To the End of the World: Travels with Oscar Wilde

Product Description 'Quivers with honesty, A-list gossip and sardonic prose' The Times'Everett is a deliciously gifted writer. Nothing and no one escapes his attention' ObserverRupert Everett tells the story of how he set out to make a film of Oscar Wilde's last days, and how that ten-year quest almost destroyed him. (And everyone else.) Travelling across Europe for the film, he weaves in extraordinary tales from his past, remembering wild times, freak encounters and lost friends. There are celebrities, of course. But we also meet glamorous but doomed Aunt Peta, who introduces Rupert (aged three) to the joys of make-up. In '90s Paris, his great friend Lychee burns bright, and is gone. While in '70s London, a 'weirdly tall, beyond size zero' teenage Rupert is expelled from the Central School of Speech and Drama. Unflinchingly honest and hugely entertaining, To the End of the World offers a unique insight into the 'snakes and ladders' of filmmaking. It is also a soulful and thought-provoking autobiography from one of our best-loved and most talented actors and writers. Review A rude and uproarious new memoir about the vicissitudes of fame and his attempts to make a film about the last days of Oscar Wilde ― The Times Books of the Year Another actor who can really write is Rupert Everett. His latest memoir, To the End of the World, about making his Oscar Wilde film, is reliably hilarious - even if the joke is now always at his expense: "like a toothless old circus dog, I yap yes to everything", he writes, as he hoovers up "a couple of dry martinis to conjure up a bit of sloshed sparkle - the dregs of my star quality" ― Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year 2020 Both a caustic reflection on the iniquities of show business and an account of his decade-long efforts to bring Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince to the screen. The writing is as sparkling as the anecdotes are riotous: he stands up Joan Collins for dinner and throws up on Colin Firth ― Guardian Books of the Year 2020 The joy of Everett as a writer has always been his pitilessly clear-eyed perspective, especially of himself...Everett has become one of the most delightful writers about modern fame... He has a writing style as seductive as his youthful beauty... every sentence Everett writes rings with his personality, and it's a personality that has always been irresistible ― Hadley Freeman, Guardian Book of the Day Everett is wonderfully sharp, and alive to all the comical absurdities of the movie business... he turns out to be a masterly travel writer, with the magical ability to make a city or a building or a group of people burst into life in a few words...Like Everett's other books, To The End Of The World is also very funny and revealing about the shallow nature of stardom ― Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday This is tremendous ― Rev. Richard Coles Like its preceding volumes, R ed Carpets and Other Banana Skins and Vanished Years, it quivers with honesty, A-list gossip and sardonic prose...We should really start describing him as a writer who acts, rather than the other way round... He's brilliantly caustic on Hollywood and the march of time...."Why hadn't I realised I could write?" he asks of his younger self. The answer, probably, is simple. He needed those years of excess, hissy fits and humiliations to fuel his imagination ― The Times In a sharp, scabrous account of his lifelong love of Oscar, the actor again proves himself a masterly writer...it is just about everything you could want, at least in a memoir by an actor. We know, by now, that Everett is a deliciously gifted writer. Nothing and no one escapes his attention...However wasteful and capricious his first profession, we know that he is perfectly safe. The blank page will henceforth always be his. He is a writer to his (aching) bones ― Rachel Cooke, Observer His resilient energy, sharp-eyed intelligence and keen sense of the ridiculous, as well as his capacity for short-term enjoyment of lif