He has lived the wild life in Hollywood and New York, partied with Madonna, hung out with Andy Warhol, and sniffed poppers with Hardy Amies but Rupert Everett’s next chapter promises to be more sedate: he’s moving in with his mum.

“It’s done, I’m there,” the actor told Hay literary festival in Wales. “It’s very peculiar, I’m not sure if it’s a wonderful thing, or a tragic thing yet.

“You spend so much energy getting away from home, but there’s something about age … you feel dragged back to the beaches of youth. I don’t know how it’s going to work out.”

Everett visited Hay to talk about his film The Happy Prince, in which he plays Oscar Wilde. Written, directed, produced by and even starring him, it has taken Everett 10 years to get the financial backing to finally get it made.

He admitted his career had been characterised by dramatic highs and lows but he would not have it any other way. “Everything good that has happened to me has happened because of failure in a way.”

Everett said he had four years of fame and success in Hollywood starring in films including My Best Friend’s Wedding in 1997. But being an openly gay actor meant it was tough and there was never an option of hiding his sexuality because he enjoyed being out on the gay scene too much.

“It was impossible to do anything else but play the gay best friend... and after a couple of gay best friends what can you do? People get bored with it. We have in Hollywood a world where straight people can play gay parts but a gay person does not have the same access to play straight parts.

“Once I tried to move on from playing those parts, I was thwarted every time, sometimes quite dramatically. It was like hitting a brick wall.”

He said things were changing but not fast enough. “In Germany, a fairly liberal country, there is not a single gay actor who is out. Not much in Italy, not much in France so I think it is still an issue.”

Moving in his with his mother, a redoubtable figure in her 80s, is his next project. The house in Wiltshire has been split between them. “It is in the countryside, I’m going to be able to work and write and do some other projects.”

Everett, who’s turning 59 on Tuesday, predicted: “There are going to be quite a few ‘star wars’ between us.”

His Oscar Wilde film has been screened at film festivals and garnered good reviews with the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw writing: “It is a part he was born to play, and he does it with exactly the right kind of poignantly ruined magnificence.”

He has speaking in Hay with the BBC’s Alan Yentob, who spent five years making an Imagine documentary on the 10 years it took Everett to make his passion project film.

Everett said it could not have been made without financial backers knowing that Colin Firth would be in it.

He first met Firth as a young man seeing him on stage and having a complete crush. They appeared together in the 1984 film Another Country where Everett went off him.

“I found him incredibly dreary, I thought I can’t believe I fell in love with this bore!” They fell out but, fortunately, became friends 10 years later on the set of Shakespeare in Love.