The Elephant to Hollywood

8 The Fast Lane

All that hard-won knowledge of the reality behind the dazzle of Hollywood was still years off when I returned to London after my first, almost overwhelmingly glamorous trip. I was still half suspecting that all good things have to come to an end and certainly, those three months in Hollywood rushed by so fast that the first morning I woke up back in my flat in London, I thought that it had all been a dream. Had I really met John Wayne and Frank Sinatra and been round to Danny Kaye’s for a Chinese? Had Shirley Maclaine actually chosen me to play opposite her in Gambit? As I paced round my small flat and began to pick up the pieces of my London life, I felt very odd, almost as if I had been on another planet. I didn’t have long to worry about it, though – before I knew it I was leaving London again, this time on my way to Berlin.

After the success of The Ipcress File, the studio were keen to keep going with Harry Palmer and decided to film Funeral in Berlin, Len Deighton’s third Harry Palmer novel. The last time I had occupied the city was during my national service days in 1951 and it had been a very different place. Now, the Wall dividing east and west was an ever-present reminder of the Cold War. The East German soldiers watched us through binoculars the whole time we were filming there. At one point they were obviously not happy with the way things were going and shone a mirror at our camera lenses until we had to give up and find another spot. The director, Guy Hamilton, had recently directed Sean Connery in Goldfinger and had himself been in British Intelligence during the war. I’m not sure in retrospect he was quite the right man to give Harry Palmer the gritty edge he needed to differentiate him from James Bond, but it was a great film to work on – and Berlin was a bit of a revelation, to say the least.

One of the scenes was shot in a transvestite club and it was quite an eye-opener. Waiting for the cameras to be set up, I was chatting to the receptionist, a beautiful girl, when a very burly, butch-looking man with heavy stubble and massive arms walked past. He was dressed as a schoolgirl and got up on stage to do his act, an unforgettable version of Shirley Temple’s ‘On the Good Ship Lollipop’. I leant over to my new friend and whispered confidentially, ‘He doesn’t look very feminine.’ ‘Oh?’ she said, with barely a flicker of interest. ‘That’s my dad. He owns the place.’ Later on I spilled a drink and went into what I thought was an empty dressing room to clean it off. It was already occupied: an enormous transvestite was standing there in frilly knickers, black silk stockings, suspender belt and high-heeled shoes, but no bra. His hairy chest had been shaved to just below his nipples and when he saw me he screamed and covered them with his hands, as a woman might have done. I thought it was very strange, but, mind you, I was a lot younger then.

Just as we were finishing up in Berlin, I heard that Alfie was being entered for the Cannes Film Festival. I’d had such a ball there with John Lennon when I’d gone the previous year for The Ipcress File that I took a few days off filming and hopped on a plane for a bit of southern French sunshine. Unfortunately, Alfie didn’t go down too well with the French, who couldn’t believe that an Englishman could attract one woman, let alone ten of them, and although we won a prize, the director Lewis Gilbert found himself being pelted with tomatoes when he went up on stage. The trip wasn’t entirely wasted, however. Paramount gave a grand lunch for Alfie at the Carlton Hotel and I found myself sitting next to an Austrian guy. Although I was partying hard every night, I made sure I was more or less sober during the day and this turned out to be just as well. ‘My name is Charles Blühdorn,’ he said in a thick accent. ‘I liked your movie and your performance very much.’ I thanked him and as we started eating I asked him what he did. He told me he was an industrialist and then he said, ‘But that is not interesting. You should ask me what I did yesterday.’ ‘And what did you do yesterday?’ I asked dutifully. ‘I bought Paramount Studios!’ he said. ‘So, if you ever have a script you want (he said ‘vant’) to do, let me have a look at it.’ Well – nothing ventured… ‘As a matter of fact,’ I said, ‘there is something…’ And I told Mr Blühdorn that my friend Troy Kennedy Martin (the creator of Z Cars) had written a script with a great part for me and a London producer called Michael Deeley had it. ‘What (‘vot’) is it called?’ Mr Blühdorn asked. ‘The Italian Job,’ I replied. You never can know what a chance meeting might bring about, can you?

Since I had got into the festival habit, I went more or less straight from Cannes to Acapulco in southern Mexico. Not perhaps the best known of the international festivals, nor the most prestigious, but certainly one of the warmest and that seemed a good enough reason to go there for Alfie. Along with Rita Tushingham, star of A Taste of Honey and a real Sixties icon, and Lynn Redgrave, star of Georgy Girl, we represented the cream of British talent. I had chosen to spend the day before the festival began on the beach and had got second-degree sunburn and a bright red peeling nose – and I had also picked up an appalling attack of the squitters. Rita was tiny, pale and cute, but no sex bomb, and Lynn (pre-Weight Watchers) was just large and pale. The glamorous South American press were not impressed: after a few polite questions, they lost interest and went off in quest of some real movie stars.

Acapulco had its memorable incidents, most notable of which was attending a bullfight with Rita and Lynn. Witnessing the massacre of the poor bull from our prestige front-row seats was too much for Lynn, who passed out as the blood spurted in front of our eyes. Carrying her out of the arena was almost too much for me and proved to be a more compelling spectacle than the fight itself for the thousands gathered in the bullring. When I finally struggled to the top of the long flight of steps leading to the exit with Lynn’s considerable dead weight in my arms, and tiny Rita trailing behind with all our belongings, a great cry of ‘Ole!’ rang out from the onlookers. What they didn’t know was that the diarrhoea that I thought I had well under control was not equal to the extra strain of my gallant mission. Thank God for dark brown trousers…

Lynn Redgrave was one of the funniest actresses I’ve ever seen – I’ve never forgotten her performance in Hay Fever at the Old Vic, which was absolutely hilarious. We didn’t see each other as much as I would have liked after she went to live in New York, and of course I knew she wasn’t well, but I was very sad to hear of her death. Whenever we did meet we always had a laugh about Mexico and those dark brown trousers…

And they would probably have been handy for the next stage in my career. The legendary Otto Preminger, director of movies such as Carmen Jones, The Man with the Golden Arm and Anatomy of a Murder, had offered me a part in his new movie, Hurry Sundown. I was so excited I barely bothered to read the script and headed off to the sun of the Deep South with only those few words of advice from Vivien Leigh to help me. Otto was reputed to be a monster with a habit of screaming at actors and technical staff alike, but I decided up front that I was not going to let him scream at me. ‘You need to know something about me,’ I said to him on the first evening we met. ‘I’m very sensitive and I’ll cry if you or anyone else shouts at me while I’m working.’ Preminger raised an eyebrow in surprise. I plunged on. ‘And if anyone does shout at me, I’ll go straight to my dressing room and I won’t work again that day.’ A long silence. Otto seemed puzzled. ‘But I would never shout at Alfie!’ he said eventually – and he never did and in the end we became firm friends. Like many men – and perhaps this was one of the secrets of the film’s success – Otto Preminger saw himself as Alfie and, again like many others, made the mistake of seeing me as Alfie, too.

Otto may have gone easy on me, but he made everyone else’s life on the set a misery and was particularly tough on my young and beautiful co-star Faye Dunaway, who was often in tears by the end of a day’s shooting. Apparently he always chose a scapegoat, and poor Faye was in the firing line. From time to time our friendship meant that I was able to tell him to ease up on her. But I was warned that I would never completely get away with telling Otto never to shout at me. He took his revenge in a way that took no account at all of the feelings of Jane Fonda, also then a young actress, who was playing my estranged wife. We were due to shoot a scene in which I was supposed to rape her and, very nervous about how I should go about this, bearing in mind the US censor and my co-star’s feelings, I asked Otto for some guidance. ‘Simple, Michael’, he leered (Otto had an impressive leer. In his acting days he had been a remarkably realistic Nazi officer). ‘Just smash the door down, burst into the room and rape her. I’ll call CUT when we’ve got what we need.’ So I did what he said. I smashed the door down, hurled myself into the room, threw Jane Fonda onto the bed and proceeded to ‘rape’ her as realistically as I could without doing any actual damage (and always bearing in mind the US censor’s strictures that she should have her bra and knickers on at all times). After a while I began to feel I was running out of options and that there was a danger that things would get out of hand. ‘I’m stopping!’ I shouted and sat up abruptly. Otto and the entire crew were sitting there with wolfish grins. They had long since switched off the camera. Jane, I’m relieved to say, just went along with it and wasn’t upset at all – in fact she laughed as much as the rest of us.

From the heat of Louisiana I went straight to Finland, for the third of the Harry Palmer movies, Billion Dollar Brain (and if this feels like a breathless gallop from one film to another, it’s because it was…). I have never felt cold like it – and I hope I never do so again. But this was the first in a whole run of movies I was to make almost back-to-back, some of them memorable and some of them I’m only too happy to forget. Subconsciously I thought that my good fortune wouldn’t last and that I should line up as many as I could while the going was good and make as much money as possible before I found myself back in the dole queue.

Aside from the cold, I was very pleased to be playing Harry Palmer again and I thought – and still think – that Billion Dollar Brain is a really atmospheric movie. It was way ahead of its time, too. I recently discovered that in Billion Dollar Brain I was the first person ever to use the internet on screen. At the time, I just assumed it was one more piece of technological spy wizardry and back then I certainly couldn’t get the hang of it – so I did what all actors do, which is to ask the experts for some emergency coaching, to make me look as if I knew what I was doing… Now, of course, it’s as much part of my life as it is of everyone’s – and I couldn’t do without it! A lot of the shooting was done out on the ice floes and, although the temperature never reached more than about three degrees, the ice was cracking under our feet and beginning to melt. Standing in three inches of water was a really miserable experience – and I got a sense of the potential danger we were in when our generator truck began sinking and had to be driven off the ice. It was followed by the catering lorry, which was a very serious business. So with hand-held battery-powered lights, and no lunch, we were thoroughly fed up.

There were other problems with the extreme cold, too. I found close-ups very hard because my face had literally frozen. So Harry Palmer’s expression was not so much wooden as completely glacial! And in temperatures like this, the camera slowed right down – and then fogged up the minute we had to do an inside shot. Some of the scenes were filmed in the Helsinki botanical gardens, which were of course much warmer to preserve the plants, and there was a lot of hanging about waiting for the camera lenses to de-mist.

My head was warm, at least, and without my beautiful sable fur hat I wouldn’t have survived. The first time I put it on, a Finnish journalist was standing nearby and said – with a completely straight face – ‘You know, you bear a remarkable resemblance to Anita Ekberg.’ Anita Ekberg – me? I stole a glance at myself every time I passed a mirror, but I couldn’t quite see what she was getting at. Anita Ekberg or not, the hat looked pretty good on screen and I became very fond of it and took it home afterwards to join all the hats from my other films, that I had amassed in my bedroom. The only one missing from the collection then – the rest of it all disappeared long ago – was my pith helmet from Zulu. I’m sorry not to have kept that, but it was big and would have been a bit heavy to carry home from filming in South Africa. God knows who did end up with that helmet. When Berman’s, the London theatrical and film costumiers, put the uniform on display in their window the whole lot was smash-and-grabbed.

I really enjoyed playing Harry Palmer in the three movies. In some ways I felt a certain affinity with the way his character develops during the course of them. In The Ipcress File he was a complete innocent, just as I had been in the film business. By Funeral in Berlin we had both learned a lot more. And by the time we got to Billion Dollar Brain I felt that both Harry and I had become pretty hardened by our experiences. In many ways, playing Harry Palmer required a certain frame of mind, rather than straight-out dramatic acting. He’s cool all right, but he has to be. Being a spy is a twenty-four-hour-a-day job and he can never afford to relax.

Well, after Billion Dollar Brain I felt I probably could afford to relax and after we had left Finland for the distinctly milder climate of England to finish the movie, I shot off to Paris for a bit of fun. I had a bit part in Shirley Maclaine’s new film, Woman Times Seven, and I was only too happy to do it in return for everything Shirley had done for me in Hollywood. Anita Ekberg was appearing with Shirley, so I also got a chance to look at her a bit more closely, which was nothing but a pleasure, although I still couldn’t spot much resemblance.

Thoroughly defrosted by Paris, I then went off to Spain to do the first of a two-picture deal for Twentieth Century Fox. Deadfall was directed by my old friend Bryan Forbes and although the movie didn’t turn out as well as we’d hoped, it was a happy time. As soon as we’d finished filming in London I went straight back to Spain, this time for a Harry Salzman production, Play Dirty. I had signed to do this one not just because of Harry, but also because it was to be directed by the great French film director, René Clément. Unfortunately as soon as I’d put my name on the dotted line, Clément walked out after a huge row with Harry – I should have taken it as an omen…

Play Dirty was being filmed in the southern Spanish town of Almería, which had become the centre of the Spaghetti Western industry after Sergio Leone made The Good, the Bad and the Ugly there and it was also a favourite location for wartime desert battle movies, which was why we were there. In fact there were only about four sand dunes and all the high crane shots also managed to include the local beaches, crowded with hordes of sun-loving tourists.

The ‘desert’, such as it was, was rather overcrowded – there were two Spaghetti Westerns being filmed at the same time as our movie, as well as a new British-produced Western, Shalako, starring my friend Sean Connery, and this made for some frustrating – if actually very funny – moments. One day we were shooting a scene in which Rommel’s Afrika Korps were advancing their tanks across the desert sands only to be confronted round one of the dunes by a horde of American Indians in full battle-cry in pursuit of a nineteenth-century stagecoach. As soon as they saw the tanks, the horses reared up and threw their riders and we had to hang about while they were picked up and dusted off and all the horseshit and hoofmarks were eliminated.

Despite the overcrowding, it was still possible to get some peace and one afternoon one of my friends from the crew and I found a quiet spot to sit and have a couple of beers. I was bemoaning the lack of beautiful girls around the place to my happily married companion, when he suddenly jabbed me in the ribs. ‘Michael!’ he said urgently. I looked up and nearly fell off my chair. Standing before me was Brigitte Bardot. ‘’ello, Michael,’ she purred. ‘We meet at last. I ’ave been looking for you everywhere…’ She introduced herself and her two companions – two equally beautiful women: Gloria, her secretary, known as Glo Glo, and Monique, her French stand-in, known as Mo Mo. I leapt to my feet and promptly knocked the table and all the drinks on it flying. Not exactly the impression of un homme du monde I had hoped to make. Nonetheless, we soon found ourselves whisked by white Rolls Royce (plus black chauffeur) to the divine Miss Bardot’s luxury suite. When I eventually found my voice I managed to ask how she knew I was in town. ‘My friend Sean tells me,’ said the screen goddess. Ah – Sean, again: Brigitte, or Bri Bri as she was known, was his co-star in Shalako. Still, Sean was out in the desert somewhere and I was here in the suite… Unfortunately it didn’t quite work out the way I’d planned. It wasn’t Brigitte who had had her eye on me, it was her assistant, Gloria. Bri Bri’s own tastes ran to extremely young, very beautiful and very dark Spanish men and as I didn’t score highly in any of those categories, I gave up the unequal struggle.

Both Sean and I had been very busy and hadn’t seen much of each other, but he did invite me to the end-of-filming dinner for Shalako. By now rather miffed at the way that BB had managed to resist my obvious attractions, I grabbed a table at the back with my friend the comedian Eric Sykes who was also in the cast. ‘Just watch,’ whispered Eric as Bardot swept into the restaurant, ‘she is completely crazy about me… just watch as she comes past. She’ll pretend to ignore me completely. She’s done it since the first day on set – but it’s all an act.’ And indeed BB did walk straight past us without saying hello. ‘You see?’ insisted Eric. By now I was so hysterical with laughter that I had to lay my head down on the table. I raised it just in time to get hit square on the nose with a hunk of stale Spanish bread and looked over to see the divine Miss Bardot smiling wickedly and rubbing breadcrumbs off her hands…

The Magus, my next film, was the second of my disastrous Twentieth Century Fox contract and one I’d rather forget, because I simply didn’t have a clue what it was all about – and I still don’t. It marked the end of a three-year stint of movie making and I was more than happy to find myself back home in London – and in a new flat in Grosvenor Square with a grandstand view of the anti-Vietnam riots – with the chance to pick up with friends and family again. My brother Stanley, now happily working in Selfridges’ book department, had been looking after my old flat and so I gave it to him, along with all its contents, and started afresh.

It wasn’t long, though, before another picture came along and this one, I’m happy to say, was nothing but a pleasure from beginning to end – and a successful pleasure, too. I’ve always taken the view that you get paid as much for a bad film as you do for a good one, but I’m only too aware that you need to keep the proportion of good films to bad high enough to avoid the stink of failure and to maintain your credibility at the box office. The Italian Job – that script I had mentioned to Charles Blühdorn the day after he bought Paramount – satisfied on all fronts.

We started on location in London and for me one of the greatest pleasures of the film was working with Noël Coward. The director of the film, Peter Collinson, had grown up in an orphanage sponsored by Coward – he still called him ‘Master Coward’, just like a schoolboy – and he had persuaded Coward to take on the unlikely role of the underworld boss who masterminds the entire heist from inside prison. It may have been an unlikely role, but Noël played it to perfection: being an old queen, he loved taking on the role of a gangster boss with all these tough guys under his command. He was gloriously unfussy and unstuffy about the whole thing and mucked in with everybody: it was a fantastic opportunity for me to learn from the master of comic timing. He was a generous, amusing and lovable man and every Wednesday while we were shooting in London we had dinner together at the Savoy Grill – I still can’t believe I had that chance to get to know him. Noël told me that he had been given a free room for life at the Savoy because he had played cabaret there during the war and had kept going, right through the Blitz. ‘Perfect for me…’ he confided, ‘a truly captive audience!’ He was warm and witty and a wonderful dinner companion, although I relished his waspish side. On one occasion I was describing the anti-Vietnam demos I could see from the window of my flat and how I had seen Vanessa Redgrave in the frontline. Noël sniffed. ‘She will keep on demonstrating,’ he said. ‘But then she’s a very tall girl and I suppose she’s pleased to sit down.’

From London we moved to Turin where all the great car stunts took place. We spent days throwing little Mini Coopers off the top of Mont Blanc. We needed about sixteen altogether by the time we had assembled a team of crash cars, stunt cars, doubles and others on standby, so we went to the British Motor Corporation, as it was then, and asked if they would donate some in return for the publicity the Mini would receive. They were fantastically snooty about it and said they could only manage a token few. Fiat, on the other hand, completely got the idea, and offered us as many cars as we wanted, including sports cars for the Mafia scene. No wonder the British car industry went down the toilet – The Italian Job was and still is the best publicity the Mini Cooper has ever had.

The Italian Job was a classic, British, family comic caper and it did very well at the time in the UK. America was another story. I got off the plane in LA on the first leg of the US publicity tour to be confronted by an ad in which a naked woman was perched in front of a gun-toting gangster – hardly family viewing. I more or less turned round on the spot and went back home. As a result, we never did the sequel and Charlie Croker and the boys are still in that bus hanging over the edge of the cliff.

I had no idea then of the cult status The Italian Job would achieve over the next nearly forty years: you can’t be aware at the time that you’re making an iconic movie. It’s been voted the twenty-seventh favourite British film of all time, apparently, and my line, ‘You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!’ was voted the favourite film one-liner ever. I don’t know about that – there’s plenty of competition – but I do know that it’s a favourite of mine. We thought it was a funny line at the time. I remember we had to do several takes because we were laughing so much we ruined them, which pissed Peter Collinson off a bit because he just wanted us to get on with it, but we had no idea anyone would pick up on it. I’ve been a bit more aware of one-liners since, though. In Get Carter, the one-liner (two lines actually, but who’s counting?) that everyone remembers is, ‘You’re a big man, but you’re out of shape. For me it’s a full time job.’ People are always quoting that at me. I wondered while we were making it if there was going to be an iconic line in Harry Brown, but it wasn’t until I was watching it a while later that I suddenly spotted it… It’s the line where my character says to the drug dealer when his gun doesn’t fire, ‘You failed to maintain your weapon.’ And I thought, the lads will use that. I can imagine a pub on a Saturday night and a guy comes in and says, ‘My girlfriend’s left me,’ and they all turn to him and say in a chorus, ‘You failed to maintain your weapon!’

In The Italian Job, there’s also the matter of the cliffhanger (literally) at the end. There’s been a lot of speculation about this and in 2008 the Royal Society of Chemistry launched a competition for the most scientifically plausible solution to Croker’s problem. The winner came up with an ingenious idea, but in fact what we had planned was that I would crawl up the bus, switch on the engine and wait until it ran out of petrol. That would rebalance the weight so we could all get out – but the bus (and the gold) would then drop over the edge of the cliff into the arms of the Mafia waiting below. The sequel would have been all about us getting it back – shame it was never made!

From Turin I went more or less straight on to my next project, which was a small part in Harry Saltzman’s next production, The Battle of Britain. Harry had had me under contract since The Ipcress File, but he was a fair man and as I became more and more successful he reflected this by upping my payment each year on my birthday. This birthday, my thirty-fifth, he gave me the usual envelope but instead of the usual revised contract it contained the original, ripped up. ‘You’re on your own now,’ he said.

I only had a small part in The Battle of Britain, but it was a film I particularly wanted to be involved with. As a boy who had had to leave London because of the Blitz, and as an evacuee who had grown up in Norfolk watching pilots taking off, some of whom never came back, I was well aware of the debt we owed to ‘the few’ and here was a chance to pay tribute to these brave young men. It was also a chance to get to know some of the pilots who had actually flown in the Battle. Ginger Lacey and Bob Stanford Tuck were acting as technical advisors to the film – as was Adolf Galland, the Luftwaffe pilot who had led the German attack. What I couldn’t quite get over was how young they had all been – until I remembered that I was only nineteen when I was in Korea. I’m not sure the stakes for Britain were quite as high in that conflict, though.

Flying is way out of my league. I didn’t learn to swim until I was twelve, and I’ve never learnt to ski or water-ski. I didn’t drive a car until I was much, much older. These things just weren’t available when I was growing up during and just after wartime, and they weren’t available in the Elephant in peacetime, either. So I can’t fly and I have no desire to learn: I like to leave that sort of thing to the professionals. But the director, Guy Hamilton, was very keen on absolute authenticity and wanted to film us in the open Spitfire cockpits speeding as if to take off. I squeezed myself into the pilot’s seat and sat there waiting for ‘Action’ to be called, almost as nervous as if I were really going into battle. ‘Whatever you do,’ yelled Ginger Lacey, who was coaching me, ‘don’t touch the Red Button!’ The Red Button? I looked down and there by my left knee was indeed a Red Button. ‘Why not?’ I bawled back. ‘You’ll take off!’ he shouted cheerfully. ‘Action!’ In a complete panic I shunted over to the far right as I hurtled down the runway, the only Spitfire pilot ever to get ready for take-off with his legs crossed.

If Finland for Billion Dollar Brain had been the coldest location I had ever worked on, then the Philippine jungle, where we shot Too Late the Hero must be the hottest – and the most uncomfortable. Too Late the Hero is set in the Second World War and is the story of a British troop (plus an American soldier, played by Cliff Robertson) sent to knock out a Japanese radio transmitter on a Pacific island. The landscape we were working in was stunning, but the poverty of the local people and the food were anything but and so the director Robert Aldrich had us work in two-week stints, followed by five days R & R.

On our first break from filming we went to Taiwan. I got lucky there in the hotel bar and found myself in the arms of a beautiful Chinese girl. She was a great fan of mine, she said, and seemed very keen to prove just how highly she regarded my performance at first hand. Unfortunately she had neglected to inform me that her father was a local dignitary… Later that night three Chinese policeman armed with machine guns burst into my room. ‘Papers!’ one of them barked at me, pulling the bedclothes off. The others were opening cupboards and looking under the bed. I looked around wildly, but it seemed my companion had already slipped away. I handed over my passport. The chief policeman glared at it for a minute and then glared at me. Suddenly a big smile broke out over his face. ‘Alfie!’ he said happily. ‘You are Alfie! Me,’ he thumped himself on his chest, ‘I am Chinese Alfie! I fuck many women.’ Yeah, right, I thought, but I nodded vigorously. It wasn’t the first time Alfie had come out of the woodwork to save the day.

We endured the heat, the humidity and the mosquitoes and the often considerably greater risks attendant on our various R & R expeditions because we believed that the story behind Too Late the Hero deserved its authentic location. But when I finally got to see the finished picture I can’t say I thought the misery had been worthwhile. The jungle shots just looked like an anonymous mass of trees – it might as well have been filmed in Borehamwood.

After a brief respite in Hollywood, which I felt I thoroughly deserved, I set off for Innsbruck in Austria in autumn 1969 to film The Last Valley, which was set during the Thirty Years War. Glorious Austrian location, delicious food, a co-star like Omar Sharif – what could go wrong? Well, for a start, I couldn’t get my hotel room cleaned. In the end, I had to complain to the hotel management who looked into it and came back to me a bit embarrassed. My room was on the same floor as Omar’s but a bit further down the passage and it seemed that on Omar’s days off, the maid somehow never made it past his room along to mine… And then there was the fact that the film was set in the Middle Ages and I was playing the captain of a mercenary force: horses were involved again. Dominique – by now an expert horsewoman – had told me that I should make sure to ask for a docile mount and to stipulate that it had to be a mare. I duly followed her instructions and so was taken aback to find myself confronted with not only the biggest horse I had ever seen, but one that featured a pair of the biggest balls I had ever seen. The horse was as quiet as can be, I was assured, and had been chosen with me in mind. His name – I should have suspected something – was Fury.

My first few rides on Fury were uneventful and I began to relax. But on the first day of shooting, he seemed to switch personality. I had changed into costume and had planned to start the day with a little trot. The trot began sedately enough but soon turned into a canter and then began to gather speed until it turned into a gallop I had no chance of controlling. We were eventually brought to a screaming halt (it was me doing the screaming) by a jeep from the unit, three miles from the set. I have rarely been angrier and let rip at the director, James Clavell, as soon as I was back. He sat calmly absorbing my anger and then got up, took me by the arm and led me to a quiet corner and gave me one of the best lessons of my life. ‘I was a prisoner of the Japanese during the war,’ he said, ‘and the reason I survived and others did not is that I never lost face. If you lose your temper in front of people you do not know, you lose their respect and it is almost impossible to win it back. You must keep control – if you cannot control yourself, then you have no chance of controlling others. The reason the horse ran away was that your sword was slapping against his side as you began to trot. He thought you were urging him on to go faster and faster.’ I have never forgotten his advice.

He may have been responsible for that fact that my room was never hoovered, but Omar Sharif was fantastic to work with on The Last Valley. A great actor, he can maintain a poker face better than almost anyone else I know – I’m not surprised he’s a champion bridge player – and he’s a cool customer, too. We were once sitting in a bar during some time off when a group of tough Austrian lads came in. They had had a bit too much to drink and saw these two actors sitting there and started making loud comments about us and our sexuality – all in perfect English. We just sat there, ignoring them, nodding away and chatting. They ratcheted up the invective, but we hung on in there and kept our cool, which seemed to rile them even more. Of course what they didn’t know was that sitting all around us at the other tables was our entire stunt team, just waiting for us to give them the nod. After about ten minutes, the Austrians could take it no longer, pushed back their chairs, and squared up to us. They wanted a fight. Omar and I stood up, too – they must have thought, blimey, these actors have got some guts – but then the stunt team stood up – and, well, I’m afraid there was a bit of a ruckus and some of those Austrians ended up being thrown out of windows that were firmly shut.

I’d taken on The Last Valley because I’d wanted to try my hand at something a bit more serious. Ever since Alfie I had been identified with his character as a bird-pulling Cockney bloke and I was determined to try to change that view. In The Last Valley, ‘The Captain’ and his group of mercenaries wind up spending the winter in a peaceful valley. He was apparently a man of great brutality. I wanted to get behind that to show that in fact he was someone who had other qualities; that he was a man who had come to understand the futility of war. It is an understated performance – like most of my work – but it’s one of the ones that I am most proud of, although I knew pretty well as soon as we finished filming that it wasn’t going to work at the box office, despite the quality of the movie and the brilliant score by John Barry. It may have been timing again – we were in the middle of the Vietnam War and the Middle Ages seemed irrelevant – and it may have been the level of violence (the censors asked for some of the bloodier scenes to be cut), but I was right: the film was not regarded as a success when it was eventually released.

So the sixties ended for me on a bit of a depressing note. The decade had given me so much, but I was only too aware that all good things come to an end and that things – and people – were already moving on. Dennis Selinger and I flew off to spend Christmas with Harry Saltzman and his family in Acapulco and I took the chance to pause and decide what I wanted to do next. I had spent the past ten years going from film to film almost without a break. I had worked with some great producers, but I had also worked with some really bad ones. Now, I thought, I would do something I had always wanted to do: produce a film of my own. I made sure that my next project allowed me to do just that, alongside my friend Michael Klinger, a professional producer.

There’s a danger, when making films, of romanticising violence. I know only too well what the other side of violence looks like and I wanted to show that other side in Get Carter, a film based on a novel called Jack’s Return Home by Ted Lewis. In it, I play a tough London-based gangster who goes home to Newcastle to avenge the murder of his brother and deals ruthlessly with anyone who gets in his way. Mike Hodges, the director, came up with the idea of casting John Osborne as the gangster boss and I thought he’d be brilliant – which he was. We’d known each other well since before his Look Back in Anger days – we’d been out of work together – and we were old friends. He loved being the toughest guy and his performance is truly chilling.

Get Carter is the complete antithesis of films such as The Italian Job, with its larky criminals who get beaten up and appear in the next scene with barely a scratch on them. The only film I had ever seen (as a kid growing up in the Elephant) that seemed to me to give a halfway realistic portrait of gangland life was Brighton Rock, the Boulting brothers’ film of Graham Greene’s novel, starring Richard Attenborough. Michael Klinger and I were determined to achieve at least as convincing a portrait as that.

Realistic portraits of gangland life require gritty settings and so Michael Klinger, Mike Hodges and I decided to shoot the film in Newcastle upon Tyne. Once a great shipbuilding town, it had long since fallen into decline and gave us exactly the dark and brooding atmosphere of urban decay we were looking for. Many people have taken Get Carter as a Western, and we were certainly aiming for that sense of a wild frontier. As for me, I wanted the challenge of creating a real villain. Up until Get Carter I’d more or less always played nice characters – even Alfie is nice in his way, a real charmer – but Jack Carter is a cold, cold man.

People often think that Get Carter is a film about vengeance, but it’s not: it’s about honour, family honour. I understood all that, because there was a very strong code of honour round where I came from. It was a bit like Sicily: you kissed a girl and the brothers came round and you had to get married the following Saturday or you would besmirch the family name – and you wouldn’t get away with that. I was in a club somewhere in the West End just after Get Carter was released and the gangster I’d based Jack Carter on – not that he ever knew it – came up to me and said, ‘I saw that Get Carter, Michael.’ Uh-oh, I thought, but I kept a dead straight face and I said, ‘Did you?’ and he went on, ‘Biggest load of crap I’ve ever seen.’ ‘Really?’ I said, looking round for the exit. ‘What makes you think that?’ And he said, ‘Michael, you weren’t married, you never had any kids and you had no responsibilities. You don’t understand why we do things. I had to keep a wife and kids with no special skills.’ And I thought – no special skills? He’d only killed about five people – not that he’d ever been charged with anything, but everyone knew… and I said, ‘Oh, blimey – you’re right. That was a terrible mistake.’ I completely agreed with everything he said. You don’t want to argue with someone like that.

Violence has consequences and you don’t often see that in movies. It’s a sort of pornography: people are struck time and time again and the next time they appear they just sport a bit of Elastoplast, not even a black eye or missing teeth. If you were a real victim of the violence you see in some films, you would be in hospital or dead. In Get Carter you see the effect of one whack, although we never cut to the gore. I’m worried by the sorts of computer games kids play these days when their characters smash someone over the head and there’s no blood – what sort of a generation are we bringing up? And I’m amazed at what you can see on television even before the watershed. People seem to glory in it and that scares me.