Rupert Everett doesn’t care for critics.
Rupert Everett doesn’t care for critics. ‘You see them coming into the theatre,’ he says, ‘like the homeless who’ve lost their soup-kitchen, shuffling in with their plastic bags, deranged and vacant.’ After watching him play Henry Higgins in Pygmalion the reviewers have dumped poor Rupe in the poop. ‘Sad to witness,’ said one. ‘Lacking in intellectual joie de vivre,’ lamented another. ‘Respectable,’ said a third. (I bet that hurt.) And Everett, a leading practitioner of bitchcraft, lashed out and accused his attackers of not being able to afford their own sandwiches.
He’s right to cavil at the cavillers because I can’t remember a more entertaining version of the role. Everett is an odd blend of Higgins and non-Higgins. He’s naturally disdainful and rather cross with the world, and faintly misogynistic, too, so all that comes easily enough.
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