Rupert James Hector Everett (born 29 May 1959) is an English actor and singer. He first came to public attention in the early 1980s, when he was cast in Julian Mitchell's play and subsequent film Another Country as an openly homosexual student at an English public school, set in the 1930s. Since then he has subsequently appeared in many other films including My Best Friend's Wedding, An Ideal Husband, The Next Best Thing and the Shrek sequels. He currently lives in London.

Everett was born and brought up in Norfolk, England to Sara (née MacLean, 19 September 1934 - ) and Major Anthony Michael Everett, who worked in business and served in the British Army. Through his maternal grandparents, Lady Opre Vyvyan and Vice Admiral Sir Hector Charles Donald MacLean, he is a descendant of the baronets Vyvyan of Trelowarren and the German Schmiedern barons, as well as a great-nephew of Donald Duart Maclean, the Soviet double agent, and a great-grandson of the Liberal politician Sir Donald Maclean, who was leader of the parliamentary opposition in the years following the First World War. He has an older brother, Simon Anthony Cunningham Everett (b. 1956).

From the age of seven he was educated at Farleigh School, Hampshire, and later was educated by Benedictine monks at Ampleforth College, Yorkshire, but he left school at 15 and ran away to London to become an actor. In order to support himself, he worked as a male prostitute, or "rent boy", for drugs and money as he later admitted to US magazine in 1997. After being dismissed from the Central School of Speech and Drama for insubordination, he travelled to Scotland and got a job at the Citizens' Theatre in Glasgow.