Rupert Everett

Rupert Everett arrived more or less fully formed in 1981, cast in Julian Mitchell's play Another Country as a gay pupil at a 1930s English public school, then again in the 1984 film, which earned his first BAFTA nomination. He was patrician, drily funny and openly gay at a point when that was a career decision rather than a fact, and the following decade gave him a glamorous, uneven run: Dance with a Stranger, The Comfort of Strangers, and an Italian horror comedy in which he plays a cemetery caretaker with a philosophical problem.

Hollywood found him properly in 1997 with My Best Friend's Wedding, which brought a second BAFTA nomination and his first Golden Globe nomination, and did it by casting him as the friend rather than the lover. He was extremely good at it. The line readings land a beat late and slightly bored, and the effect is that he seems to be the only adult in a film full of people behaving badly. An Ideal Husband followed in 1999, and a second Globe nomination with it.

Wilde has been the constant. He played Algernon in The Importance of Being Earnest, took a Golden Globe nomination for An Ideal Husband, and eventually wrote and directed The Happy Prince, in which he plays Wilde himself in exile. Around all of that he voiced Prince Charming in two Shrek films, which is probably the performance most people under thirty know him by, and kept turning up in strong supporting parts: Christopher Marlowe in Shakespeare in Love, Wellington in Ridley Scott's Napoleon.