Blowing the Bloody Doors Off Page 4

  “Look Back in Anger,” he replied.

  “I’m writing a play as well,” said our other friend, an actor called David Baron. “And you can be in it, Michael. Only I’m not going to write it under my acting name. I’m going to use my real name.”

  “What’s that, David?”

  “Harold Pinter.”

  “Well, good luck to both of you,” I said. I didn’t hold out much hope for either of them.

  As a child and a young man, I hadn’t seen a single British film about the working class, or about private soldiers. Although I didn’t really go to the theatre, there were no plays about the working class either. At that time, the only working-class British actor who had ever made it in Hollywood was Charlie Chaplin. And how had he done it? He was lucky enough to be around in the days of silent films when it didn’t matter what you sounded like. Oh, and Cary Grant: but he had a Bristol accent and somehow, because it sounded quite American, that worked too. Also not to be forgotten, just a few years younger than me, there was Richard Burton. He was as genuinely working-class as you could get: the twelfth of thirteen children, son of a Welsh coal miner, his mother died when he was just two years old. Richard broke through, all right, thanks to talent, hard work and, of course, some great pieces of luck, but he had to transform himself into a great classical orating theatre actor, like Olivier or Gielgud, to do it.

  But in the late 1950s and the 1960s (the 1960s really started in the late 1950s), writers were writing plays and films about the working class: pieces like John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey and Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning that collectively became known as kitchen-sink dramas, and Harold Pinter’s works, including The Room, with, as promised, a part for me, and his better-known later plays, The Birthday Party and The Caretaker. A cohort of (male) working-class actors—people like Roger Moore, Sean Connery, Peter O’Toole and me—found enough interesting parts to break through.

  Until the 1960s, movie stars had to be superior, distant and unreachable. In the 1960s, we had to be the opposite: the audience had to believe that if they happened to meet Roger, Sean or me in the pub, we would buy them a pint and we’d have a good laugh. In the 1960s, the working class stopped being invisible and pitiable and became cool and modern. That suited me much better.

  So I was lucky. And “be lucky” is, I realise, not that useful as a life lesson. But I’ve heard it said that luck favours the prepared and I believe it.

  So be prepared. And I always was. For me that meant, specifically, knowing my lines. Know your lines until you could come out of unconsciousness and say them, until saying them is no harder than reciting the alphabet or counting to ten. Could you say your lines while half your brain is doing something else, like cooking an omelette or packing a suitcase, or chasing someone down the street? If not, you’re unlikely to be able to get them out at your audition, when half your mind will be frozen with nerves and the other half trying to register the names of the people who have just introduced themselves to you.

  And don’t say them in your head or mouth them silently. (This is an acting tip I picked up from the great theatre and screen actor Laurence Olivier.) If there’s a tongue-twister in there, or a combination of consonants you find difficult, you won’t find it unless you say the lines out loud. Ever had that feeling where the sound of your own voice takes you by surprise, and seems unreal, unconvincing? Don’t let that happen in an audition, an interview, a date, a sales pitch. Practise until it sounds natural. Practise until it is natural. If you can’t convince yourself, how are you going to convince anyone else?

  Don’t look in the mirror, though. That’s only a useful preparation if you’re going to be playing identical twins. I don’t like having someone else read the other part to me either. I like to keep the dialogue fresh enough so that when I hear the lines in the audition I can react to them as though I’m hearing them said for the first time, the way you would in a real conversation. But I do familiarise myself with those lines because they provide the logic behind what my character is saying and thinking.

  And think of all those auditions when you didn’t get called back and all those walk-on parts (or the job interviews or client pitches where they decided to go another way, or the first dates that went nowhere) not as failures but as part of your preparation. Because luck favours the focused, the hard grafters and the rubber-ball resilient. Most of my luck happened when someone saw me playing one role and offered me another: maybe slightly bigger or slightly better.

  A lot had to go right for me to get that part in Zulu. The movie producer Stanley Baker had to spot me in the theatre. He had to remember me from my eight-line part in A Hill in Korea (a part I’d only got thanks to my experience in Korea: I was also supposed to be a “technical adviser,” although no one ever took a blind bit of notice of anything I said). The part he wanted me for had to go to someone else. I had to be able to do a posh English accent. The director had to be American: no English director would have considered me to play the part of an officer—not through malice; it was just the class-based way everyone thought. The bar had to be long enough and I had to walk back down it with some semblance of dignity. Luck? Or preparation, focus, hard work and resilience?

  A different series of things had to go right for me to get the lead in Alfie. First, Bill Naughton had to write this part of a lifetime for a young working-class British actor: a cheeky, charming, irresponsible and ultimately rather sad and lonely lad-about-town. (And let me put something to rest once and for all: I am not Alfie. We were both Cockney lads and we both like women but that is where the similarities end. How he treats women is the exact opposite of how I would treat a woman. That wasn’t me: that was acting.)

  Then, once the (not-so-successful) play got made into a film, half a dozen people had to turn the part down. Terence Stamp was offered it first, but he had played the part on Broadway, and although he had been great, the play had flopped. He turned it down. Then Anthony Newley, James Booth and Laurence Harvey turned it down. Eventually Jonny Gilbert, the son of the director Lewis Gilbert, suggested me. A brilliant example of a friend who had my back, by the way. Lewis didn’t really know who I was but Jonny took him to see me as Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File, my first lead role in a movie. That was how I got cast in Alfie, which was an enormous hit in Britain and Europe, got me my first Academy Award nomination, and was the first of my films to get a release in the United States. (This required me to redo 124 lines of dialogue. The Americans would never have understood my Cockney accent, a point that my American co-star Shelley Winters confirmed to me. She told me she hadn’t understood a word I’d said during the shoot and had resorted to watching my lips to know when to come in.) Yes, a lot of luck, but I like to think that wasn’t the whole story.

  I have also come to understand that my other enormous piece of good luck during these early years was that, while I had a lot of truly terrible and mortifying auditions, I was never put in the humiliating, frightening position of being asked for, or even forced into, sex in return for a part. There was no casting couch for me, no sexual negotiation, no harassment. No one ever even approached me, and I was always treated with respect. It used to go a bit quiet when I took my trousers off in the communal men’s dressing room in the repertory theatre at Horsham, but that was the extent of it.

  I always knew (or thought I knew) about the “casting couch” but, to my regret and shame, I never thought too hard about it. My own battle was against a certain snobbery about my background and my accent, but I never had to think about the ugly kinds of battles others were fighting. I think, on reflection, I got the long straw. And I hope for the sake of today’s young people, trying to make their way in the world, that both the snobbery of the 1950s and the sexual power plays of more recent times can be consigned permanently to the past.

  3.

  Using the Difficulty

  “We only ever told each other the good things.”

  Youth, 20
15

  THERE CAME A POINT, somewhere between Zulu and Alfie, where I didn’t have to audition any more. But if you think this all sounds easy, or like I had a gilded path to success, then that’s just the way I told it. It wasn’t and I didn’t. Those first years of my career were brutal.

  After a few happy months playing small parts and making the tea in Horsham Rep, I collapsed on stage during a Saturday matinee performance of Wuthering Heights and was diagnosed with a rare form of cerebral malaria, a parting gift from the Korean mosquitoes. By the time I had recovered, several weeks later, forty pounds lighter, my face tinged yellow, I would only have been good for horror plays, but it didn’t matter: the company had folded.

  I headed back to Solosy’s, found a new job as juvenile lead in rep in Lowestoft and, way too young at twenty-two, married the female lead, a beautiful and talented actress called Patricia Haines. We had met just a few weeks earlier. What can I say? Lowestoft is a romantic city. I was desperately in love but much too immature for the responsibility, and the marriage was a disaster from the outset. We left Lowestoft for a small flat in Brixton, where we both struggled to find acting work, and argued about how to support ourselves. I eventually took on a series of soul-destroying menial jobs while Patricia pursued her acting career.

  Meanwhile my heart was breaking in a different way, watching my father, who was only fifty-five, fading away in agony from liver cancer. These were tough years, and by the time Patricia’s and my daughter Dominique was born, our marriage was all but broken. My beautiful child was just eight months old when I walked out. Pat took Dominique back to her parents in Sheffield, who took on the job of raising her (and did a superb job). My sense of guilt, inadequacy and desperation was intense. I moved back to the prefab with Mum and came very close to a breakdown.

  I was always on the edge of destitution. Here’s the list of dead-end jobs I worked: I washed dishes, I worked in a steeIyard, I packed laundry, I worked pneumatic drills on the roads and I was a night porter for a very dodgy hotel catering to a lot of couples called Smith in Victoria. In my worst moments I went on the dole (the last time, Sean Connery was two guys in front of me in the queue). I owed small sums of money all over London and often had to dash across the street to avoid my creditors. I came perilously close to going to jail for getting behind with my maintenance payments for Dominique. The whole time I was going to auditions.

  At one point, my agent, Pat Larthe, unwittingly nearly finished me off when she secured an interview for me with the chief casting director of Associated British Pictures, which was then one of the biggest movie companies in Britain and, like the Hollywood studios of the time, kept a number of actors under contract. Robert Lennard was a man with the power to solve my financial problems and make my career in one stroke, and his pleasant fatherly manner made what he had to say all the more devastating. He told me it was a tough business, which I knew. He told me he had a son who looked like me, which I didn’t know. Then he said, “My son is an accountant and he has more chance of success in this business than you do.” I sat there numb but smiling. He went on, “I’ve got to be frank with you, Michael, I know this business well and you have no future in it at all. Give it up, Michael.” I kept smiling through my fury, thanked him for his advice and walked out more determined than ever to succeed.

  I took to hanging around a casting agency just off Trafalgar Square, waiting to see if I could get the odd walk-on part—play, TV, film, whatever I could get. It was the kind of place where if you fitted the policeman’s uniform the film company had in its wardrobe, you got the part. It was crushingly soul-sapping.

  In summary, there were more knockbacks than call-backs. More knockbacks than you could shake a stick at. And the thing is, I was not particularly unlucky. My friends were in similar positions, or worse. My oldest and dearest childhood friend Paul Challen, who had grown up in an orphanage and never been strong in the first place, had his acting career cut short when he succumbed to tuberculosis. Two good friends, Jonny Charlesworth and Peter Myers, committed suicide, unable to cope with the financial and emotional toll of the constant rejection. The other people hanging around with me waiting for work included Sean Connery, Richard Harris, Terence Stamp, Peter O’Toole, Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay, and many others who found it too tough and turned their backs on their dreams.

  Everyone had it tough. Some paths were easier than others, but one thing is for sure: there was no overnight success. There is no such thing as an overnight success. Behind every apparent overnight success is some poor bastard who’s been slogging away, unnoticed and unappreciated, for years.

  Acting is a notoriously difficult industry for those starting out. But to succeed in any walk of life you’re going to need grit, drive and determination. And you’re going to need a way to overcome—and maybe even enjoy—the obstacles that will, without any doubt, be put in your way. Here are some of the ways that worked for me.

  If you’re going through hell, keep going

  This first one isn’t original to me. I always thought it belonged to Winston Churchill, who certainly knew a thing or two about how to get himself and other people through tough times. If he never said it, he should have done.

  At times in the first nine years of my acting career, I did feel like I was going through hell. And most of us do at one time or another. I kept going then out of a mixture of anger, fear, determination and necessity. There was nothing else I could do. I wanted to be an actor and I was going to go through whatever I had to go through to do it.

  Even when I had achieved stardom, I could never quite believe that each film would not be my last, and there certainly were a lot that could have killed off my career and sent me back to hell if I hadn’t kept going and, somehow, just at the right moment, pulled off a success—The Italian Job in 1969, Get Carter and Sleuth in the early 1970s, The Man Who Would Be King in 1975, another John Huston film, Escape to Victory, in 1981, Hannah and Her Sisters in 1986. The list goes on.

  In the 1990s I effectively retired. Well, I didn’t retire, the movies retired me. I was in my sixties, the scripts stopped coming and I thought my acting career was over. I settled down to owning restaurants and writing my autobiography. It wasn’t exactly hell, but Jack Nicholson persuaded me to keep going and, boy, was I glad I did. As it turned out, I’ve done some of my best work since I “retired.”

  Use the difficulty

  This one I like to think is mine, although I’m happy to be told otherwise. Whenever I’m in a negative situation I tell myself to “use the difficulty”: to look hard and find something positive within the problem.

  Joe Levine, the president of Embassy Pictures and the guy whose photo must surely be in the picture dictionary under “American movie producer”—short, fat and with a big cigar—had put me under contract for seven years, in case I was star material, when I was cast in Zulu. But he was not a fan of my performance. He summoned me to his office and told me, “You know I love you, Michael…” my stomach hit the floor “…but you’ll never be a romantic lead and you’re not for us.”

  I felt dizzy. I concentrated on my breathing. “Why?” I asked, in a tear-soaked whisper.

  “I know you’re not, Michael,” said Joe, between puffs, “but you look like a queer on screen.” The 1960s was not an easy time to be gay, or to look it, and Joe released me from my contract. It was a terrible blow.

  When the executives saw the rushes of The Ipcress File they took a similar view, sending a message to the director, Sidney Furie, that read, “Michael Caine is wearing glasses, shopping in supermarkets and cooking. He is coming across as a homosexual.” That wasn’t the exact message—I’ve cleaned it up a bit. Luckily Sid took no notice. In fact, he used the difficulty. When the girl (played by Sue Lloyd) asks if I always wear my glasses, I say, in Harry Palmer’s rather low-key, anti-hero way, “I only take them off in bed.” She reaches over and takes them off. It’s now considered to be one of the great moments of movie seduction.

  After my dev
astating interview with Joe Levine I used the difficulty. The BBC was filming Hamlet at Elsinore and Dennis, my agent, always looking for ways to enhance my reputation and extend my range, got me the part of Horatio to Christopher Plummer’s Prince. I had had no classical training and was not well acquainted with iambic pentameter but I decided that if what I was conveying on screen was ambiguous sexuality, I would go with it, rather than fighting it, and use the difficulty to bring out that aspect of Horatio’s personality.

  And then I got the opportunity to scotch the difficulty, playing Alfie, one of the most notorious heterosexuals ever to appear on film.

  Later, I understood that having spent a large part of my life as a loser, I did not come across on screen as an obvious winner in the way that, say, Peter O’Toole or Charles Bronson did. I didn’t mind: I decided that having been a loser added an interesting dimension to my personality, and decided to make it part of my appeal. I have often played losers in pictures, and you get paid just as much as you do when you’re playing a winner.

  Later still, I had to face up to a particularly wounding difficulty. One day when I was on the cusp of middle age I was sent a script. I happened to be in a bit of a lull but, nonetheless, when I read it I sent it straight back, appalled, saying the part wasn’t big enough. Barely worth doing at all. A couple of hours later the producer was on the phone: “Michael, there’s been a misunderstanding. We don’t want you to play the romantic juvenile. We were thinking of you as the father.” I looked in the mirror, appalled again, but for an entirely different reason, and decided to use that difficulty too. Getting older is much easier for actors than for actresses. All the best roles for an actor of my type are the mature ones, and since I accepted I was the father, not the lover, the parts have just got juicier and more interesting.