When the makers of Hollywood's latest comedy hit My Best Friend's Wedding, starring Julia Roberts, screened the film to a preview audience, they knew the ending was not quite right. Roberts spends the film trying to steal her best friend's lover, and the director P.J. Hogan did not want to provoke another Southern Baptist boycott by rewarding her appalling on-screen behaviour with the man of her dreams.
He did not, however, expect the audience's unanimous reaction. In one voice they clamoured out loud: we want more Rupert Everett. What? Kenneth Branagh, Hugh Grant or Tim Roth, you could understand. But more Rupert Everett? It is not a cry which has echoed through the Hollywood Hills before.
"Rupert got great numbers on the cards at our preview screenings," says Jerry Zucker, the film's producer. "But we didn't need to see the cards. You could hear the audience react to him. He got laughs, he got cheers." And so Zucker, part of the comedy team which produced Airplane! and the Naked Gun series, listened. "To me movies are about communication; I've always wanted to please the audience." So please them Zucker and Hogan did, by going back and shooting another 17 minutes worth of undiluted Everett.
It was a wise decision. The critics have gone berserk over the star's wonderfully camp performance, claiming he has stolen the film from Roberts and her co-star Cameron Diaz.
To be frank, the film, a cholesterol-free comedy caper, would scarcely be worth watching without him. Superb pre-publicity and endless TV trailers ensured box office takings of $34 million during the first weekend. It came second only to the latest Batman, and that starred George Clooney. Rupert Everett woke up in his Greenwich Village apartment to find himself so much of an overnight sensation that he was even wanted live on the NBC breakfast show at 7 a.m.
The odd thing is, of course, that Everett has been an overnight sensation before. In 1984 the critics were blown away by his pouting performance in the film version of Julian Mitchell's play Another Country, a spy drama with homosexual undercurrents set in the claustrophobic dormitories of a boarding school during the 1930s.
What was not exactly clear at the time was quite how much Everett was actually acting. Yes, he was good and awfully handsome - the camera practically steamed up whenever he came into shot. He could scarcely have been offered a more appropriate part. After all, he was at the time a closet homosexual - he has since come out - and the son of an army father, and he was educated at a Benedictine boarding school.
Given the attention he received at the time, what followed must have been disappointing, if not devastating. Especially when compared with the turbo-charged progress of contemporaries like Kenneth Branagh, who performed in the original stage version of Another Country. None of the films Everett was to star in for the next 10 years made the big time.
Oh, he got decent reviews for Dance With A Stranger, the story of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain, with Miranda Richardson. He was not bad either, opposite Natasha Richardson, in The Comfort Of Strangers, Harold Pinter's adaption of Ian McEwan's cold, macabre novella set in Venice. But it has taken him a long time to become that most prized of adjectives in Los Angeles, "box-office".
What happened in the intervening years is what makes Everett far more interesting than many of his ambition-crazed and somewhat bland colleagues. So too does the remarkable frankness with which he talks about his own past. The press could not believe their luck when he told an interviewer for US Magazine that he had been a male prostitute. Who cared if it was true or not; the point was he had said it.
In fact it was true, though there was nothing new in these revelations: he had told the London Independent the same thing two years ago. What is refreshing, in a world full of bubbles, is his honesty. "I got my first offer outside a London tube station when I was 16," he told one reporter. "And I was very pleased with the money." "I didn't set out to hustle," he told US magazine. "But this guy offered me such a massive amount of money that, well . . . it was like a year and a half's pocket money and it just came in really handy."
You bet it did. Up until last year Everett was being cast on average just once every 16 months. But prostitution was not without its disadvantages. "The first time out is fine. And then you're knocked about a bit on your third night. You go back four days later with a bruise and get knocked about again, but you've got a knife so you're okay. It became second nature."
Everett got knocked about again when he wrote up much of his hustling experience, partly disguised, in his two semi-autobiographical novels. He also used the first, Hello Darling, Are You Working?, to declare his long-assumed homosexuality. The second, The Hairdressers Of St Tropez, addresses the problems of the environment. Both were written while he was living in Europe.
Hello Darling was written because he needed the money and, more to the point, wasn't working much himself, but as he also told the London Independent at the time, he was "bricked in emotionally".
"When you say `I love you' on screen, in a sense you're destroying the next `I love you' experience because it becomes a sense memory. I feel there's much more emotion for me in my writing than in my life. There are only three emotions I can feel for myself now: anger, fear and panic. Especially anger."
He continued to feel angry at the reaction to The Hairdressers Of St Tropez, when gay critics claimed he hadn't dealt with Aids sufficiently responsibly. "In the book, I didn't want to deal with the horror of Aids, because that's understood when you see the word written down," he snapped after publication in 1995. "It didn't have to have a paragraph saying `Isn't that shocking? Isn't that macabre?' I wanted to look at it in a different way."
Everett also looks at the stage - normally treated by actors with such wide-eyed reverence - in a different way, claiming that for audiences brought up on television it seems dreadfully dated.
"The thing about theatre is that people you want to go see it can't afford to go anyway," he complained to the Associated Press agency. "The ideal is having kids come to see your work and it changes their way of thinking about something. That's what's exciting! There's nothing remotely exciting about playing to a lot of rich businessmen and their wives who are trying to get their smoked salmon sandwiches from out of their teeth during the show."
But he is quite serious about trying to attract a younger audience to the theatre, priding himself on always managing "to do something that appeals to people who would otherwise buy a CD".
Some of them may even have bought CDs of Everett's own short-lived career as a singer, including the lesser-known Hooray Rap, produced while he was "resting". You have to hand it to him - actor, writer, singer and model for Yves Saint Laurent's overpowering aftershave, Opium - the man is resourceful, if, by his own account, he can be "fairly brattish".
He may also be vain, but it is still immensely brave to come out publicly in a business based on Baptist morality. Together with his co-star in The Madness Of King George, Nigel Hawthorne, he is one of a very few film actors happy to be openly gay. It says much about the strength of his current popularity, based on My Best Friend's Wedding, that there was virtually no mention of his interview about prostitution in the American press, while the British tabloids positively slavered over it. Suggestions that the piece may damage his career are silly; he is not going to be the next Batman, but then he was never going to rival Clooney or Val Kilmer. He might, however, be the next Joker.
Julia Roberts and Everett have shared the screen before, on the set of Robert Altman's Pret a Porter. "Making that was a very fraught experience," he said after the film's release. "Everyone was getting very neurotic, about half the film was scripted, half improvised."
They were expected to improvise again in Wedding, most notably in a highly entertaining cab scene, where Everett tries to make Roberts's ex-boyfriend (and the rest of the male crew) jealous by grabbing her breasts. As he murmured later: "Julia does not like people touching her tits." Off screen his own love life is more mysterious. Before coming out he had been linked in a lavender kind of way with Paula Yates, Bianca Jagger, Cher and Madonna. His most constant companion of late appears to be his labrador, Moise.
His next film, B Monkey, directed by Michael Radford, will see him in another piece of perfect casting, as a decadent drug dealer. And after that? "One of the great things about getting older," he says briskly, "is that unemployment becomes more and more fun."