentiis ultimately snapped up the rights to the book in 1982, with David Lynch's version hitting screens in 1984. Which Jodorowsky subsequently described as 'terrible'. Ouch (Picture: Funcom) Another video game adaptation which never got out of the starting gate, Castlevania. A gothic horror franchise, involving Count Dracula and the vampire-hunting Belmont clan, was all set to get the live action treatment courtesy of Paul W S Anderson (Resident Evil). Although the project was announced in 2007, it never happened. Although it's not clear why the project stalled, that hasn't stopped fans from clamouring for it. In fact, various fan-made trailers, featuring the likes of Johnny Depp and Robert Pattinson in the lead roles, have surfaced online, while a poster featuring Depp as the Count went viral when it did the rounds earlier this year. For now? Fans can make do with the Netflix animated series, which debuted in 2017 and ran for four seasons (Picture: Netflix/Everett/Shutterstock) The past couple of decades have given us our fair share of Mummy movies, right from the original 1999 version which saw Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz chasing the titular monster. Sequels followed, from 2001's inevitable The Mummy 2 through to spin-off movie The Scorpion King, a video game and an animated TV series. But even a franchise this successful isn't without its problems, and when 2017's reboot The Mummy, starring Tom Cruise and Sofia Boutella, was a box office flop, plans for the follow-up, Rise Of The Aztecs (or The Mummy 4, to put it another way)y, were promptly shelved (Picture: Universal/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock) Film fans have no shortage of Alien movies to get to grips with, from the terrifying 1979 original through to 2024's Alien: Romulus. But one entry into the franchise which we'll never get to see is Alien 5: Awakening - which marks yet another cancelled project for the director Neill Blomkamp. The movie, a direct sequel to Aliens which took place around 30 years after the events of that film, was set to feature Ripley, Hicks and a grown-up Newt. However, following the disappointing box office of 2017's Alien: Covenant, Fox scrapped the project altogether. So this is one screen reunion we'll never get to see (Picture: 20th Century Fox/Kobal/REX/ Shutterstock) Next Gallery
The Herald Scotland
4 days ago
- The Herald Scotland
Sorry Rupe, the ‘witch' Sturgeon and SNP did not ruin Scottish arts
Speaking to The Herald ahead of his appearance at the Boswell Book Festival where he was promoting his new(-ish) book of short stories, Everett zeroed in on his time in Glasgow in the late 1980s and in particular a spell at the Citizens Theatre, where the quality of the work bowled him over, the drive of the people running the place and the intellectual expansiveness of what was staged there. My words, by the way, not his. What he said is this: 'It was a European theatre in the same vein as Peter Stein, Pina Bausch. It was a national European theatre. And unlike those theatres, it never ran at a loss. It presented an uncompromising array of work to people that it never patronised… It's how I imagine the relationship with the audience must have been in the Restoration, in a way. It was a collaborative thing between the audience. A very vocal audience. It was literally like going into Aladdin's cave, going into the Citizens.' Then along came 'the witch' – this is a quarter of a century after he graced the Dear Green Place, remember – and suddenly 'everything changed in Scottish arts… everything had to be about being Scottish.' Read more: 'Misogynistic and abhorrent': Forbes hits out at Everett over Sturgeon 'witch' slur Now I used to go to the Citz as a schoolboy in the period Everett was acting there, and maybe even saw him in a production or two. And yes, he's right that the theatre presented innovative works by playwrights from across Europe and beyond, and from across the centuries too. That said, there was always a strong Scottish focus. There had to be. Glance at the list of the productions at the Citz at the time and you can see it in black and white. James Bridie's Glasgow-set Dr Angelus opened there on June 10, 1988. A year later it staged Douglas, John Home's blank verse tragedy from 1756, which is set in the Grampian Mountains and inspired by the folk ballad Child Maurice, later popularized by Ewan McColl. I could go on. Track backwards and forwards from those points and, if you know anything about Scottish theatre and how it fits into and converses with issues in Scottish culture and society, you'll know that the productions which have best defined it over the last 50 or so years are works which are, well, Scottish. Such as The Cheviot, The Stag And The Black, Black Oil, first staged by the mighty Scottish company 7:84 in 1973. Productions such as The Cheviot, The Stag And The Black, Black Oil have best defined Scottish theatre over the last half-century (Image: National Theatre of Scotland) Here's three more: David Greig's Caledonia Dreaming from 1999, Stephen Greenhorn's 1997 play Passing Places, and Harry Gibson's seismic 1995 adaptation of Trainspotting. Or how about Gregory Burke's electrifying, quadruple Olivier Award-winning Black Watch, commissioned by the fledgling National Theatre of Scotland in 2006 and premiered at that year's Edinburgh Festival? Correct me if I'm wrong, but not one of those productions was staged when the SNP was in power at Holyrood. So is Rupert Everett right – or is he, as I'm sure some readers are currently now thinking, talking nonsense? Afraid I'm in the second camp, Rupe. PS: You were great in Inspector Gadget. Read more: My wild days of sex and drugs and being mates with Madonna are over It's only rock'n'roll, officer The Herald's Russell Leadbetter writes as authoritatively as ever about rock music in his appreciation of the Sex Pistols, looking in particular at the furore they caused up and down the country in the mid-1970s. It all seems a little tame and old fashioned now. Nostalgic, almost. What was all the fuss about? Given current events, however, one story stands out in Russell's piece: the cancelling by Glasgow City Council's licensing committee of a gig the band was due to play at the storied Apollo. Fast forward half a century and suddenly it doesn't seem so old-fashioned. Witness the current war of words between Oasis and City of Edinburgh Council, which has allegedly described Oasis fans as 'drunk', 'lairy', 'fat' and 'old' in privately-circulated briefing documents which were leaked to the press. Read more Barry Didcock: The band's frontman Liam Gallagher was quick to take to social media to offer his tuppence-worth. 'To the Edinburgh council I've heard what you said about Oasis fans and quite frankly your attitude f****** stinks,' he wrote. 'I'd leave town that day if I was any of you lot.' Not quite Lydon-esque but not far from it, and doubtless delivered with an appropriate sneer. And of course we've also had the Kneecap debacle. They were pulled from next month's TRNSMT line-up but have at least have been able to re-schedule a gig in Glasgow. So, the Pistols in the 1970s, Oasis and Kneecap today. Bad boy bands still giving the authorities a headache. Plus ça change, as they probably don't say in Manchester or Belfast. And finally The Herald's theatre critic Neil Cooper is sharpening his pencils before the start of the Edinburgh Festival but headed for Glasgow this week to take in the latest show in Òran Mór's A Play, A Pie And A Pint season – this was JD Stewart's hymn to a group of Scottish Beyoncé fans – as well as to the Theatre Royal where he watched Picture You Dead, a touring production of Peter James's Detective Roy Grace novels. Elsewhere music critic Keith Bruce was at Kelvingrove Art Gallery for the Scottish Ensemble's Concerts For A Summer's Night programme, currently touring visual arts venues. He was wowed by guest solo soprano Heloise Werner performing a programme which included work by Italian baroque composer Barbara Strozzi and 18th century Frenchwoman Julie Pinel among others.
