The Elephant to Hollywood

2 The Elephant

I suppose the real question is not why the spotlight of movie stardom was fading, but how it ever got to shine on me in the first place. Beverly Hills is a long way from my childhood home in the Elephant and Castle in south London, and a Hollywood movie lot is a long way from the drama class I joined at the local youth club when I first had the spark of an idea that I might become a professional actor. That spark turned very quickly into a burning ambition for me – but to everyone else it was just a joke, a good laugh. When I said I was going to be an actor they all said the same thing, ‘You? What are you going to do? Act the goat?’ And they would fall about. Or if I said I wanted to go on stage, they would say, ‘Are you going to sweep it up?’ I never said anything – I just smiled. In fact I’d only been to the theatre once, with school, to see a Shakespeare play, and I’d fallen asleep.

At the time I was reading a lot of biographies of famous actors, desperate to see how they had started in the business. It didn’t help. The people I was reading about weren’t anything like me. The first actor they ever saw always seemed to be playing at some posh West End theatre and they got taken by their nanny. The story was always the same: as soon as the lights dimmed and the curtain rose, they simply knew they had to be an actor.

Things were a bit different for me. The first actor I saw was playing at a real fleapit called the New Grand Hall in Camberwell Green and it was The Lone Ranger. I was four and I’d gone to the Saturday morning matinee, which was about as far from the West End as you could get. It was rough, very rough: Nanny would not have liked it at all. The ruckus started in the queue, which was all barging and shoving, and went on with missiles thrown round the cinema even after we’d all sat down. But as soon as the lights went down and the film began, I was in another world. I was hit on the head by an orange; I took no notice. Someone threw half an ice cream cone at me; I just wiped it up without taking my eyes off the screen. I was so lost in the story that after a while I propped my feet up on the back of the seat in front of me and stretched my legs. Unfortunately, someone had taken out the screws attaching the seats to the floor and the entire row of seats we were sitting in tipped backwards and landed in the laps of the people behind. They screamed; we all lay there, legs in the air: it was utter chaos. The film ground to a halt. The usherettes came running. ‘Who did this?’ I was given up without a qualm and whacked around the ear. Order was restored, the film was started up again and as I watched it through a wash of tears I knew I had found my future career.

Of course I’d actually already been acting for about a year. My mother was my first coach and she gave me my first acting lessons when I was three. In fact she even wrote the script. We were poor and my mother couldn’t always pay the bills on time, so whenever the rent collector came round she would hide behind the door while I opened it and repeated, word perfect, my first lines. ‘Mum’s out.’ I was terrified at first but gradually I got more confident and eventually I progressed to an even more discerning audience – once I even convinced the vicar who came round to collect money for the local church. I wasn’t always successful, though. One time there was a ring on the bell and we got ready for the usual routine but when I opened the door it wasn’t the rent collector, it was a tall stranger with long hair, a great bushy beard and strange, piercing eyes. I don’t think I’d ever seen a beard before and I stood with my mouth open, staring at him. He reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t think who. ‘I’m a Jehovah’s Witness,’ he said, fixing me with his glare. ‘Is your mother in?’ It was all I could do to stammer my lines. ‘Mum’s out.’ He wasn’t taken in. ‘You’ll never get to heaven if you tell lies, little boy,’ he hissed at me. I slammed the door in his face and leaned against it shaking. I’d remembered who he reminded me of: a picture of Jesus I’d once seen. As we climbed up the three long flights of stairs back to our flat, I asked my mother, ‘Where’s heaven, Mum?’ She snorted. ‘Don’t know, son,’ she said. ‘All I know is it’s not round here!’

My debut as an actor on stage was in the school pantomime when I was seven. I was very nervous but when I walked on, the audience roared with laughter. I was delighted. This isn’t so bad, I thought – and then I discovered that my flies were undone. Many years later when I was playing a psychiatrist in Dressed to Kill (that is, a murdering, transvestite psychiatrist, just to give the full flavour of the role), I read a number of psychological treatises and one of the conclusions that really struck home for me was the suggestion that we all become the thing we are most afraid of. I used to suffer from terrible stage fright and when I think back to my childhood and how shy I’d been, I think how much this idea is true for me. I was never one of those kids who would perform for anyone – if a stranger came round I’d dive straight behind the curtains until they’d gone. I think I was the shyest little boy I’ve ever come across and it could be that I became a performer to overcome that fear of being in front of people. When you act, you project a part in public and you keep your real self behind those curtains. A journalist asked me recently during a tour for Harry Brown, which character was most like me – Alfie, Harry Palmer or Jack Carter. I said, ‘I have never played anyone remotely like me.’ He couldn’t understand that. ‘Those are all people that I knew,’ I said, ‘not people that I am.’

My very first public appearance was in the charity wing of St Olave’s Hospital, Rotherhithe, where I was born on Tuesday 14 March, 1933. I didn’t have the easiest start in life – and I probably wasn’t the handsomest baby, although my mother always said I was. I was named Maurice Joseph Micklewhite, after my father, and I was born with Blefora – a mild, incurable, but non-contagious eye disease that makes the eyelids swell. I never asked Robert Mitchum if he had the same condition, but like many things that seemed like a problem initially, it turned out to be to my advantage: my heavy eyelids made me look a bit sleepy on screen, and of course sleepy often looks sexy. My eyes weren’t my only problem in the looks department: my ears also stuck out. I know this didn’t affect Clark Gable’s career, but my mother was determined that I shouldn’t have to go through life being teased and she used to send me to bed every night for the first two years of my life with my ears pinned back with sticking plaster. It worked, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

So there I was with funny eyes, sticking-out ears and, just to round it all off, rickets. Rickets is a disease of poverty, a vitamin deficiency that causes weak bones and although I was eventually cured of it, I’ve got weak ankles still. When I started walking, my ankles couldn’t support my weight and I had to wear surgical boots. Oh, and I also had a nervous facial tic I couldn’t control. I tell you, looking at me, acting would have been the furthest thing from anyone’s mind.

We may have been poor, and I may have been shy and – at least in the early days – pretty ugly, but when I look back I can see just how lucky I was. I can never remember once being hungry, cold, dirty or unloved. My parents were both traditional working-class and they worked their hardest to provide a home for me and my brother Stanley, who was born two and a half years after me. Dad was part gypsy. Two branches of the family – the O’Neills and the Callaghans (two women with the names of O’Neill and Callaghan appear as signatures on my birth certificate) – came from Ireland originally and the reason they ended up at the Elephant was because there was a big horse repository there and they came over to sell horses. Dad didn’t follow that line of business, he worked as a porter in London’s Billingsgate fish market – as generations of Micklewhite men had done before him for hundreds of years. He’d get up at four in the morning and spend his next eight hours heaving crates of iced fish about. He didn’t like the job but although he was a very intelligent man, he was completely uneducated and manual labour was the only choice he had. Jobs at Billingsgate were highly prized and it was a real closed shop – you could only get in if a member of your family was already working there. Dad told me once with some pride that when I grew up he could get me a job there with no problem. I didn’t want to tell him it would be over my dead body.

Dad may not have been educated but he was one of the most brilliant men I’ve ever known. He built his own radio from scratch and he read biographies all the time – he was very interested in the lives of real people. He died when I was only twenty-two so I never really got to know him as an adult, but we were very good friends and he was my hero. My mother always used to burst into tears at Christmas just looking at me and she’d say, ‘You are your father, aren’t you?’ And I’d say, ‘Yeah, I am.’ My whole character is based on him: he was a tough bugger, like me. When I look back at his life, what strikes me is the waste of talent – not just his, but the generations of his family and families like his – on manual unskilled labour. And although I know how much better it is now, that kids like my dad at least get a chance to go to school and have the opportunity to learn, I still feel we’re failing a whole group of people who just don’t fit into the educational mould. I should know – I didn’t either.

Back then, Dad was part of a whole generation of working men who didn’t think anyone or anything could help them; they were just trying to make the best living they could for themselves and their families. I was born right in the middle of the Depression and everyone was just trying to survive. Although Dad read the papers every day, I don’t remember him ever discussing politics and he was certainly not a member of a union or a militant in any sense. In fact he didn’t vote at all. He regarded himself as outside the system completely and although he lived through the founding of the welfare state, and the NHS and the 1944 Education Act – all social policies designed to help the working class – his attitude was still that no one could help him but himself. He was socially disgruntled and a sense of this ran through everything he did. He had a relay wireless subscription, for instance, for which he paid two shillings and sixpence a week, when he could have bought a wireless set for £5. Over the years he probably spent £100 on that relay wireless, but he just couldn’t make the leap of faith and invest in something that would have saved him money.

One of the proudest moments of my life was seeing my daughter Natasha graduate from Manchester University. She was the first member of our family to go to university – and for her children, my grandchildren, it will be a normal thing. Even though he was from a generation that didn’t show a whole lot of emotion, I know my dad would have been so proud. He would have loved every minute.

Years after my father’s death and in another world, I went to the birthday party of the son of my friend Wafic Saïd, the international business tycoon and founder of the Saïd Business School at Oxford University. It was held in a big modern banqueting hall, which just happened once to have been Billingsgate fish market. As I sat there, sipping champagne and eating caviar, it suddenly dawned on me that I was staring across the room at the exact spot where my dad’s fish stall had been and where I used to help him ice the fish every weekend. I was sitting next to Princess Michael of Kent who was chatting happily. ‘Did you ever meet President Putin?’ she was saying. It sounded as if she was speaking from a very long distance away. ‘No, I haven’t,’ I said. She leant forward and touched my arm. ‘Your eyes are watering,’ she said. ‘I’ve got something in them,’ I lied and grabbed a napkin.

The only thing my father liked about working at Billingsgate was the fact that he could come home at midday and get round to the bookies. He was a committed gambler and his steady run of bad luck on the horses was the main reason I began my acting career at the front door. It was my mother who held us all together. She devoted her life to my brother and me and made sure we never went without, but it was a second-hand world we lived in – second-hand clothes and (never a good idea with growing feet) second-hand shoes. By the age of four my rickets was cured – mainly from having to run up and down the five flights of stairs between our flat and the only toilet in the house, which was in the garden and shared between the five families living there. I also developed strong legs and a strong bladder but I was sorry to have to abandon my special boots. At least they fitted.

By the time I got to school most of my physical problems had disappeared – or rather, they had reversed. No longer an ugly kid, I had turned into a very cute one – so cute, that my teacher at the John Ruskin Infants’ School took one look at my curly blond hair and big blue eyes and christened me ‘Bubbles’. Big mistake. After I had put up with two or three days of being kicked and punched by the other kids my mother came marching down to the playground. ‘Where are the boys who did this?’ she demanded. When I pointed them out she beat the shit out of them. I had no more trouble after that, but I didn’t want my mother to fight my battles for me, so I asked my father what to do. ‘Fight them,’ he said immediately. ‘There’s no shame in losing, only in being a coward.’ And he got down on his knees and put his fists up and persuaded me to hit him. I soon got the idea – and no one at school tried anything after that.

Fighting at school was one thing, the Lone Ranger fighting the bad guys every Saturday morning was another, but some real fighting was just about to start. The first thing my brother and I knew about it was my mother sitting us both down and telling us that we were going to have to go and live in the country because a bad man called Adolf Hitler was going to drop bombs on our house. It didn’t make much sense to us. We didn’t know anyone called Adolf Hitler so how could he know where we lived? But gradually the reality of war began to take over our little world. First there were the gas masks, made to look like Mickey Mouse and issued to us at school. We tried them on to make sure they fitted and I ran about the playground just like the other kids – except for some reason my mouthpiece was blocked and I keeled over in a dead faint through lack of oxygen. I’d let the side down, it seemed, and I was sent home in disgrace, leaving me with a burning sense of injustice and a lifelong loathing of the smell of rubber.

I’ll never forget Evacuation Day. My father had taken the only day off work he ever had in his life to come and say goodbye. Stanley and I were all dressed up in our best clothes, new prickly wool shirts that were the scratchiest I’d ever worn (until I joined the British army), ties choking our necks, and labels attached to our jackets. Right up to the time we got to the school playground, my mother was still pretending it was all going to be fun. But first one mother started sobbing, then another and eventually they were all at it – even ours – and we realised that this was no joke. As we marched off in a crocodile, me clutching Stanley’s hand in an iron grip, I turned back for one last look at my mum waving her handkerchief and weeping – and promptly trod in a great pile of dog shit. There was a lot of jeering and catcalling and I was made to go to the back of the line and walk by myself. As I walked on, tears streaming down my face, one of the teachers took pity on me and gave me a hug. ‘It’s good luck,’ she said. I looked at her in disbelief. ‘It is,’ she insisted. ‘You’ll see.’ Something must have stuck with me, because, years later, when the cameras were rolling for the opening shot of Alfie, where I’m walking along the Embankment by Westminster Bridge, I did the same thing. The director Lewis Gilbert said, ‘Cut!’ and turned to me as I hopped about, changing my shoe. ‘That’s good luck,’ he said. ‘I know,’ I replied. ‘My teacher told me.’ And we went on to do Take Two of the movie that would make me a star. You see? You should always listen to your teacher.

That first evacuation did not last long. Stanley and I were the last two children left in the village hall at Wargrave in Berkshire and had to be rescued by a very kind woman who whisked us off to a huge house in a Rolls Royce. There we were showered with kindness and given unlimited cake and lemonade – it all seemed too good to be true. It was. The next day a busybody official came round and said we were too far from the school and we would have to be sent elsewhere and split up.

Stanley was sent to live with a district nurse and I was taken in by a couple who were just plain cruel. My mother couldn’t come to visit straight away because the Germans were bombing the railway lines. When she eventually managed to get down she found me covered in sores and starving. There was an allowance to cover the costs of taking in evacuees and my hosts were out to keep as much of it as possible; I’d been living on a tin of pilchards once a day. Even worse, they used to go away for the weekend and leave me locked in the cupboard under the stairs. I’ve never forgotten sitting hunched in the dark, crying for my mum and not knowing if anyone would ever come to get me out; time had ceased to have any meaning. That experience was so traumatic that it has left me with a lifelong fear of small, enclosed spaces and a burning hatred of any cruelty to children; all my charity work is aimed at children’s charities, particularly the NSPCC. Anyway, back then I decided I’d rather risk the bombing than be locked up in a cupboard again. Happily, my mother agreed and took Stanley and me straight back to London, determined not to be parted from us again.

By now the Blitz on London was happening in earnest and it seemed to me that Adolf Hitler had found out our address. The bombs got closer and closer and when London was set alight by blanket incendiary bombing during the Battle of Britain, my mother had had enough. My father was called up to serve in the Royal Artillery and she took us to North Runcton in Norfolk, on the east coast of England.

Sometimes I think the Second World War was the best thing that ever happened to me. Norfolk was a paradise for a scrawny little street urchin like me, coming from all the smog and fog and filth of London. I was a little runt when I went there and by the time I was fourteen I had shot up to six foot, like a sunflower growing up a wall. Or a weed. Wartime rationing meant no sugar, no sweets, no cakes – no artificial anything – but we had good food, supplemented with wild rabbits and moorhens’ eggs. Everything was organic because all the chemical fertilisers were needed for explosives, so I was given this unexpectedly healthy start in life. We lived with another ten families crammed together in an old farmhouse, with fresh air, good food and, best of all, the chance to roam free in the countryside. I went round with a gang of other evacuees; the village mothers wouldn’t let their kids play with us because we were so rough and our language was a bit suspect, to say the least. Now I look back on it, we must have been a bit of a bloody nuisance – we raided the orchards, stole milk off doorsteps and got into fights with the local boys – but my experiences there changed my life. I appreciated the country because I went there and I appreciated London because I’d left it behind.

After six months in Norfolk, my father came home for a fortnight’s leave. We wanted to hear Lone Ranger-type stories of fighting the Germans, but he was simply exhausted. He’d just come, he said, from a place in France called Dunkirk. It didn’t mean anything to us at the time, but when I look back now I wonder at what sort of hell he went through there. When his leave was up he was sent to North Africa with the Eighth Army to fight Rommel. We didn’t see him again for four years.

By now the war had reached even sleepy Norfolk. With the entry of America, we found ourselves living in the middle of seven huge US Air Force Bomber bases and witnessing the war in the air at first hand. As we watched from the ground we could see German planes attacking our own fighters – and we could see the deadly results as plane after plane spiralled out of the sky and crashed in the fields around us. I had never connected the fighting I saw in the movies with real life; now, when we reached the downed planes, often ahead of the police or Home Guard, I saw dead bodies for the first time.

Hitler may not have invaded us, but the Americans certainly did. The towns and villages of Norfolk were overrun by gum-chewing, laid-back, good-humoured American airmen who seemed to think everything was a joke and amazed the locals with their generosity and sense of fun. Everything I knew about America I had learnt from my weekly cinema visits and these brave young men were the first real Americans I’d met. It was the beginning for me of a love affair with America and all things American that has lasted the whole of my life.

I wasn’t only getting an education through the cinema. I’d been very lucky in my elementary school teacher: a butch, chain-smoking, whisky-drinking, completely inspirational woman called Miss Linton. Looking back, I can see that she was probably a lesbian and that I perhaps represented the son she’d never have. She saw something in me, encouraged me to read widely, taught me maths through the unusual medium of poker, and one memorable day came flying across the village green in her academic gown to our house to give me the news that I’d passed the London scholarship exam to grammar school. I was the first child from the village school ever to do so. By now my mother had got a job as a cook and we had moved into the servants’ quarters of a big house called The Grange, on the edge of the village. After the Elephant and Castle it was unimaginable luxury – electric light, fully equipped kitchen, endless good food (we got the leftovers) and hot and cold running water. There was even a huge piano in the family drawing room, shaped like a harp on its side – nothing like the upright boxes I’d seen in the saloon bars in the London pubs.

The house was owned by a family called English whose money came from a timber firm – Gabriel, Wade and English. I’d always remembered the name, and years later Shakira and I decided to take a trip down the Thames on a sunny evening and we went past an old warehouse and I was surprised to see that name painted on the side. I think I’d somehow thought it wasn’t a real firm. Mr English was very kind to me and offered to pay for me to go to school and university, if I didn’t pass the scholarship. I was a funny little boy, quite lonely, but people would catch on to me somehow and Mr English used to take me through to the main house and give me tea in the drawing room. One day, I thought, I’m going to have all this – and the house I live in now in Surrey is really his home: I have replicated his life. It’s even extended to food. Because we used to eat the leftovers from the Englishes’ dinners, I got used to eating game – pheasant and partridge – as a young boy and that’s had a lifelong effect on me. I eat like a country squire these days – albeit a country squire who’s been to France a lot!

As you get older, you find yourself doing many things for what you are aware will probably be the last time. A couple of years ago I went back to North Runcton with my daughter Natasha. I had been invited to unveil a blue plaque on the village school where I had acted in public for the first time. We were given a great welcome and shown round the impressively modernised buildings, and then we drove to The Grange where the current owner let me in through the front door for the first time. The house, like the school, had changed – the quarters where we had lived were now a double garage – but the two bay windows in the drawing room looking out over the fields were just as they were when Mr English used to have me in for afternoon tea. As I stood there, I realised that one major part of me had been shaped in this room, while another had been shaped by the school we had just visited. And as we drove away from North Runcton, I was conscious of saying goodbye to my childhood and, although they were long dead, once again to the people there who had been such an important part of it.

So, thanks to Miss Linton – and if I’d failed, it would have been thanks to Mr English – I got to go to grammar school. The London school that had been evacuated nearest to us was a mainly Jewish school called Hackney Downs Grocers. I’d never met a Jewish person before but my mother informed me that my father’s bookmaker was Jewish and so was Tubby Isaacs, the man who used to sell Dad his jellied eels. Both these men were fat. Mum also said that Jews were clever because they ate a lot of fish (I hated the stuff my father used to bring home from the market before the war) and that most Jews had money, which made sense to me since Dad lost most of his at the bookies and spent what was left on jellied eels. So I was a bit surprised to get to my new school and find that although they were clever, the boys were not fat and they weren’t rich – in fact they were just like me. We even shared a name. The name Maurice was a bit unusual round the Elephant but at Grocers everyone seemed to be called Maurice. In fact a lot of them had Morris as a surname, too. Very confusing. The only thing that set them apart from the kids I’d been to school with before was that they worked hard. They got this attitude from their parents. My best friend Morris’s (I’m not making his name up) parents were obsessed with the importance of his education and, yes, they ate fish at practically every meal.

We got back to London in 1946 and it was a miserable time. Many of the familiar streets of my childhood had literally disappeared and the landscape was littered with the rubble of collapsed buildings. When my father was demobbed, having fought right through the war from El Alamein to the liberation of Rome, the council rehoused us in a pre-fabricated house. Years later, when I was in the movie Battle of Britain, I had lunch with General Adolf Galland, the former head of the Luftwaffe, who was acting as technical advisor. I didn’t know whether to hit him or thank him for his successful slum clearance programme, but it wouldn’t have mattered: he didn’t seem to have realised that the Germans had lost.

The prefabs, as they were known, were intended to be temporary homes while London was rebuilt, but we ended up living there for eighteen years and for us, after a cramped flat with an outside toilet, it was luxury. Outside, though, there was a constant smell of burning rubbish in the air as the authorities cleared the bomb sites, compounded by the thick smog produced by the coal fires. The shops were empty, everyone was queuing for the few goods that were available – and my only escapes were the cinema and the public library. For young working-class boys like me, America was really exciting. British war films were always about officers; American films were about enlisted men. British authors wrote about officers; in the library I discovered Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Jones’ From Here to Eternity. Here at last were stories about the experiences of soldiers I could identify with.

I may have been a keen member of the public library, but I was not enjoying school. I’d had to move from Hackney Downs Grocers to a school nearer to us and it did not go well, either for the staff at Wilson’s Grammar School or for me. The only subject I was remotely interested in was French – and that was only because of Mam’zelle, whose short skirts offered a flash of thigh when she perched on the front of her desk – and I began to devote more and more of my creative energy to playing truant. Mum used to give me money for lunch each day and whenever I could I would spend half of it on a bar of chocolate to keep starvation at bay and the rest on a ticket to the Tower cinema in Peckham.

Where Wilson’s was failing in its attempts to educate me, the Tower cinema was doing a lot better – and not just in the world of film. One day I turned up at the box office as usual with my chocolate bar and while I was buying my ticket, the girl behind the glass leant forward and whispered, ‘Give us your chocolate and I’ll show you me tits.’ My jaw dropped. I sneaked a look at her torso. She was no oil painting, but when you’re fourteen, most girls have a certain allure. ‘OK,’ I said hoarsely and pushed the bar across the counter before she could change her mind. She glanced around. The foyer was empty. ‘Here you are, then, Romeo,’ she said and slowly lifted one side of her jumper to reveal a slightly grubby bra. With one finger, she pulled up the left cup until first a nipple popped out and then a whole white breast. It was enormous! It quivered before my staring eyes for at most two seconds before she bundled it back inside her bra, pulled down her sweater, grabbed the chocolate bar and slammed the box office window closed. As I walked the long lonely walk down the darkened corridor to the screen, a sense of injustice began to grow. She’d said ‘tits’ plural! I’d only seen one. And now I was left with no chocolate. It didn’t seem fair to me and I vowed that I’d never pay for sex again. And I never have. Love, yes – at various points – but that’s a different matter.

They say the average teenage boy thinks about sex every fifteen seconds. That wouldn’t have got anywhere near it for me. But of course help was always at hand, so to speak. More constructive help was available at a youth club called Clubland in the Walworth Road, which offered a gym and sport to keep our minds pure and our bodies exhausted. Cold showers were also on the agenda, but I cottoned on to the real purpose of these very quickly. I did join the basketball team since I was already six foot tall but I was a lost cause: the only thing I was really interested in chasing was girls.

I was obsessed with a girl called Amy Hood and one day as I was going up the stairs to the gym, I spotted her through a door, along with all the other best-looking girls in the club. I was standing there with my nose pressed to the glass when the door opened unexpectedly and I fell into the room. I blushed and the girls all tittered but the teacher came over and grabbed me by the collar. ‘Come in!’ she said, hauling me over to the group. ‘You’re the first boy we’ve had all year.’ My lucky day; my twin obsessions – girls and acting! I had stumbled into the drama class.

I’ve never liked critics and it may well go back to my very first review in the Clubland magazine. I was playing a robot in R.U.R., an obscurely intellectual play by Karel Capek. I didn’t have a clue what it was about. I didn’t even understand the one line I had. Even so, I understood fully the sarcasm behind the young critic’s assessment of my performance. ‘Maurice Micklewhite played the Robot, who spoke in a dull, mechanical, monotonous voice, to perfection.’ Bastard.

Bad notice or not, I was on my way – or so I thought. From then on until I was called up for my national service, I was always in a play. I was also taken under the wing of a man called Alec Reed, a movie fanatic, who used to show his collection of sixteen millimetre silent films at Clubland every Sunday evening. Not only did Alec teach me everything he knew about the history of film, he also introduced me to the technical side of movie-making. Every summer the whole club would go on holiday to the island of Guernsey, off the south coast of England, and Alec would make a documentary of the trip. It was a proud moment for me when my name came up on the credits for the first time – ‘Maurice Micklewhite, Director’. Once again, the audience laughed. Bastards. But I realised they were right. When I made it to the big screen it would have to be under a different name.

Even I had to admit, though, that my name was the least of my problems. I was a tall, gangly, skinny, awkward boy with blond hair, a big nose, pimples and a Cockney accent. All the movie stars of the day – Robert Taylor, Cary Grant and Tyrone Power, for instance – were dark-haired, smooth, sophisticated and very handsome. Even the ugly ones, like my hero Humphrey Bogart, were dark-haired, smooth, sophisticated and very handsome. It’s easier now, of course, but back then people who looked like me would only ever have been cast as the hero’s best friend. I remember even Steve McQueen telling me once that if he’d been an actor in the thirties he would have been the best friend.

So how did I make it in the end as a movie actor? There’s a good ten years of hard graft in the theatre and TV there, of course, before I got to Alfie, but even apart from the acting, you have to have the right face. Take a look in the mirror. Can you see the white on the top of the iris of your eye in relaxed position? Can you see your nostrils looking at your face straight on? Can you see the gums above your top teeth when you smile? Is your forehead longer than the space between the bottom of your nose and the bottom of your chin? If you are a man, do you have a very small head? If you are a woman, do you have a very big head? If you have any of these facial characteristics, you won’t get the romantic leading roles. If, however, you have all of the above, you could probably make a fortune in horror films.

All those years I spent acting at Clubland and later in the professional theatre turned out not to be a lot of help, ultimately. The art of cinema acting is the exact opposite of stage acting. In the theatre you have to be as big and broad and loud as possible, even in the quiet scenes, which is a trick that only the best actors can pull off. Film acting, on the other hand, is about standing six feet from a camera in blazing light and not letting the tiniest bit of acting show. If you are doing it right you make it look very easy, but it takes a great deal of hard work to accomplish. It’s a bit like watching Fred Astaire dancing and thinking, I could do that – and you couldn’t in a million years.

Of course there are some useful tips I’ve picked up along the way… In a close up, choose just one eye of the actor you’re playing opposite, don’t skip between the eyes or you will just look shifty; choose the eye that brings your face closest to the camera; don’t blink if you are playing a strong or menacing character (and remember your eye drops!); if you are playing a weak or ineffectual character, blink as much as you like – just look at Hugh Grant; and if you have to pause after another actor’s line, always start your line and then pause – and you can hold that pause as long as you like. Last of all – full frontal nudity. Don’t do it. Acting is all about control and the minute you are naked you have lost control of what the audience is looking at. But if you absolutely insist on disregarding my advice on that last point, let me offer one final tip: don’t move. When legendary ballet dancer Robert Helpmann was asked, as the notorious naked revue show Oh! Calcutta debuted in London, if he would ever do a naked ballet, he said, ‘Certainly not.’ When asked why, he replied, ‘Because everything doesn’t stop when the music does.’ Wise man.

Even if you’ve got the right face, you still need to have a sense of humour about yourself. I think I’m a good dramatic actor but I always look as if you could have a laugh with me. There’s a connection between the actor and the audience that goes far beyond the part you play and it’s got nothing to do with acting ability. Charisma – you’ve either got it or you haven’t. Who’s got it today? I’d pick Jude Law, Clive Owen, Matt Damon and of those, I identify most strongly with Jude Law. After all, he looks a bit like me – and he’s remade two of my movies. I identify with him in another way, too. The press spend a lot of time attacking him personally. When we played in Sleuth together, one of the critics mentioned that he’d screwed the nanny and I thought – hang on a minute – he didn’t screw the nanny in the movie! He’s a wonderful actor, a great dad to his kids, and he’s a bit of a jack-the-lad, like I was, although perhaps I was smarter at not being caught. But back when my pals and I were living the high life and dating a lot of girls, we didn’t have to contend with the paparazzi or the celebrity magazines the way stars do now. We’d never get away now with what we got up to in those days.