It's kiss-and-tell, Hollywood style. He's dined with Madonna, slept with Sharon Stone and partied with J-LO, and now actor Rupert Everett is baring all.

At 17, I had sat with David Bowie downstairs at the Embassy Club in London. At 18, I had dined in Paris with Andy Warhol and Bianca Jagger. As a jobbing actor, I knew what it was to be drunk on fame by association. Yet everything was a pale imitation of the impact Madonna had on me. One morning in Los Angeles, I was with Mel, a scriptwriter friend, in a car at traffic lights on Sunset Boulevard. We were on our way home from breakfast in some faraway dive where I was told Jimi Hendrix wrote "Are You Experienced? ". I was out of work and with few prospects. It was 1985, the time of the Brat Pack in Hollywood, and there wasn't much around for a tall, thin English freak.

"Omigod, Sean Penn is in the next car and he's waving, " Mel whispered at the lights, then nudged me hard in the ribs. "Wave back. "

We volleyed compliments from car to car while the light was red and swapped numbers before he sped off. Hollywood was amazing - far from being an impregnable fortress, in those days you could get to know everyone within a couple of weeks (it was losing them that took forever).

A couple of days later, Penn called me. "I told my girlfriend about you and I'd like you to meet her. Let's go for dinner tomorrow. "

THE MATERIAL GIRL
Even before she arrived, as I was still sitting there waiting with Sean and Mel, there was a flurry outside. Two people knocked against the window of the restaurant, like leaves in a strong gust of wind that blew open the door, and the "Immaculate Conception" was among us. She was not yet the Material Girl, nowhere near the peak of her fame. There was no bodyguard; she had parked the car herself. But still there was an energy field around her.

She sat down and Sean's beautiful forget-me-not eyes watered with adoration. Hers were the palest blue - when they looked in your direction, you froze. She was raucous but poised, elegant but common. She oozed sex and she demanded a sexual response from everyone. It didn't matter if you were gay, you were swept up all the same.

At some point during the dinner she got up to go to the bathroom. "Come with me, Sean, " she said. Her voice was high and whiny.
"You'll be OK, baby, " replied Sean.
"I'm scared. C'mon, baby. " She stamped her foot in a sexy pastiche of exasperation.
Sean got up. "I'll be right back, " he said.

When they eventually returned to the table - 20 minutes later - neither of them made the vaguest reference to their lengthy absence as they settled back into their cold plates.

MY BEST FRIEND'S WEDDING
Like Madonna, Julia Roberts smelt vaguely of sweat, which I thought was very sexy. There is a male quality to the female superstar. There has to be. If a girl is going to survive in Hollywood on that journey from broken eggshell to the sea, she must develop "people skills". Flocks of executive seagulls will try to take her and drop her on to the rocks. The casting couch is not the solution for a young hopeful. She must learn to f**k them before they f**k her if she is to survive, so she becomes a kind of she-man, a beautiful woman with invisible balls. In her personal? relationships, after sex with a man, she quite possibly fights the desire to eat him. For him, all the hims, the smell of a superstar is a strange and powerful reminder of who is wearing the trousers. It marks him as her territory. And this film, My Best Friend's Wedding, was her territory. But there was another embryonic superstar taking her first tentative steps. Cameron Diaz was the antithesis of Julia. She was gangly and exuberant, a tomboy with gazelle legs, and good in high heels, which Julia wasn't. She loved greasy burgers, didn't care that they made her spotty, and she wiped her hands on her jeans after she ate.

"Why can't Cameron relax around me? " Julia asked one day. Actually, Julia couldn't relax around Cameron. It requires a strong nerve for a superstar to take a part where she loses the guy to a younger girl.

When the movie hit $100 million at the box office I was summoned to meet the heads of all the studios. There is nothing like the headtrip when Hollywood's giant eye turns its attention on you. Walking through the hive of offices to the queen bee's headquarters was an intoxicating catwalk. Sitting down in an office, graciously accepting coffee and compliments, while being sized up, was enormous fun. I had two ideas. I wanted to make a gay James Bond story, and a comedy with Julia about a pair of superstars who were married, but he was gay. I sold them both.

The entire article is available in the current issue of marie claire.

Edited extract from Red Carpets And Other Banana Skins: The Autobiography by Rupert Everett (Little, Brown, $32.95).