Rupert Everett just can't wait to play the headmistress of St Trinian's, writes Michael Dwyer.
Meet the headmistress. He's 43, dressed in a sleeveless blue T-shirt and jeans, and his angular six-foot-four frame is sprawled across a sofa in a suite at the Clarence hotel in Dublin. He's Rupert Everett and this morning he's mildly hung-over and munching a restorative breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast. And he is set to play the dual roles of the headmistress, Miss Fritton, and her ne'er-do-well brother, Clarence, in a series of remakes based on the hugely popular 1950s British comedy series set in the anarchic girls' school, St Trinian's.
"I can't wait to be the headmistress," Everett declares. But isn't Alastair Sim, who originally played the part, a really tough act to follow? "I'm not going to be like Alastair Sim," he says. "I'm going to be more like my own mother, a no-nonsense hooray. The only trouble with that series is they're all great films. It's normally a much better idea to do a remake of something that's not so good. But, at the same time, I really want to play a very funny drag role."
He hasn't been in drag on screen before, although he received excellent notices for his performance as Flora Goforth in the 1993 Glasgow stage production of the Tennessee Williams play, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore. "The play is about an old actress who's dying of cancer and her relationship with this poet/hustler. Basically, both characters are Tennessee Williams.
"It was so exhausting to do. I was on, like, 20-inch heels, wearing a corset and millions of clothes. One of the reasons the play rarely works on stage is that the people who are right to play it, actresses in their 80s, just don't have the energy to do it."
The sixth-form girls in the new St Trinian's films are all going to be played by supermodels and divas, he says, and the casting wish-list includes Naomi Campbell, Mariah Carey and Kylie Minogue. "They will look great in their gym slips. Their characters are selling the younger girls to Arabs for spanking sessions, while the girls' parents think they've gone on a school trip to France. It's going to be a very contemporary treatment of the story and I believe it will be very funny. The original series was gloriously funny."
Everett's latest movie to arrive here, The Importance of Being Earnest, based on the Oscar Wilde play, is not a remake as such, although it has been filmed in the past, faithfully by Anthony Asquith in 1952, and featuring an indelible performance as Lady Bracknell by Edith Evans.
"That was a really bad film," Everett insists. "It's like My Fair Lady, a stodgy adaptation that never really made the transition from stage to screen. Needless to say, in America, when our film opened, every single critic was describing the Asquith version as a masterpiece, as the definitive way of doing Oscar Wilde. There are terrific actors doing great work in the film, but it's such a dull piece of film-making. It's the same with My Fair Lady, where Rex Harrison is fantastic but the film just goes on forever."
He leaps to the defence of the new version, which plays with the original and features such jarring elements as anachronistic ragtime songs and a tawdry invented backstory for Lady Bracknell. "Well, it's very English," he says. "What I admire about it is that it encapsulates all sorts of English traditions in cinema. There's the Ealing tradition of performance-driven cinema, great eccentric performances. Then it's got a 1960s feeling reminiscent of Tom Jones, and of the Carry On movies. The fantasy sequences have a brash, tongue-in-cheek, slightly trashy feel to them. It's taken a lot of Wildean themes and made them very cinematic."
But why mess with Wilde, why fix what ain't broke? "That's fair enough," he replies, "but the play is a four-and-a-half-hour play and if you want it to work as a film, you have to do some work with it. And Algy was a great part for me and I'd known most of the actors for a very long time."
One of those actors is Colin Firth, with whom Everett first worked 18 years ago in another stage adaptation for the screen, Another Country. It marked the breakthrough role for Everett who had been expelled for insubordination by the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. His subsequent screen career has operated like a seesaw, swaying from the heights of Dance With a Stranger, Chronicle of a Death Foretold, The Comfort of Strangers, The Madness of King George and My Best Friend's Wedding, to the lows of Duet For One, Hearts of Fire, Prêt-à-Porter and B Monkey.
Everett was, in his own words, excessively egocentric and difficult when he was a younger actor. What mellowed him? "As you get older, you get surer of your own identity - or your lack of your own identity," he says. "Looking back, some of the things I thought were the worst things to happen to me turned out to be some of the best things. Everything, in the end, panned out very well. I was forced to move to Europe and live and work there, which gave me a great second string to my bow. Even going to live and work in Russia for a year, which I did, was a worthwhile experience."
Having played Guy Burgess in Another Country, Everett is about to play another notorious British spy, Kim Philby, in A Different Loyalty, which starts shooting in November and will reunite Everett with the director of Another Country, Marek Kanievska. "It's a great story, about Philby's third marriage," he says. "It's set in 1963. They get married in Beirut and one day he goes out to get cigarettes and never comes back, and Eleanor, his wife, suddenly finds herself in this huge drama. Sharon Stone will play her. I've known Sharon for some time and I think we could be the perfect couple on screen. I'm really excited about it."
"I'm very interested in doing two more Oscar Wilde films, too - The Picture of Dorian Gray and this film called De Profundis, which is about the last two years in Wilde's life with flashbacks to his earlier life. I'm always frustrated by those films about Oscar Wilde, which end just when the story gets most interesting, after he goes to jail.
"I find the other stuff so boring - the Café Royale stuff, Oscar at the opening night of The Importance of Being Earnest, the Marquess of Queensberry with the cauliflower. The Stephen Fry version struck me as a family values film. Stephen was very good, but he wasn't the character. I imagine Oscar Wilde in his heyday, when he was dressed up as a violin in those funny suits, was a sweaty, garlic-smelling lech - a hideous character."
Most recently, Everett has completed yet another screen version of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, which has already been filmed by Stephen Frears and Milos Forman. In the new treatment Everett, who plays Valmont, co-stars with Catherine Deneuve, Nastassja Kinski and Leelee Sobieski. "It's set in the 1960s in France, Scotland, New York, and it's in French," he says. Was his French up to it? "Oh yes, of course," he says. "I speak fluent French. I lived in France for 12 years."
Meanwhile, he has been dabbling in his parallel career as a singer, performing a duet on They Can't Take That Away From Me with Robbie Williams - and engaging in risqué banter with him - at his Royal Albert Hall concert, and again on Williams's best-selling album, Swing While You're Winning. It was Everett, too, who suggested to Madonna that she should cover American Pie, and he performed backing vocals on the track.
"My next aim is to do a duet with Shirley Bassey on her new album," he declares. "We've had one conversation about it, so I don't know if she's taking it seriously, but she did say I could. She is magic!" So he's working his way through the divas - Madonna, Stone, Deneuve, Bassey. There are not many other divas left, I suggest. "Well, there's me," he says with a big grin.
Everett came out as gay in 1989, which has proved a mixed blessing for him. "If I hadn't, I couldn't have gone to a gay bar again," he says matter-of-factly. "I can understand why journalists bring itup all the time, but from my point of view, it's not very conducive to being an actor because it carries you away and it's liable to stop you getting work if people only see you in one type of role.
"And there aren't that many good gay roles. I can't go on being forever the girl's gay best friend. That gets boring after a while. It was fun when I did it, but it was new then. And there just isn't that much to say about being gay. Of course, the worst thing is to get defensive about it. But I'm working through it and I'm getting the jobs that I want most of the time."
In fact, he never seems to stop working these days. He speaks with palpable enthusiasm about Unconditional Love, his second film for PJ Hogan, the director of My Best Friend's Wedding. Again he plays a gay man - "Dirk, a really bitter queen," he says. Dirk becomes involved with a Chicago housewife (Kathy Bates) who comes to Wales for the funeral of her idol, a murdered crooner played by Jonathan Pryce, who is involved in a secret affair with Dirk. The cast also includes Lynn Redgrave, Julie Andrews, Richard Briers and Barry Manilow.
Then there were the traumas of working on the financially-troubled production, Cromwell & Fairfax, in which he plays Charles I and gets beheaded. "That was a pretty depressing experience for everyone, with the money falling through not once but twice and production grinding to a halt, but we survived it," he says, clearly relieved to put it behind him.
Now he is developing his own TV sitcom for the major US network, NBC. In the series, Mr Ambassador, he will play Ronnie Childers, the British ambassador to Washington. "We're starting in February," he says proudly. "It's my story and I'm the producer of it. It could do very well, but who knows? American television is a cruel business. If the pilot programme doesn't work, they will scrap the series. If it works, I'll get offered every film on the planet." He describes the character of Childers as "an eccentric Basil Fawlty-esque, Cary Grant-esque man who's quite useless at his job, but often quite brilliant by mistake. And he's very into hip-hop!"
The Importance of Being Earnest is on general release yesterday