Actor Rupert Everett has apologised for calling British soldiers "wimps" and suggesting they joined the army to torture prisoners.
The 49-year-old yesterday issued a lengthy statement apologising "without reserve" to the "many in this country, and hundreds and thousands of others across the world who have lost their brothers and sisters,
their fathers and mothers to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and all the countless others," Britain's Telegraph newspaper reported today.
The apology came after he said during an interview to promote his new film The Victorian Sex Explorer - in which he plays the renowned explorer Sir Richard Burton: "In Burton's day they were itching to get into the fray.
"Now it is the opposite. They are always whining about the dangers of being killed. Oh my God, they are such wimps now!
"The whole point of being in the Army is wanting to get killed, wanting to test yourself to the limits," he said in the interview published in The Sunday Telegraph.
"Now you have to fly 15,000ft above the war zone to avoid getting hit. I don't think there is any point in having wars if that's how you're going to behave. It's pathetic. All this whining!
"The whole point of being in the Army is going to war and getting yourself blown up. That and p***ing on prisoners. Yet we all get shocked by Abu Ghraib."
In his apology, he explained he made his remarks to compare war now to war in Victorian times, saying: "I compared his longing to get into battle to the way we engage in war today. Then death was glorious.
Today it is what it really is. Each and every death is a terrible tragic loss."
He said the point he was making was that while in Burton's day war was portrayed as "romantic or exciting", it actually "creates terrible suffering everywhere, and today we go into it with our eyes open,"
The Telegraph report said.
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