latimes.com – “Sorry for the delay,” Taron Egerton says, putting his iPhone down on a table. “I can literally say that I had to take a call from Elton John.”

Little more than 12 hours have passed since the lights came up inside the Cannes Film Festival’s grandest theater, revealing the actor and the iconic musician he plays in “Rocketman” both in tears. The crowd around them rose to its feet as the two embraced, quietly sobbing into the other’s shoulder. Then they migrated down the Croisette to a party on the beach, where the 29-year-old and the 72-year-old duetted together for hundreds of guests standing in their black-tie attire on the sand.

“It was just the perfect day,” Egerton says — one of the best of his young life. But he started it off anxious, walking into the Grand Théâtre Lumière with his breath high in his chest. He couldn’t relax for the first 45 minutes of the film, seated beside John as the performer faced depictions of emotionally turbulent years filled with parental neglect, sexual confusion and substance abuse.

“He only saw it for the first time yesterday, which is why I think he was so profoundly moved,” Egerton recalls. “He’s lived a life less ordinary, but it’s not been an easy life, I don’t think. So to see him, frankly, relive some of that and have such an acute emotional reaction? It’s an emotional thing for me.”

Flaunt.Com – There are few players in this insubstantial pageantry we call life who touch the masses on such a grandiose and glittering scale that they can genuinely be referred to as an icon, and of those very few, only a handful channel the universal language of love. Elton John, however, is one such rare player in the theatre of the modern era—a man who in his own words “Always felt like an outsider,” but whose music has touched millions of lives on such a profound level that it often provides an emotive soundtrack to the most important landmarks on countless individual journeys to the grave. The self-styled piano player, born Reginald Dwight to working-class parentage in post-WWII London, is arguably nothing less than a bona-fide musical phenomenon—a man whose ear for melody must surely harness some intangible truth of the human experience, in that his work transcends societal differences of every imaginable kind, and is loved by people all over the world.

It’s precisely such notions that I have in mind while waiting for the young man who has taken on the mantle of playing the legendary musician in the much-anticipated biopic Rocketman— another product of the British working-class, who was catapulted to his own fame via the multi-million dollar Kingsman franchise, actor Taron Egerton. We are due to meet in West London in the shadow of the iconic BBC Television Centre, which must have played host to Elton John countless times in his career, not least on the early ’70s show Sounds For Saturday. But it seems almost trite to try to give a brief summation of the pre-eminence Elton John has achieved in a sometimes wildly hedonistic trajectory that spans some 50-plus years. Suffice to say, he has sold over 300 million records, with his writing partner Bernie Taupin, and that’s damn near the figure for the current population of The United States. It seems that whatever level of fame Egerton has become accustomed to thus far is insufficient to preparehim for what’s to come. In fact, when he suddenly appears and introduces himself with a firm handshake and smile, he couldn’t look more innocuous, sporting the kind of dressed-to-blend attire that you might not readily expect from someone dubbed by British GQ as one of the Best Dressed Welshmen of all time, but it’s crystal clear after five minutes of talking to him, that such dubious mainstream accolades are unlikely to ever go to his head.