Rupert Everett - Rupert Everett Lived In Terror Over Aids Fear

Actor Rupert Everett lived in "absolute terror" of contracting Aids for years after several of his partners died from the disease.

The My Best Friend's Wedding star, who is openly gay, admits he spent much of the 1980s worrying he had contracted the sexually transmitted disease because of his promiscuity.

Everett tells Britain's Guardian Weekend magazine he even had a meltdown once after mistaking a red mosquito bite for an HIV-associated lesion.

He says, "Having been such a s**g and a s**t in the 1970s, then Aids came along and I spent six years in sheer terror... That was part of my landscape then, this terror that was always there. Nearly everyone I slept with was dying, you couldn't test until about 1986, and that was really the big period of my life.

"That's what all queens went through who'd been in those days beforehand, when everyone f**ked everyone just as a matter of course... Terror makes you behave very strangely. People have forgotten about that. It was absolute terror."

Everett also blames his health fears for causing him to throw tantrums at work, adding, "Living like that, if something niggled you, you could explode and be really difficult."