Bette Bourne is between a Rock and hard place

There's a scene in City of Night, John Rechy's landmark gay novel, in which the narrator surveys the graffiti on a lavatory wall. Beneath the obscene drawings and offers of sexual favours are the words: “In the beginning God created fairies and they created men.”
If ever there was a fairy who lived up to this claim, it was Henry Willson. The so-called Fairy Godfather of Tinseltown, Willson was the Hollywood agent who created Rock Hudson. Now his tale is being told in a new play, Rock, written by Tim Fountain and starring Bette Bourne (pictured) as Willson.
For Bourne, it's a gay Pygmalion. “My character turns this gasoline attendant into the highest paid movie star on the planet. He takes a callow youth and turns him into Rock Hudson, who was the perfect, ideal man - or so everyone thought.”
Hudson's screen image was rarely straightforward, whether he was doing comedy in Pillow Talk or trying to disguise the ravages of Aids in Dynasty. But Bourne suggests that his manly screen image was weakened after he starred in Giant with James Dean in 1956.
“In that film was the person who ruined men like Rock Hudson,” Bourne says, “because from that point forward everyone wanted the boy who needed looking after. We wanted to nurse and cuddle James Dean, whereas previously we'd wanted men like Rock to do the nursing and the cuddling.”
This isn't the first time that Bourne and Fountain have worked together. A decade ago he earned critical plaudits for his role as Quentin Crisp in Fountain's one-man play Resident Alien. “It was 1999, the year of Quentin's death,” Bourne remembers. “In fact, Quentin died on the night of the tenth performance at the Bush. He was a sweetheart. We got along very well.”
Like Crisp, Bourne is a “stately homo” who has enjoyed an unusual career. In the 1960s he studied at the Central School of Speech and Drama and performed on the West End stage under his given name, Peter Bourne. In 1969 he toured with Ian McKellen in a double bill of Edward II and Richard II. A year later he came out - and not just as any old theatre queen but as a radical drag queen.
He turned his back on straight theatre and joined a drag commune in Notting Hill. In 1976 he saw a performance by the New York gay cabaret troupe Hot Peaches. He toured with them that summer and a year later formed his own cabaret troupe, Bloolips. The company specialised in madcap celebrations of “queerness” - part pantomime, part sexual politics, all singing and all dancing. They continued for the best part of 20 years, producing fun-filled, pun-filled shows with titles such as Lust in Space, Get Hur and Living Leg Ends. The company finally disbanded in the early 1990s.
“I'm not a career person,” Bourne says. “I never had a plan. I just bob along like a buoy on the ocean, bumping into whatever comes my way.”
Still, he hasn't done too badly for himself. The last time we met was in his dressing room at the RSC, where he was playing Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing (he had previously played the part of the nurse in Romeo and Juliet). The day after this interview he was off to Paris to shoot scenes with Michelle Pfeiffer for the new Stephen Frears film of Colette's Chéri. “I loved his film My Beautiful Laundrette,” he says, “and the fact that those two actors didn't signal to us that they weren't really queer.”
My Beautiful Laundrette was released in 1985, the year that Rock Hudson died. Much has changed since then, but there are still no openly gay leading men in Hollywood. “Most of the people who are out now are what we used to call character actors,” Bourne says.
What about his role in Chéri? “I play a sort of old harridan queen who makes poisonous remarks.” How on earth will he get into character, I ask? He fixes me with a regal stare. “I never think differently about the way I approach characters,” he says grandly. “Whether they are based on real people or totally fictional, I always aim for the truth.”