It’s taken me a long time to watch Marek Kanievska’s Another Country because the thought of Soviet spies didn’t exactly fill me with excitement. It turned out to be a red herring. The film opens with Rupert Everett as Guy Bennett (think Guy Burgess), a wheelchair user in his drab Moscow apartment, who reflects on his schooldays at a 1930s English public school.

“It was delightful, utterly despicable.”

I’d forgotten how incredibly handsome Everett, Colin Firth and Cary Elwes as young chickens were. Well, it’s a gay movie and gloom pervades throughout. The agonies of homosexual love and the even greater agonies of being played with by the power structure.

Afterwards, Everett, flushed with anarchy, and a former public schoolboy himself, looks to have blurred his character with real life. A bit of a nightmare then, but I admire him for it. (I think that Everett is a brilliant memoirist – read his books).

When the film was released in 1984, an American newspaper queried why the biggest question hadn’t been answered. How did the lanky, dishevelled Bennett move from a witty and irreverent schoolboy to become a Soviet spy? We never did find out.

A good film, beautifully shot, if not a bit pedestrian at times.

And so, to the sad story of Frederick Alexander (aged 22), a close friend of Everett, who played Jim Menzies, but was really called Piers Flint-Shipman.

He and Everett were the only members of the original stage cast to appear in the film. “A much subtler and better actor that people at first gave him credit for. Wonderfully arrogant. Great dash and élan. One of the few people who could keep Rupert in order,” said its writer, Julian Mitchell. 

In June 1984, while travelling back from France to attend the preview-cum-premiere of Another Country he was killed when a suicidal driver turned into his oncoming car. He would never grow old like Everett, Firth and Elwes.

And a recent anecdote.

Charles Spencer, 9th Earl Spencer, brother of Diana, Princess of Wales, was a young extra when it was filmed in Oxford, Northamptonshire and London in 1983.

“I bumped into Colin Firth – whose first film this also was – when he was promoting The King’s Speech, and said: ‘Colin, you won’t remember me – but we took a shower together in Another Country’.

“Of course I remember!”, he laughed: “You have fantastic buttocks!”

“Had, I’m afraid”, I replied: “not have…”