TO THE END OF THE WORLD

Sub-titled 'Travels with Oscar Wilde', this is the outrageous and very personal memoir with riotous anecdotes, a rude and uproarious third memoir about the vicissitudes of fame and Rupert Everett's attempts to make a film about the last days of Oscar Wilde. He hoovers up 'a couple of dry martinis to conjure up a bit of sloshed sparkle - the dregs of my star quality.' Travelling across Europe for the film, Everett weaves in extraordinary tales from his past, remembering wild times, freak encounters and lost friends and of course celebrities. But we also meet glamorous but doomed Aunt Peta who introduces Rupert, then aged three, to the joys of make-up. In 1980s Paris, his great friend Lychee burns bright, and is gone. In 1970s London, a 'weirdly tall, beyond size zero' teenage Rupert is expelled from the Central School of Speech and Drama. Everett is wonderfully sharp and alive to all the comical absurdities of the movie business and turns out to be a masterly travel writer with the magical ability to make a city or building or group of people burst into life in a few words. Like his previous volumes, the memoir quivers with A-list gossip and sardonic prose and he is a brilliantly caustic wit on Hollywood and on the march of time. His scabrous account of his lifelong love of Oscar Wilde, he has a keen sense of the ridiculous as well as a huge capacity for the short-term enjoyment of life's sensual pleasures. He ricochets from Paris to Naples, Berlin to Venice in search of funding and locations, captures the snakes-and-ladders world of international finance and survives all the setbacks in the film's making, along with the stalwart support of loyal friends like Colin Firth and Emily Watson. 337pp, paperback with many colour photos.