English actor and writer Rupert Everett was BOTD in 1959. Born in Burnham Deepdale, Norfolk to a wealthy family with aristocrat lineage, he was educated at private schools in Hampshire and Yorkshire. At 16, he left school to study at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, supporting himself by working as a rent boy. In 1981, he was cast in Julian Mitchell‘s play Another Country, loosely based on the life of gay Cambridge spy Guy Burgess. After a successful West End run, Everett reprised his role in the 1984 film adaptation, launching his film career. With his aristocratic breeding, matinee-idol good looks and impish sense of humour, he seemed destined for major stardom, though his bankability in Hollywood suffered after he came out as gay in 1990. An erratic career followed, including an unsuccessful attempt to become a pop star, two enjoyably trashy novels and a series of critical and commercial flops. His career was revitalised in 1997 as Julia Roberts’ gay best friend in the romantic comedy hit My Best Friend’s Wedding. Everett’s performance was so popular with test screening audiences that the film’s ending was rewritten to reunite him (platonically) with Roberts. His next role in John Schlesinger‘s The Next Best Thing, a melodrama about a gay man who has a baby with his female best friend (played, atrociously, by Madonna), was a critical and commercial bomb. In the 2000s, he voiced the supercilious Prince Charming in the monstrously successful Shrek film franchise, and dragged up to play headmistress Camilla Fritton in a remake of St Trinian’s, a performance inspired by Camilla Parker-Bowles. He spent the best part of a decade campaigning unsuccessfully to be the new (and openly gay) James Bond, losing the role to the robustly heterosexual Daniel Craig. Settling into suave middle age and pseudo-national treasure status in the 2010s, he appeared in TV documentaries retracing the travels of Lord Byron and Richard Francis Burton, and appeared in successful stage revivals of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion and Noël Coward‘s Blithe Spirit and Private Lives. He made a major comeback playing Oscar Wilde in a 2012 London revival of David Hare’s play The Judas Kiss, earning him an Olivier Award nomination. He channeled his obsession with Wilde into writing, producing and starring in the 2018 film The Happy Prince, chronicling the playwright’s unhappy final years after his release from prison. Everett has identified variously as transgender, gay and bisexual, cheerfully clocking up hundreds of lovers and having highly-publicised relationships with Paula Yates and Béatrice Dalle. Never afraid of controversy, he has been a vocal advocate for prostitution law reform, and an equally loud critic of same-sex marriage and cancel culture. He married his long-term partner Henrique, a Brazilian architect, in 2024.