And it begins, naturally enough, with a naked transgender woman with sparks flying out of her vagina. And the story of how I ended up in a cinema, crying my eyes out at the sight of my family 60 years ago, is a long and convoluted one. And my childhood is one thing I’m still sensitive about.Įven if I hadn’t been, the whole experience of watching someone else pretend to be you on screen, of seeing things you remember happening again in front of your eyes, is a very weird, disconcerting one, like having an incredibly vivid dream. I was closer to Mum than Dad, but there were long periods when we didn’t speak. They divorced when I was 13, both remarried, which I was happy about, although my relationship with both of them was always tricky. The best way to escape it was to shut myself in my bedroom with my record collection and my comics, and drift off into an imaginary world, fantasising that I was Little Richard or Ray Charles or Jerry Lee Lewis. I got the feeling they were staying together because of me, which just made things more miserable. My dad was in the RAF so he was away from home a lot, and when he got back, he tried to impose new rules about everything: how I ate, how I dressed. Hot seat: Taron Egerton, Elton John and David Furnish on the set of Rocketman. The rows were usually about me, how I was being brought up. When they were together, all I can remember are icy silences or screaming rows. My dad was strict and remote and had a terrible temper my mum was argumentative and prone to dark moods. They gave every impression of hating each other. I suppose my mum and dad must have been in love once, but there wasn’t much sign they ever had been by the time I came along. But it fitted life in Pinner Hill Road perfectly.
I Want Love is a song Bernie wrote, I think, about himself: a middle-aged man with a few divorces, wondering if he’s ever going to fall in love again. So I wasn’t prepared for the power of what I was seeing. I figured it would be uncomfortable for everyone to have the person the film was about lurking around. But otherwise I’d kept well away from Rocketman, letting my husband David be my eyes and ears on set every day. I gave some suggestions, saw a few daily rushes, said yay or nay to some important decisions and met two or three times with Taron Egerton, who plays me.
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Up until that point, I’d kept a discrete distance from the actual process of making a movie about my life. I knew it was in the film, but I didn’t know how they were going to use it. I was watching my family – my mum and dad, my nan – in my nan’s old council house in Pinner Hill Road in the late 1950s, singing I Want Love, a song Bernie Taupin and I had written in 2001. Not crying as in the occasional tear quietly trickling down my cheek: really sobbing, in that loud, unguarded, emotionally destroyed way that makes people turn around and look at you with alarmed expressions. I was in the cinema for about 15 minutes before I started crying.