Rupert Everett's real life is a career-best performance. The years may have vanished, but Everett sifted them as they went, and was left with a mixture of diamond-sharp insight, gritty cynicism and mud  for the purposes of slinging. His quirks, his mania, his delirious spiritual perspective  always a fusion of sacred and profane  all amp-up the drama.

Everett's previous book, Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins, described the thrills of achieving fame, after starring in the film Another Country in 1984 at the age of 25, and the spills occasioned by sustaining it into his 40s. The new book focuses on the pursuits  mainly in the last decade or so  of the mature superstar: celebrity charity work, high-profile journalism, and branching-out into TV in America. Famous friends  Isabella Blow, Nicky Haslam  are always present, but they do not hog the limelight, which falls intead on a witch from LA and Rupert's adorable father.

Vanished Years maintains a discreetly chronological structure, but it's designed to prioritise digression and recollection. In the opening chapter, for example, we flashback to a cinema trip with Brock, Elliot and Wynton (chums from boarding school) and a Rupert-defining incident. They were 14, and the idea had been to wank over a saucy film in a York cinema.

But the film is estrangingly hip  Performance, with Anita Pallenberg and Mick Jagger. In one paragraph alone Rupert is "spellbound" and "in shock"  "I completely forget about wanking." For Everett, the great divider is not money, not class, but aesthetics. Unlike him, the others "hated the film" (Elliot complained that he "only came once"). "Our friendships cool from this day on."

When Everett's tricksy wisdom and wit rub against the right subject matter, the product is no ordinary spark. Take the exorcism he undergoes at the hands of the witch in LA in order to ensure the success of his TV series. Corky is an ancient Cuban lady with a Hollywood bungalow, a cockatoo and a spirit guide called "the Gypsy"  ''The Yipsy is drivin' me crazy today. Oy, Roopi!'' She involves him in a "deranged" ritual. At its climax the co-witch, Miguelina, "emits a blood-curdling scream and is literally thrown across the room". "You gonna see," Corky assures Rupert. Of course "Nothing Happens".

Apart from these signs of suggestibility, Rupert's convictions are held in his guts. While he was filming The Celebrity Apprentice, it was ideological loathing (along with Tramadol and vodka) that caused him to vomit at the mention of Tony Blair's arrival at the studio: "I swallowed hard and raised my eyebrows. Luckily I could that month."

He is no coward. The threatened media-exposure of a tape showing him having sex with a man in a restaurant loo in LA results in madcap revenge. The offending journalist, who had previously brought cocaine shame on Britney Spears, lived "on the edge of a swamp". Rupert and his accomplice drive there to throw a cream cake at him  "this one's for Britney"  and hurtle off in their car. 

"Vanished years", from a poem by Noël Coward, suggests partied-out amnesia and the whoosh of time in the limelight. But for Everett the years are also a rosary of temps perdu, for thumbing over bead by bead: memories of (the other) Madonna "in the last days of her prime", or Liam Neeson and Natasha Richardson swooping by in a speedboat, the Manhattan skyline behind them. The once dazzling and now irretrievable  Everett's memories are a reminder that even superstars turn to dust. 

Equally poignant are his own regrets, the "conditioned" "post-coital remorse" that blighted, on a school pilgrimage to Lourdes, his lovemaking in the woods with a member of the cricket eleven. One memory in particular inspires excellent writing. In his early 20s, his young lover, Alfo, discovered and told Rupert he had HIV. They realise they are in love. Everett concentrates on the ordinary details, the bedside lamp with its "medium's shade with tassels", the "damp green walls" and the "traffic rumbling outside". 

These same poetic powers are employed in his account of Hollywood. Landing at a private airport with Tina Brown and entourage, through the fence "the forest smoulders with heat, livid and threatening" and "It feels for a moment, as we squawk and clatter to our cars  that nature actually hates us." They are "a line of killer ants in black dresses and patent-leather bags" while lyme ticks hang in the trees "scanning the horizon for a passing blood bag to infect".

The mystery within this mystery is why a man as intelligent as Everett wished to take part in these soul-dimming goings-on. To learn that Harvey Weinstein's "legendary tantrums  made it all worthwhile" is to be none the wiser. Everett's chief pleasure seems to be in the dangled opportunity: after scoring Richard Curtis's phone number  "Orgasm. Images of renewed Hollywood stardom burst across my brain."

But stardom unquestionably supplied Everett with people to observe, and his chief gift is for characterisation. Weinstein looks "like a giant old couch that had been left on the street", Isabella Blow's arrival was always preceded by "a weird movement in the air and a clattering outside followed by screams and a crash". Rupert's own granny at home was "Empire under siege, small, neat and vice-regal."

On a ferry to Lourdes with his ailing father in a wheelchair, he reflects, as the sun sets, that ''Byron must have watched it disappear thus, before dragging his bad foot below for a drink." Perhaps it takes wisdom to be this silly. And it surely takes wisdom to be this wry in the face of disillusionment: "I am not built for excessive wealth. (Too tall)."

Everett is not only a good raconteur, he has musicality  he knows how and precisely when to turn elegy to jazz with a roguish blue-note of bathos. It is a tragical, comical, ironical Broadway-hit-show of a life. 

As sexist old Samuel Johnson said of a woman preaching, when an actor writes a book "it is not well done, but you are surprised to find it done at all". These are adults who spend their whole lives raiding dressing up boxes and speaking the words of others for a living, after all. Rupert Everett, like Richard E Grant and Kathy Burke, is the exception that proves the rule; he really can write, as his 2006 bestseller Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins  which took a bejewelled hatpin to the blow-up egos of co-stars Madonna and Sharon Stone, among others  proved. But despite reviews that, above the sound of easily impressed critics noisily wetting themselves, could be heard comparing him to Evelyn Waugh, Noël Coward and Lord Byron, the question of whether he is basically one of Mother Nature's plus ones  at his best when tittle-tattling on his famous mates  or a force to be reckoned with in his own right remained undecided.

The cover of this new memoir  a soft-focus I-am-beautiful-in-my-suffering shot  could easily be a CD sleeve of the follow-up to his 1987 record Generation of Loneliness. (One of Everett's sidelines, having failed at his own musical career, has been as the camp, carping Zelig of many a pop star, from Bob Dylan to Robbie Williams.) The theme of wasted youth and squandered promise is prominent from the prologue  as is the name-dropping. Wandering in Jamaica, characteristically "searching for a reasonable excuse not to start work on the book I am writing", Everett comes across a "slightly chavvy", "slightly disorientated ...little sparrow" in "Uggs and a tracksuit... at least 60 her face is deeply lined", who looks as if she might have been sleeping rough, trawling for codeine because "morphine doesn't agree" with her. They get talking, and she reminds him of someone. Her name is Anita. "Later, I am sitting in the empty bar of the hotel nursing a second rum punch something clicks in my head. 'Anita Pallenberg,' I say out loud. Someone is walking on my grave."

Everett, like the best fashion models, cottoned on early that appearing to be mean, moody and magnificent butters a lot more parsnips than being a grinning fool, so you do wonder how much of this putting on the agony is done for effect. At times he comes across as a beautifully groomed Private Frazer from Dad's Army ("Doomed, doomed, we're all doomed!") and at others like Kenneth Williams as Caesar in Carry On Cleo ("Infamy, infamy, they've all got it in for me!"). Still, becoming aware of sex while confined to a Catholic boarding school can hardly have been a day at the beach.

There's some gorgeous stuff here. In Everett's dressing room, Richard Curtis congratulates John Maybury on his film Love Is the Devil. Maybury, "drunker than the rest of us", replies: "Why, thank you, Richard. But look at your own achievements. You have single-handedly destroyed the British cinema." A brilliant sketch of Everett's doomed stint on Celebrity Apprentice finds his team-mate Alastair Campbell "big, badly dressed and sexy, and his sad eyes looked medicated... a big knobbly nose that was made for aggression or at least cunnilingus". Simon Schama is "one of those peculiar fey straights, a male lesbian, more dangerous even than the lesbian herself (when riled)".

Intermittently, as if fearing that we're having too much fun for it to be doing us any good, Everett keeps referring back to the stuff of Eng lit proper; grandmothers, churches, second cousin Sylvia, shrimping nets and Brancaster beach. It's still very good: "'You were such a solitary child,' Granny says dreamily. 'Very quiet. You always played alone. You hated birthday parties. Now I read in Hello! that you're the life and soul of every party. What happened?' 'Life,' I reply. 'Life changes one.' She looks at me with a faint smile and shrewd eyes. I know what she's thinking. Life, including two wars, never changed anyone else in her family." But the reader is by this time so hopped-up on cheap thrills that the wistful episodes of the book feel like skippable opportunities to catch one's breath for the next round of hissing'n'dissing.

And here it comes again: "He was also Richard Gere's lawyer, so our conversation couldn't have been any more awkward than the one he must have had with the great Botty-sattva himself, inquiring whether that gentleman had ever had intimate relations with a gerbil." Madonna "hobbles home after about half an hour, to wrap herself in clingfilm for another sleepless night plotting... she probably sets a time limit on everything, including orgasm".

Everett's malice comes with a twist of self-loathing that makes you admire rather than pity him  it seems appropriate, considering the contortions he performs in order to tread water in the shallow end. At one point he finds himself at a Tina Brown party acting as dumb waiter to Henry Kissinger: "With success comes compromise, and it's amazingly easy to forget two million massacred Cambodians as one is passing round the cheese straws."

The English gossip magazines are now very dull because no one wants to offend the A-listers who may refuse interviews in the future. Instead, they concern themselves with the antics of reality stars who measure their press rather than read it. But paradoxically, Everett is fearless when gossiping about A-listers in a book because he wants nothing from them  indeed, he might even see their shunning as a side benefit. Whatever, his loss is our gain  because, yes, seer or sidekick, most of all he is just a very good writer indeed.

As sexist old Samuel Johnson said of a woman preaching, when an actor writes a book "it is not well done, but you are surprised to find it done at all". These are adults who spend their whole lives raiding dressing up boxes and speaking the words of others for a living, after all. Rupert Everett, like Richard E Grant and Kathy Burke, is the exception that proves the rule; he really can write, as his 2006 bestseller Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins  which took a bejewelled hatpin to the blow-up egos of co-stars Madonna and Sharon Stone, among others  proved. But despite reviews that, above the sound of easily impressed critics noisily wetting themselves, could be heard comparing him to Evelyn Waugh, Noël Coward and Lord Byron, the question of whether he is basically one of Mother Nature's plus ones  at his best when tittle-tattling on his famous mates  or a force to be reckoned with in his own right remained undecided.

The cover of this new memoir  a soft-focus I-am-beautiful-in-my-suffering shot  could easily be a CD sleeve of the follow-up to his 1987 record Generation of Loneliness. (One of Everett's sidelines, having failed at his own musical career, has been as the camp, carping Zelig of many a pop star, from Bob Dylan to Robbie Williams.) The theme of wasted youth and squandered promise is prominent from the prologue  as is the name-dropping. Wandering in Jamaica, characteristically "searching for a reasonable excuse not to start work on the book I am writing", Everett comes across a "slightly chavvy", "slightly disorientated ...little sparrow" in "Uggs and a tracksuit... at least 60 her face is deeply lined", who looks as if she might have been sleeping rough, trawling for codeine because "morphine doesn't agree" with her. They get talking, and she reminds him of someone. Her name is Anita. "Later, I am sitting in the empty bar of the hotel nursing a second rum punch something clicks in my head. 'Anita Pallenberg,' I say out loud. Someone is walking on my grave."

Everett, like the best fashion models, cottoned on early that appearing to be mean, moody and magnificent butters a lot more parsnips than being a grinning fool, so you do wonder how much of this putting on the agony is done for effect. At times he comes across as a beautifully groomed Private Frazer from Dad's Army ("Doomed, doomed, we're all doomed!") and at others like Kenneth Williams as Caesar in Carry On Cleo ("Infamy, infamy, they've all got it in for me!"). Still, becoming aware of sex while confined to a Catholic boarding school can hardly have been a day at the beach.

There's some gorgeous stuff here. In Everett's dressing room, Richard Curtis congratulates John Maybury on his film Love Is the Devil. Maybury, "drunker than the rest of us", replies: "Why, thank you, Richard. But look at your own achievements. You have single-handedly destroyed the British cinema." A brilliant sketch of Everett's doomed stint on Celebrity Apprentice finds his team-mate Alastair Campbell "big, badly dressed and sexy, and his sad eyes looked medicated... a big knobbly nose that was made for aggression or at least cunnilingus". Simon Schama is "one of those peculiar fey straights, a male lesbian, more dangerous even than the lesbian herself (when riled)".

Intermittently, as if fearing that we're having too much fun for it to be doing us any good, Everett keeps referring back to the stuff of Eng lit proper; grandmothers, churches, second cousin Sylvia, shrimping nets and Brancaster beach. It's still very good: "'You were such a solitary child,' Granny says dreamily. 'Very quiet. You always played alone. You hated birthday parties. Now I read in Hello! that you're the life and soul of every party. What happened?' 'Life,' I reply. 'Life changes one.' She looks at me with a faint smile and shrewd eyes. I know what she's thinking. Life, including two wars, never changed anyone else in her family." But the reader is by this time so hopped-up on cheap thrills that the wistful episodes of the book feel like skippable opportunities to catch one's breath for the next round of hissing'n'dissing.

And here it comes again: "He was also Richard Gere's lawyer, so our conversation couldn't have been any more awkward than the one he must have had with the great Botty-sattva himself, inquiring whether that gentleman had ever had intimate relations with a gerbil." Madonna "hobbles home after about half an hour, to wrap herself in clingfilm for another sleepless night plotting... she probably sets a time limit on everything, including orgasm".

Everett's malice comes with a twist of self-loathing that makes you admire rather than pity him  it seems appropriate, considering the contortions he performs in order to tread water in the shallow end. At one point he finds himself at a Tina Brown party acting as dumb waiter to Henry Kissinger: "With success comes compromise, and it's amazingly easy to forget two million massacred Cambodians as one is passing round the cheese straws."

The English gossip magazines are now very dull because no one wants to offend the A-listers who may refuse interviews in the future. Instead, they concern themselves with the antics of reality stars who measure their press rather than read it. But paradoxically, Everett is fearless when gossiping about A-listers in a book because he wants nothing from them  indeed, he might even see their shunning as a side benefit. Whatever, his loss is our gain  because, yes, seer or sidekick, most of all he is just a very good writer indeed.