Blowing the Bloody Doors Off Read online

  I didn’t go to drama school so most of my learning was on-the-job or on-the-bus. On the bus and the Tube, I learnt voice and movement and character, from watching how people behaved. On the job, I learnt lessons of technique that I used throughout my career and still draw on every day I am on set; I built skills and confidence that prepared me for anything and everything the business could throw at me. My years in draughty repertory theatres, my brief unsuccessful stint in Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop and my endless bit parts on TV and one-line movie roles formed my apprenticeship, and for an actor I still think there can be no better start.

  In repertory in Horsham, Alwyn D. Fox taught me, at my very first rehearsal, to project my voice to the back of the auditorium: “The person sitting at the back has paid as much as anyone else to hear every word you have to say.” After I had accepted a pick ’n’ mix sweet from a member of the audience during a bit where no one on stage was speaking to me, he screamed me an explanation about the “fourth wall” and its role in sustaining the illusion of theatre. “How dare you break it? The fourth wall is the invisible wall between us and the audience, and if you break it the magic of theatre is completely destroyed.”

  I learnt a range of accents, from Chicago gangster to Lord of the Manor via Ireland, Scotland, Wales and the north country, which came in very handy years later when Cy Endfield was considering me for the role of the army officer in Zulu. I learnt how to time a funny line. I suffered from terrible stage fright and used to keep a bucket in the wings into which I would throw up most evenings until, gradually, I learnt how to be relaxed on stage.

  In repertory in Lowestoft my director also gave me an early lesson in how to create an impact by doing less: how to be, rather than perform. This was excellent advice for a theatre actor and, as I realised years later, crucial advice for a film actor.

  I was cast as a drunkard, and at my first rehearsal I came staggering onto the stage, then swayed about a bit. The director held up his hand.

  “Stop. What are you doing, Michael?”

  “I’m drunk in this scene,” I explained, failing to hide my irritation that it had not been apparent.

  “I know that,” he said. “But what are you doing? You’re giving me an actor playing a drunk. I’m paying you to be a drunk. You’re trying to talk slurred and walk crooked. A real drunk is trying to speak clearly and walk straight.”

  My wise and wily repertory theatre director had summed up movie acting in one line, and I remember it and use it to this day.

  My repertory theatre training came into its own any time I had to remember a lot of lines, or do something truly terrifying. In rep, you do fifty different plays a year. You have to remember two hours of dialogue every night, and rehearse a different two hours of dialogue for next week’s play during the day.

  That grounding gave me the confidence to beg John McGrath to give me the part in The Compartment—a forty-five-minute monologue, delivered live—and the experience to pull it off. (Although I can’t prove this to you: a few years later I asked the BBC for a copy of the tape and they wrote back to say they had been on an economy drive and had recorded something else over it. So my first serious piece of TV work was gone for ever. I wondered whether they had also recorded over Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud. I decided not to go mad with frustration and kill anybody but I was a bit disappointed.)

  It came in handy again in 1964 when I was given another big opportunity, starring in the TV play The Other Man, about what might have happened if Britain had surrendered to Germany in 1940. At two hours long, The Other Man was ITV’s longest ever TV play. There was a cast of two hundred, sixty of whom had speaking parts, a twenty-minute stop for the news and several commercial breaks. And, yes, again, to top it all off, the play was broadcast live.

  The exposure was high-stakes and the circumstances could hardly have been tougher but my co-star Siân Phillips was a wonderful actress, which helped, and I swear I didn’t forget one line. (A couple of people did, but fortunately for them we had a high-tech solution in the form of a lady with a button on a wire and a script, who followed whoever was speaking around the set. If someone dried up, she would push the button, sound transmission would be cut and she would read the actor the line. I imagined people all over Britain banging their silent TVs and cursing in unison.)

  Repertory theatre and the training it offered young actors no longer exists in anything like the same form. Now it’s the pre-recorded TV shows that provide work and experience for young actors, but they can’t possibly provide the adrenalin-fuelled tightrope-walk training of live performing. Or the vocal training, which is probably the reason I can’t hear or understand a lot of the dialogue on TV, these days.

  A short stint at Joan Littlewood’s legendary Theatre Workshop in the mid-fifties was the closest I ever came to drama school. Joan was a brilliant woman whose Communist theatre company followed the “method” acting principles of Russian actor and director Konstantin Stanislavski long before they became popular in the West, and the political principles of Vladimir Lenin when they were all the rage in certain parts of London. Despite being a genuine member of the proletariat, I struggled to fit in there. One of the Theatre Workshop’s principles was the sublimation of the individual to the ensemble and, though I did try to sublimate myself, Joan made it clear from the outset that she was not impressed. “Stop,” she said, the moment I stepped on stage for the first rehearsal. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m rehearsing,” I said, mystified as to why she had stopped me.

  “This is a group theatre, Michael,” she said. “Get off. Come on again.”

  So I went off, and came on again, trying harder to be ensemble-y.

  “No,” shouted Joan, immediately I reappeared from the wings. “I’m not having it.”

  “Having what?” I asked. Joan was the first Communist I had met since my time in the army in Korea and I had to remind myself that this Communist I was not supposed to kill.

  “All of this star business, Michael. It won’t do.”

  As soon as the show was over, she fired me. “Piss off to the West End,” she said. “You will never be an actor. You will only ever be a star.”

  It wasn’t hard to find the blessing inside that particular disguise. Someone had called me a star, even if that someone thought “star” was a dirty capitalist word.

  Also, even in the short time I spent in her company before she threw me out, Joan taught me two very important lessons in “method” acting that remained a part of my craft. She taught me the “sense memory” technique that takes you back to your own real-life experiences to help you access emotion when you need it. And she told me: “The rehearsal is the work, the performance is the relaxation.” Meaning that, by the time you get to the performance, you should be so familiar with what you’re doing that it seems effortless. (More on that in Chapter Six.) Joan made an incredible contribution to British working-class theatre, for which I salute her. I am also eternally grateful to her for the contribution she made to my own professional education.

  Unfortunately, when I started to make the move from theatre to film acting, it became clear that I had to start my education almost from scratch. I had to retrain my voice, which was like a foghorn from years of bellowing up to the back of the balcony. Remembering lines in the movies was a whole other business from remembering them on stage or even on TV. There was no time for the kinds of actor-focused rehearsals I was used to: a gentle read-through, discussions of motivation and relationships, maybe a little improvisation, trying a scene this way and that. The time was instead spent on technical considerations and the coordination of confusing film equipment, all of which served only to tauten my jangling nerves to screaming point.

  In my first movie A Hill in Korea in 1956, I had eight lines, which I had to deliver at the rate of one line a week. Each week, by the time the first assistant had shouted, “Quiet,” then “Turnover,” and the camera technicians had turned on their machines and the sound man had
called, “Speed,” and the assistant had yelled, “Mark it,” and the clapper boy had run in with the clapperboard and brought it down with a bang and rushed out of shot, and the director, Julian Amyes, had shouted “Action!,” I had worked myself into a state of such abject terror at the thought of forgetting my one line that I would, indeed, completely forget my one line. At which point the director shouted, “Cut,” and the assistant called, “We’re going again, don’t break it up,” and the director said to the continuity girl, as everyone tried with varying degrees of effort and success to hide their disgust, “Give him the line.” The assistant shouted, “Going again,” and the whole process started again. Even when I did finally manage to remember the line, I was terrible.

  Be prepared to fail

  I could have gone back to the theatre, where at least I didn’t feel like a rank amateur any more. Instead I said yes to dozens more one-line movie parts, and gradually I got better.

  In The Day the Earth Caught Fire, a classic British apocalypse movie released in 1961, Eddie Judd played the lead role and I played a policeman. I had to hold up the traffic, direct the cars one way and the trucks the other, then say my one line. It was a complicated piece of business that would surely have floored me in my early movie-acting days, but by now I was more experienced and finally I nailed it.

  “Quiet.”

  “Turnover.”

  “Speed.”

  “Mark it.”

  “Action.”

  Cameras rolled, cars and trucks rolled and my policeman’s helmet rolled down over my eyes and apparently over my brain too. I couldn’t see the cars and trucks, and I couldn’t remember my line.

  The lesson is not about hats. (Or not only about hats. Note to all: don’t let hats distract you from your goals.) It is about the value of experience, even (or especially) the most humiliating experience. The Day the Earth Caught Fire was mortifying. The director actually said to me words that I thought were just a cliché: “You’ll never work in this industry again.” Well, I did work in movies again a few times after that, but I never again allowed a hat to distract me.

  And, after Zulu, I never allowed shirt buttons to ruin a take. In one dramatic scene I was required to climb up and then jump off a burning roof, while ranks of Zulus came closer and closer. It was a big set piece involving the stunts team, lots of special fire safety procedures and hundreds of extras. The fire had to burn in just the right way. The wind had to be blowing in the right direction. It took a long time to get the shot set up. When we finally finished the scene the continuity girl said, “Oh, wait. Michael’s shirt was buttoned all the way up in the earlier sequence, and now he has two buttons undone.” Silly bugger, I had undone them between takes without thinking about it, I expect because of the intense heat. We had to set up from scratch and shoot it all again.

  I learnt the lessons by making the mistakes—but I only made each one once.

  Never stop learning

  Once I had left school I loved learning. With just one or two exceptions. Whatever your line of work, there will be some skills you have to acquire that give you very little pleasure.

  For me, it was horses. My daughter Dominique turned out to be a magnificent horsewoman but she must have got it from her mother, or my father, who was in the Royal Horse Artillery in the war. My first shot in Zulu required me to ride a horse, something I had confidently told Cy Endfield I could do. I had, it was true, taken lessons in Wimbledon. The first lesson ended when I fell off in front of a bus. The second lesson ended when I fell off in front of a bicycle. There was no third lesson. The horse I was assigned to ride in my first shot in Zulu seemed as unhappy with the situation as I was. Long story short, he wouldn’t move at all, then he reared up, like something out of the Spanish Riding School, and bolted towards a cliff edge. By this time we were losing the light. So my first appearance in my first ever major motion picture is not me but the prop man, Ginger, wearing my hat and cape. The following day the horse and I were reunited, and he took the opportunity to cement our relationship by throwing me into a pond.

  Later I had to learn to scuba dive for Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, which was an even greater challenge. I hadn’t learnt to swim until I was twelve, and the last time I had worn equipment like that, it had been as a six-year-old soon-to-be-evacuated child, testing out a gas mask during the Second World War. Mine was faulty: when I ran around with it on, as instructed, I promptly passed out. I was assured that the technology had improved since then. Nonetheless a professional diver was posted close by to whisk me to the surface if I raised my hand.

  And for Battle of Britain I was required to squeeze myself into the cockpit of a Spitfire, and speed along as if about to take off. At the time I couldn’t drive a car, let alone fly. As we were setting up the shot, Ginger Lacey, the Battle of Britain veteran who was coaching me, yelled, “Whatever you do, don’t touch the red button.”

  The red button? I looked down and, sure enough, there by my left knee was a big red button. “Why not?” I bawled back over the noise of the engine turning over.

  “You’ll take off,” he shouted breezily.

  “Action!” yelled the director. In a state of abject terror I shifted over to the right as far as I could and hurtled off, the only squadron leader ever to prepare for takeoff with his legs crossed.

  But apart from the horses, and the diving, and the flying—basically, I like to keep my feet on the ground—I was always happy to learn. In whatever line of work, technology changes, tastes change, the business model changes. I still learn something new on every project. A few years ago I made my first 3D film, Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, based on the Jules Verne story. We filmed on location in Hawaii but there was also a lot of acting in front of green screens and in light theatres, which involves standing surrounded by six thousand lights in front of eight cameras and moving into every conceivable position. After that they can manipulate your image in various ways without you being there. In 2014 I made a film called Youth in which I played a retired composer, with a great cast including Harvey Keitel, Rachel Weisz, Paul Dano and my old friend from our 1967 movie, Hurry Sundown, Jane Fonda. The director, Paolo Sorrentino, introduced me to a new way of working that had been made possible by a change in the technology. Because everything was now digital and computerised, there was no need to stop work to change the film in the camera every ten minutes or so. At first that seemed like a big disadvantage for the actors learning their lines, because Paolo Sorrentino liked to do tremendously long takes that just kept going and going, and eventually someone was going to fluff a line or make a mistake. But the upside was, when one of us did dry, we didn’t have to cut and go all the way back to the beginning of the scene, as we always used to, then start again. We could just go back a couple of lines. Plus, I learnt how to conduct an orchestra. What a wonderful feeling!

  So I’m always learning my craft. I learnt from classes, from reading, from listening, from watching, from stealing (but only from the best). But most of all I learnt, and continue to learn, from doing. I do it; I make mistakes; I learn from my mistakes. Nothing has the power to etch a lesson deeper into my brain than making a mistake. Nothing builds resilience better than making a mistake and then getting up and trying again, and doing it a bit better.

  You may not see the results straight away but everything you’re doing counts. So keep doing it. And if you keep doing the right things for long enough, eventually the stars align.

  PART TWO

  Making the Cut

  5.

  Getting There Is Just the Start

  Harry: “Clever sod, aren’t you?”

  Jack: “Only comparatively.”

  Get Carter, 1973

  THERE WAS A MOMENT, and I can remember that moment exactly, when I felt like it was happening and I was making it. I was in New York for the first time, doing my first ever American publicity tour, for Alfie. My room in the Plaza Hotel had a view over Central Park, and New York looked just like it did in the movies. Out
side the NBC studio at the Rockefeller Center, I was mobbed by fans wanting autographs. But I was wide-eyed and star-struck too: at a restaurant called Elaine’s, which was soon to become a firm favourite, I knocked over Woody Allen’s wine glass and trod on Ursula Andress’s foot. Alfie was my first movie to go on general release in the United States—an almost unheard-of event at that time for a small British picture. But the moment I felt it was happening for me came when I was standing outside the back of Bloomingdale’s on Lexington Avenue and looked across the street to see a movie theatre playing The Ipcress File. Alfie was doing so well that Universal had bought The Ipcress File and, even though it was now eighteen months old, put that on general release too. Now I had two films on general release in the U.S., and an Oscar nomination for Alfie to boot.

  I felt like I was making it, but I didn’t feel like I’d made it. I never relaxed, never assumed the good times would roll on for ever, never let my guard down. I knew that I had to keep nailing it, keep not mucking it up, keep going to work and delivering the goods and doing a good job every day. Even when you’re making it, you have to keep on making it, day after day.

  Turning up, body and mind

  This was where the discipline from the army, and my years of experience in repertory and doing bit parts, came into its own. After Alfie was released in 1966, I made twelve movies in four years. It was the sixties, but there was no “Turn on, tune in, drop out” for me. For me, it was “Turn up, don’t muck it up, get on.”