The Elephant to Hollywood

3 Learning the Ropes

People still ask me if the character of Alfie is based on me. Around the time the film came out, interviewers would say, ‘Alfie’s you, isn’t he? You’re a young Cockney lad, you like girls.’ ‘Is that it?’ I’d say. ‘I’m a Cockney and all Cockneys are exactly the same? All Cockneys who like girls are exactly the same?’ What they misunderstood then – and some of them still misunderstand now – is that, yes, I’m a Cockney; Alfie’s a Cockney. I like girls; he liked girls. But the way Alfie treated them is the complete opposite of the way I would treat a woman.

In fact I based Alfie on a guy called Jimmy Buckley who turned up one day at Clubland and made an instant impression on all the girls there. Jimmy had charisma. I didn’t recognise it at the time (and I certainly couldn’t have spelled it), but I could see that it worked for him and Jimmy Buckley became my new best friend. Unfortunately, none of his success with the girls rubbed off on me – although I was so desperate by now I would have taken even his rejects. But I did notice that he didn’t seem bothered who he went with and, in due course, neither was Alfie. I, on the other hand, have turned out to be quite fussy.

In the end it wasn’t Jimmy Buckley who led me towards the promised land, it was another friend who invited me to his sixteenth birthday party. I wasn’t drinking at that point and I was sitting morosely in the kitchen, nursing my lemonade and watching all my friends get hammered when the back door opened and my friend’s auntie beckoned me out into the garden. She was drunk, too, but far from incapable, although mysteriously she did appear to have lost her skirt. I made a half-hearted gentlemanly attempt to help her find it, but after a bit it didn’t seem to matter any more. As I bowled back home with a whole new spring in my step, I couldn’t believe my luck – so that was what it was all about!

I may have been gaining an education in some of the most fundamental aspects of life, but school continued to fail to capture my interest and I don’t know who was more relieved, me or the headmaster, when I left Wilson’s at the age of sixteen with a handful of passes in my final exams. I was free at last to pursue my show business dream.

My first job was as an office boy for Frieze Films – a film company, certainly, but a highly specialised one, in this case offering eight millimetre tourist films of London and, at weekends, Jewish weddings. As a consequence, I was the only boy at Clubland who knew all the words to ‘Hava Nagila’. One Sunday evening we were filming a wedding cabaret featuring a band called Eddie Calvert and his Golden Trumpet. Everything was going according to plan. We dimmed the lights, the bride clutched the groom’s hand, a ripple of excitement ran through the guests and Eddie Calvert himself began to emerge from beneath the stage playing – yes – ‘Hava Nagila’ on his Golden Trumpet. I was in charge of the lighting, and, anxious to capture this climax to the evening on film, I plugged in all the lights again. Every fuse in the building blew at once, the room was plunged into darkness and Eddie Calvert was left stranded in mid-ascent, chin at stage level, still blowing his Golden Trumpet. I was fired on the spot.

My next job lasted far less time. I was still an office boy but I had moved a little closer to Hollywood. The J. Arthur Rank Organisation was the biggest film company in Britain and, surely, I thought, with all those producers and casting directors going in and out of their Mayfair offices, I would be talent-spotted. In fact the place was like a morgue and, even worse, it was a morgue with rules. When I first started, my boss took me aside and explained that Mr Rank was a strict Methodist and consequently there was a long list of things employees were forbidden to do, including smoking. I’d just taken it up and wasn’t going to abandon the pleasure for anyone, so I took to going down to the gents and lighting a fag whenever I had a free moment. A few weeks or so after I began, I was just sitting there, minding my own business, having a quick drag, when there was a sudden bang on the toilet door. ‘You! Whoever’s in there! Come out – you’re fired!’

After this episode it turned out that it would be me doing the firing for a while. The British government had established national service in the aftermath of the war and every eighteen-year-old boy was required to learn to defend his country, for two years. When I look back I can see that the two things in my life that should have been unpleasant actually formed me as a person – one was evacuation, the other was national service. There were some good and some very bad aspects to both of these experiences, but I can’t deny their impact on me. I don’t think anyone should be subjected to an involuntary two years in the services and certainly should never be sent into combat as I was, but I do think kids these days should be given six months’ training in the Forces to learn discipline and be taught how to use weapons properly in the defence of their country. I am sure the experience would change them so that when they come out they would feel they belong and that they have a God-given right to be here.

In my day it was considerably less enlightened than that. I was subjected to eight weeks of boot camp courtesy of the Queen’s Royal Regiment in Guildford, which involved hours of senseless square-bashing and, when not marching, running round the barracks at the double or cleaning and polishing useless bits of equipment. This reached a peak of absurdity just before a visit to the barracks by Princess Margaret when I was ordered to join a detail whitewashing a pile of coal. Mad, I know, but it will be no surprise to anyone else who’s been through national service. And it gets worse: just before the princess arrived, the sergeant in charge noticed that although we had swept the parade ground earlier, leaves were continuing to drift down from the trees. It was early autumn; this was not unexpected. ‘Get up them trees and start shaking!’ the sergeant screamed at me. ‘I want every leaf off and on the ground and swept up before midday!’ A lifetime later, I went to Princess Margaret’s house on the island of Mustique for lunch, and when I arrived I found her scooping the leaves off the top of her swimming pool with a big net. I told her this story and she said with a wry smile, ‘I always wondered why autumn had come so early to Surrey…’ But I never found out what she thought about that unusual seam of white coal…

After training, the government informed me that they desperately needed my help to occupy Germany, which I did for a year. They then informed me that unless I signed on for another year, I would be sent to Korea to fight communism and defend the capitalist system on a wage of four shillings a day. I couldn’t help feeling that someone who was fighting to save capitalism should be paid more than four shillings a day but, more than that, I bitterly resented being bossed about. I was known as ‘Bolshie’ by the officers because as well as helping the guys with reading and writing letters home (a lot of my intake were pretty well illiterate), I was the person everyone came to for advice about the letter of the law – I knew every army rule backwards and forwards and I knew just how far we could go. As a result I spent over a year on more or less continuous punishment duty (including being made to scrape the guardroom floor clean with razor blades), and although it has turned me into the best potato peeler ever, the thought of another year of it was more than I could face, so I took the Korea option.

Korea turned out to be the most frightening and also the most important experience of my life and I was lucky to stay alive. When I did get back, Dad welcomed me home, but we’d never talked about what he’d gone through in the Second World War and he never asked me about Korea. Old soldiers never do. His attitude was, ‘Now you’re a man, you understand,’ but it was unspoken. We were now on the same level. He didn’t want to talk about his war because he would never have wanted to come across as the big hero, and neither did I. There are no heroes in war: it’s just a question of doing a job and surviving. And all I know is that surviving Korea made me all the more determined to make my dream of becoming an actor come true.

Working in a butter factory may not seem the most obvious first step to stardom, but opportunities were few and far between after I was demobbed. It was 1952 and butter was still rationed. I was put alongside a little old man and we were given the job of mixing the different qualities of butter together to make one big glob. God forbid you should have different qualities of butter available. One day we were mixing away and the old man said out of the blue: ‘You don’t want to do this all your life, do you?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘Well, what do you want to do?’ he persisted. ‘I want to be an actor,’ I said, and waited for him to crack up like they usually did. But he didn’t laugh. Instead he said, ‘And how are you going to do that?’ I shrugged. ‘Don’t know,’ I mumbled, turning back to the butter. ‘You want to get The Stage,’ he said. ‘They advertise for actors in the back of the newspaper. My daughter’s a semi-professional singer and she gets a lot of work that way. Go down to Solosy’s, the newsagents in Charing Cross Road – they stock it.’

The next Saturday I was outside Solosy’s when it opened. Five minutes later I was round the corner, sitting on a bench in Leicester Square looking at an advertisement for an Assistant Stage Manager (‘plus minor acting roles’) for a small theatre company based in Horsham, Sussex. By Monday I had sent off my application (in what I hoped would be the less risible name of ‘Michael Scott’), including a hastily taken photograph of me in which I appeared to be wearing lipstick. The following week I found myself sitting in the office of the owner and director of the company, Mr Alwyn D. Fox. He seemed to be a bit disappointed. ‘You’re nothing like your photograph, are you?’ he said. Ah, I understood. I was twenty years old, six foot two, with long blond curly hair and the remnants of a tan I had acquired on the boat back from Korea, but I was categorically and unmistakably butch. ‘Edgar!’ Alwyn D. Fox suddenly shrieked. From out of an inner office emerged a man even smaller and more delicate than Mr Fox. The two of them stood side by side, hands on hips, gazing at me. ‘Oh, I think he’ll do,’ said Edgar eventually. And I was hired.

One of the upsides of working in a largely gay company was that, with less competition around, my sex life increased dramatically. Another was that I got given most of the butch minor roles to cut my teeth on. My very first role as a professional actor was as the policeman who comes along at the end of the play to arrest the villain who has been discovered by the posh, effete amateur detective. I can’t remember the name of the play, or who wrote it, but I can remember my one line – ‘Come along with me, sir,’ – which is all the more remarkable after nearly fifty years, since I forgot it at the time. The problem was that – yes, again – I had forgotten to do my flies up and so when I went on, the audience fell about, which threw me completely. One of the actors helpfully whispered my words to me but I couldn’t hear what he said and asked, crossly, and in my normal speaking voice, ‘What?’ Another gale of laughter – and I was banned from performing for the next three weeks.

Now I look back, I realise I learnt a huge amount from Alwyn D. Fox and my time in Horsham. Of course I always now check my flies before each take, but I also always bring a pencil to rehearsals so I can take notes on the moves. (‘The first thing you need to become an actor is a pencil!’ Alwyn screamed at me the first day.) He also drummed into me the importance of speaking clearly. During my very first rehearsal he stopped me mid speech and pointed to the balcony. ‘The person sitting at the back there,’ he said, ‘has paid to hear every word you have to say and every gesture you have to make.’ He was right. He was right, too, about something else. In one play we did, I was playing a scene in which my character was not on speaking terms with the rest of the cast. I had to sit in a corner, downstage. One night, one of the old ladies in the audience took pity on me and leant out of her seat, over the footlights and offered me a caramel. I took it and nodded my thanks. The minute we’d taken the last curtain call, Alwyn rounded on me. ‘How dare you break the fourth wall!’ The fourth wall? What on earth was he talking about? ‘The fourth wall!’ he went on, working himself up into a frenzy. ‘It’s the invisible fourth wall between us and the audience and if you break it the magic of theatre is completely destroyed!’

The sort of training I had in rep has more or less disappeared for young actors. TV is the training ground now, and that work just didn’t exist when I started in the business. But I still think that if you’re going to be any good at comedy you do have to do live theatre, or you can’t time laughs. When you make a movie or a TV series there’s no audience response to test yourself against, so I always make sure I speak as loudly as I can in rehearsal and then check the reaction of the technicians. If they laugh – and they’ve seen it all before – then I know I’m doing the right thing.

In the end I did nine years of theatre rep, rather than the three years of training that students get at RADA. There’s no doubt in my mind that RADA offers amazing opportunities to its students. At the end of the courses they do these show pieces and agents and casting directors all come along. I never had that sort of chance and I think it’s great that kids these days do – and kids from all sorts of backgrounds, too. I gave a speech to the graduating year at RADA the other day and I told this joke. Two actors meet and one says in a posh voice, ‘Oh, hellair! How are you?’ And the other says, ‘I’m not too good.’ ‘Why? What’s the matter?’ asks the posh one. And his friend says, ‘I can’t get any work ’cos I’ve got this, y’know, workin’ class accent. It’s all right for you,’ he says, ‘you talk posh.’ ‘No, listen,’ says the posh one. ‘You can’t get a job because you’ve got a Cockney accent? Well, let me tell you something – I’m a Cockney, too.’ And the other one says, ‘What?’ And the posh one says, ‘Yes. What I say to you is that you should go to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and learn to speak properly like what I done!’ Standing there at RADA, looking down at all those hopefuls in the audience, I felt rather envious – at their age I would have loved to have been in their shoes. After all, what did I gain from those nine years in rep that I couldn’t have learned in college? I survived. Someone once asked me what my greatest talent as an actor was, and I said, ‘Survival – I’ll still be here when I’m seventy.’ Well, as I write, I’m seventy-seven…

Although I was learning the craft of acting fast at Horsham, I still suffered from acute stage fright and kept a bucket in the wings into which I would throw up each time I went on. By now I had progressed to bigger parts but I still felt sick and soon nausea was joined by violent attacks of shivering, which got worse and worse over the weeks. We were playing Wuthering Heights and in a spectacular piece of miscasting, I was acting the drunken, shambolic Hindley Earnshaw against Alwyn D. Fox’s tiny and delicate friend Edgar, who had been cast as the powerful brute Heathcliff. The magic of theatre remained surprisingly intact until it came to the fight scene in which Heathcliff has to beat Hindley Earnshaw to a pulp, when the fourth wall came crashing down spectacularly. The problem was that, by the end of a week of this I was shivering and shaking so hard that even if the roles had been reversed Edgar would have won hands down – and during the Saturday matinee, I collapsed.

It was cerebral malaria. Not something you would associate with Sussex, and you would be right. It seemed that Korea was determined not to let me go. When I was finally released from hospital and sent back home to my mother I had lost over forty pounds, my clothes hung off my body and my face had gone a terrible yellow colour. I had been told that my type of malaria was incurable, that I would have to take pills for the rest of my life and that that life would probably not last more than another twenty years. Since it was clear that Hollywood was no longer a possibility, as soon as I could I rang up Alwyn. ‘Well – where have you been?’ he demanded. ‘We thought you’d abandoned us!’ I was so overwhelmed, I started crying. ‘I should warn you,’ I said, gulping back tears, ‘I don’t look the same.’ ‘Oh, don’t I know it!’ he said. ‘I came to see you in hospital. Never mind – we’ll do a season of horror plays.’

In fact I had only been back in Horsham a few weeks when I was summoned back to hospital. The army had found a tropical diseases expert who had come up with a cure for my particular type of malaria and I was to be part of proving him right. I wasn’t the only one. When I arrived on the ward I found all my mates from the unit – and every one of them had turned the colour of a daffodil. We were strapped to our beds for ten days because the medicine we were given made our blood so heavy that if we moved, we would knock ourselves unconscious. I never found out exactly what it was that Colonel Solomons gave us to put us right, but I’m still here, I’m no longer yellow and the reason I leave England in the winter is because I never want to shiver again.

As soon as I’d fully recovered I rang Alwyn again to find out if the job was still open but while I’d been in hospital the company had folded. I never saw Alwyn or Edgar again – although years later, when I was in Beverly Hills, I got a letter from a social worker in Hammersmith, London. He said he had an old man called Alwyn D. Fox lying destitute in one of his wards. Mr Fox, he said, was claiming he had discovered Michael Caine. In all likelihood it was fantasy, but if there was any truth in it, would I mind writing Mr Fox a letter and perhaps sending a small amount of money to make his last few weeks a bit easier? I wrote at once to confirm Alwyn’s story and enclosed a cheque for five thousand dollars. Two weeks later I had another letter from the social worker, returning the cheque. Alwyn had been delighted to get my letter, he wrote, and had spent the day he received it showing it to everyone on the ward. He had died later that night.

No Alwyn Fox meant no job for me, so I headed back to Solosy’s to pick up another copy of The Stage. My time at Horsham meant that I had left the Assistant Stage Manager category behind and could now (with a certain amount of artistic licence) call myself an ‘experienced juvenile’. Unfortunately, my artistic licence extended a bit too far and I added the part of ‘George’ from George and Margaret, a popular play that would have been the next production at Horsham, to my list of parts. When I got to one audition, in a theatre in the east-coast town of Lowestoft, I was taken aback to find that the seventy-year-old director seemed a bit hostile. ‘It says here, you played George in George and Margaret,’ he said. Something was clearly not right. ‘Well, I did,’ I retorted, determined to stick to the story. ‘Well, you’re a bloody liar!’ he roared. ‘You’ve never even seen the play – or you’d know that the cast spends two hours waiting for George and Margaret to turn up and they never do!’

In spite of this – perhaps he liked the way I’d acted so indignant – I got the job. I learnt a great deal from this wily old man. Three pieces of advice in particular have always stuck in my mind. In one play I did in Lowestoft I was cast as a drunkard and at the first rehearsal I came rolling onto the stage and staggered about. The director held up his hand to stop proceedings. ‘What do you think you are doing?’ he demanded. Feeling rather aggrieved, I said, ‘I’m playing a drunk.’ ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘You are playing a drunk – I am paying you to be a drunk. A drunk is a man who is trying to act sober; you are a man who is trying to act drunk. It’s the wrong way round.’ Spot on. Another time I was on stage, but not speaking. The director held up his hand and said, again, ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ ‘Nothing!’ I replied. ‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘You may not have any lines, you are on stage and you are listening to what’s being said and in fact you have wonderful things to say, but you have just decided not to say them. You are every bit as much part of the action as the people who are speaking. Half of acting is listening – and the other half is reacting to what’s been said.’ Spot on. I also remember a scene in which I had to cry. I thought it was going very well, but again the director stopped me with the line I was hearing rather too frequently for my liking. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he shouted. ‘Crying,’ I said, rather offended that he appeared unmoved by my performance. ‘No, you’re not!’ he said. ‘You’re an actor trying to cry. A real man is someone who is trying desperately not to cry.’ Spot on, again.

I was keen enough to abide by the rules of theatre when it came to acting but I was determined not to let my lowly status as juvenile lead interfere with my love life. I had fallen in love with an impossible dream – Lowestoft’s leading lady, Patricia Haines. Pat was absolutely gorgeous, two years older than me, light years away in sophistication and a brilliant actress who didn’t have to add any extra parts to her CV. However, although she was always polite, she didn’t seem to have really noticed me at all, in fact she didn’t seem to have noticed that the company even had a new juvenile lead, no matter how often I hung around casting meaningful glances in her direction.

Things went on this way for a couple of weeks and then, one night after the show, one of the actors gave a party. As usual, Pat was the centre of attention. As usual, she acknowledged me with a brief smile and then ignored me. Realising my love for her was forever doomed to be unrequited, I settled down to concentrate on getting thoroughly plastered. I sat there alone all night, mired in misery, until the party began to fold. Just as I was contemplating an unsteady return to my lonely digs, I heard a voice from behind me. ‘Are you shy?’ I jerked round to see Pat standing there, all five feet nine of her (plus her three-inch heels). ‘Shy?’ I lurched to my feet, spilling my drink down my trousers. ‘Me? What makes you say that?’ She was a blunt Northern lass. ‘Because I can see you fancy me and you’ve not even tried to make a pass.’ A pass? Was she mad? Me, make a pass at Pat Haines? I wobbled there for a moment, intoxicated not just with cheap beer but by her closeness and the smell of her perfume, and then I took the plunge. What did I have to lose, after all? With all the confidence I could muster from all the Bogart films I had ever seen, I looked her straight in the eyes. ‘I’m in love with you,’ I said. There was absolute silence for a minute. The blood was pumping through my head so strongly I had to lean forward to catch her reply. ‘I know,’ she said with a smile. ‘And I’m in love with you, too.’ This time I knew just what to do. I leant forward and kissed her.

Pat and I were married a few weeks later in Lowestoft. Pat’s parents, Claire and Reg, came down from Sheffield and although they made the best of things, it was clear that they thought the marriage wouldn’t last.

And of course they were right. We left Lowestoft for London but it was a very hard first few months. We were renting a small flat in Brixton from my Aunt Ellen, the first person in our family to own their own house, and it was just as well she let us have it cheap, because neither of us was making it big. After a very dry period in which I only got a few walk-on parts in television, I gave up looking for acting work and took a series of dead-end jobs to support Pat while she pushed on with her career. It was soul-destroying – and it was about to get even more difficult, because Pat became pregnant. Our beautiful daughter Dominique was born to a father who simply wasn’t ready for her and couldn’t support her and under the strain our marriage broke down and I walked out. Pat took Dominique back to her family in Sheffield and Claire and Reg took on the job of bringing her up. I was in despair: I had no money, I was out of work and I had abandoned my wife and child. At twenty-three, I felt I had failed my family and myself and I was almost suicidal with worry.

I moved back to the prefab. Things were bad at home, too. Dad had rheumatism of the spine and could no longer work so I got a job in a steelyard to bring in some money. It was mercilessly hard physical labour – the hardest I’d ever done – and bitterly cold. Meanwhile, Dad’s back pain was worsening and the doctor told me (but not him) that in fact he had liver cancer and would only live another few weeks. I watched as this strong, vital man faded away in front of my eyes until the day I carried him out of the house to the ambulance waiting to take him to St Thomas’ Hospital to die.

I will never forget those last two days of my father’s life. He was in agony. I begged the doctor to give him an overdose of painkillers. At first he refused but when I pointed out that death could hardly be worse than the living hell Dad was going through, he looked at me for a moment and then said, ‘Why don’t you go now? Come back at eleven o’clock tonight.’ When I returned that night, Dad was much calmer and I sat with him holding his hand. I squeezed it now and again, and now and again he would squeeze back. We sat there like that for two hours, and just as Big Ben, which I could see from the window, struck one o’clock, Dad opened his eyes. ‘Good luck, son’ he said, quite clearly, and then he died.

When they turned out my father’s pockets at the hospital, all they found was three shillings and eightpence. Three shillings and eightpence was all he had after fifty-six years of hard manual labour. As I walked out of that ward I determined that I would make something of myself – and that my family would never be poor again.

Everybody gets a break now and again and it sometimes doesn’t come the way you might expect. Who would have thought that it was my experiences as a soldier in Korea that would lead to my first exposure to the movie business?

My mum had had a small insurance policy – twenty-five pounds – on my father’s life and seeing what a terrible state I was in, she cashed it in and told me to go away and sort myself out. It was typically generous of my mum – who had so little money herself – and because I had fallen in love with the idea of Paris after reading a memoir called Springtime In Paris by the American writer Elliot Paul, Paris was where I chose to go. My return fare from London, Victoria, was seven pounds and with what I had left I managed to afford – at least to start with – a crummy hotel in the Rue de la Huchette, which was where Elliot Paul had stayed. Not having any money, I had to walk everywhere, but I was just out of the army and still very fit and in any case Paris is the best city to walk around in the whole world. For a couple of months I walked all over it, sat at cafés on the pavements just watching people go by and vowing that one day I would come back and do the whole place in style. My money soon ran out, but I survived on little bits of luck. I learnt to cook French fries on the pavement on the Boulevard Clichy, Paris’s main street of vice at the time. The man who taught me sold hot dogs and I sold my ‘frites for a franc’ next to him. After I could no longer afford the hotel, I slept at the old air terminal in the centre of Paris. I had my bag with me and a discarded air ticket I had found so I looked like a passenger who had missed a flight. Breakfast was free, supplied by a sympathetic American student who ran the early morning shift in the terminal café, and he also kept my bag for me during the days so I could walk about unencumbered. I know you are supposed to fall in love in Paris – it is one of the most romantic cities in the world after all – but there didn’t seem to be much enthusiasm for a sad, broke, unemployed young Englishman among the women I met. I may not have fallen in love with a woman, but I did fall in love with Paris herself and my time there sparked in me a life-long love of the city.

It also did the trick. I stayed there for several weeks until I felt able to go home, and when I did get back to the Elephant, it was to be greeted by my mother with a kiss, a cuddle and a tear and the news that I’d got a job. I started to cry myself because there was a telegram waiting from my agent offering me a small part, plus the role of technical advisor, on a film called A Hill in Korea. The film was being shot on location in Portugal and in the Shepperton film studios and they would pay me £100 a week for eight weeks. This was untold riches! But there was a problem: the film was a month and a half away, Pat needed money to support herself and the baby and there was no chance of me getting a job for just six weeks. Once again Mum came to the rescue and took all her savings – £400 – out of the post office. ‘You can pay me back later,’ she said. As ever, there was nothing she wouldn’t do for Stanley or me.

Once I’d got past my dodgy debut performance I had never had any trouble remembering two hours of dialogue on stage. In A Hill in Korea I managed to forget just eight lines – and I only had to deliver them at the rate of one a week. Filming a take is completely unlike acting in the theatre; most of the time is spent co-ordinating the filming equipment, for a start. By the time the director, Julian Aymes, shouted, ‘Action’ I was a complete bundle of nerves and it didn’t help to overhear one of the cameramen muttering, ‘It’s only one fucking line!’

If my film debut wasn’t going as well as I’d hoped, I felt on much surer ground as a technical advisor. After all, I was the only person on the set who’d set foot in bloody Korea. But no one seemed to want to know. No one understood what we’d been doing there – in fact it often seemed as if no one knew we had even been there. Whenever I’ve mentioned it to American friends, they are completely taken aback. ‘The British were in Korea?’ And it wasn’t just us Brits. I was in a division that also included Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans, not that anyone seemed to care. I’ve got a lot of sympathy for soldiers. I know what it feels like to be sent off to fight an unpopular war that no one at home really understands or cares about and then to come back and meet a complete lack of understanding – or, worse, indifference – to what you’ve been through.

I’m very anti-war. I see these young men going off to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan and I know what’s coming to them. I can’t watch the news of army casualties; I have to turn the TV off when it comes on because it’s just too sad. Like many of them, I was only nineteen when I was sent off to Korea with the Royal Fusiliers and probably like many of those going off to Afghanistan, I’d never heard of the place. My basic national service training had consisted of learning to shoot a 303 Lee Enfield rifle (obsolete by the end of the Second World War), and how to fire a Sten gun. This machine gun had a major design fault: it either jammed after the first three rounds or kept blasting even with your finger off the trigger. That happened to one of my mates at the firing range and the idiot turned around to ask the sergeant what to do, still holding his gun, spraying bullets in all directions. You’ve never seen a bunch of squaddies hit the floor so fast.

But no training could have prepared me for the real thing, for my first time on guard duty in a trench, for the absolute darkness of the Korean night, for the first time the flares go up – and above all for the first time I saw hordes of the enemy charging towards me. In fact I felt far more hostility towards the rats that infested our bunker than I did for the Chinese soldiers we were supposed to be fighting. I will never forget standing on night duty daydreaming, as usual, that I was acting a major part in a heroic war film, when I was interrupted by the blast of a trumpet. ‘What the fuck is that?’ I shouted at my mate Harry. Before he could reply with the obvious, the entire valley erupted with the sound of not just one but hundreds of trumpets, the searchlights sprang into life and there, in front of us, a terrifying tableau was illuminated: thousands of Chinese advancing towards our positions led by a troop of demonic trumpet players. The artillery opened up, but still they came on, marching towards our machine guns and certain death. The protective minefields we sheltered behind suddenly seemed irrelevant: the first wave of Chinese committed suicide by hurling themselves onto our barbed wire so their bodies could be used as a bridge for the troops following. Eventually they were beaten off, but they were insanely brave.

It seems to me that the people who send you to war are too old to go themselves – or know better. The sergeants who trained us told stories of incredible bravery during the Second World War but by the time we’d actually got to Korea they had all mysteriously disappeared and suddenly it was some of us young guys who were made sergeants. Not me – I was lucky to make private. But then, I think that going to war ages you. When we were marching out of the line, having been there for a year, we were nearly twenty. On the way back we passed the regiment that was taking over from us. They were nineteen-year-olds, as we had been when we went in and I looked at them, and I looked at us, and we looked ten years older than they did. They looked like young boys; we looked like young men.

The closest I got to death – and the incident that still haunts my dreams from time to time – was a night-time observation patrol in no-man’s-land. Three of us – my platoon commander Robert Mills (who later became an actor, too), a wireless operator and me – were sent down the valley, faces blackened with mud and covered in mosquito repellent, to the very edge of the Chinese lines. Madness. It could have got even madder. As we squatted in a rice paddy, insects eating us alive, Bobbie Mills, who was the son of a general, had an idea. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘we’ll grab ourselves a Chinese prisoner! I’ll give you a fiver each.’ I stared at him. He’d spotted my mercenary streak, but he had seriously misjudged my interest in a futile gesture. ‘Are you off your fucking head?’ I hissed. He looked hurt. ‘Does that mean you won’t come with me?’ ‘Too fucking right,’ the wireless operator and I said together. ‘In that case,’ he said as if he was depriving us of a great treat, ‘we’ll just have to go back.’ We were halfway up the hill again, moving cautiously, when we suddenly caught the whiff of garlic – the Chinese ate garlic like chewing gum – and realised we were being followed. Just in time, we threw ourselves on to the ground as a troop of Chinese soldiers emerged from the long grass and began searching for us. I lay there, absolutely terrified, my hand on the trigger of my gun, with the enemy circling so close we could hear them talking. I was conscious of a growing fury – I was going to die before I’d even had a chance to live, before I’d had a chance to do all the things I wanted to do, before I’d had a chance to realise even one of my dreams. I decided I had nothing further to lose; if I was going to die, then I was taking a lot of Chinese with me. I was not alone: the three of us were gripped with a new sense of purpose. We would not run back to our own lines, Bobbie Mills said, we would charge the enemy, all guns blazing, and take them by surprise. This time, we were all agreed. ‘I need a piss,’ said the wireless operator. We were all agreed on that, too, and knelt there in the undergrowth and all peed together. Then we got to our feet and hurled ourselves into the night. The Chinese began firing in all directions, but they had no idea where we were coming from and we just kept running towards the enemy lines until it felt safe to change direction and head back to our own. Somehow we got back in one piece – but it was a close-run thing.

I don’t wake up in the night in a sweat reliving this incident, but it does come back to me at moments of difficulty, particularly when someone is looking to attack me or do me down. And I just think – as I did on that Korean hillside – you cannot frighten me, or do anything to me, and if you try I’ll take as much or as many of you with me as I can, even if I lose in the process. If you leave me alone, I’m great – but just don’t start…

A Hill in Korea was nothing like the real thing, but no one seemed to be interested in that. George Baker, now better known as Inspector Wexford in the Ruth Rendell mysteries, was sent into battle wearing an officer’s hat and badges to mark him out as the star of the film. I pointed out that he’d have been marked out as a prime target by the snipers in a real war and wouldn’t have lasted ten seconds in a proper advance, but I was ignored. I was ignored, too, when I suggested that the troops should fan out during the advance to maximise their fire coverage. No, they would have to huddle up, I was told, because the camera lens wasn’t wide enough. I was about to venture the opinion that Korea actually looked more like Wales than Portugal, but held my tongue – after all, where would you rather film on location?

Although on the whole Portugal rekindled very few nightmares of Korea, I was faced with one constant reminder of my time on that terrible front line: garlic. The food in the hotel was swimming in oil and garlic, and night after night I would send back my meal until there wasn’t a trace of it left. This infuriated my fellow actor Robert Shaw and one night, after we’d all had a few too many bottles of wine, he’d had enough. ‘Eat your food, you fucking Cockney Philistine! You’ll never have eaten anything as good as this!’ he shouted. I had no idea what a Philistine was, but I understood he had just insulted my mum’s cooking and I leapt across the table and grabbed him by the shirtfront. ‘Who do you think you’re fucking talking to?’ I snarled. All hell broke loose as we lashed out at each other – wine was spilt, food was spilt, the waiters went flying – it was a proper, old-fashioned bar room brawl. Of course, now I know Robert was absolutely right, and I use olive oil and garlic in my cooking all the time – but now and again, off guard, I catch a slight whiff and I’m back there in that rice paddy. You never really forget.

Once home I paid my mother back, moved into a bedsitter and had enough money left over to get to Sheffield to see Dominique, who was now an enchanting one-year-old. Pat had gone back to acting and her parents were raising our daughter – and doing a superb job. Claire and Reg were very welcoming to me and I will always be grateful to them for all they did for Dominique. I felt relieved that they had stepped in to rescue us and promised to visit as often as I could. And on the train back to London I even allowed myself to relax and believe that my problems were over.

Of course, they weren’t. My agent, Jimmy Fraser, saw the finished film of A Hill in Korea and promptly dropped me. To be fair, he’d seemed a bit reluctant to take me on in the first place. ‘You’ve got something, Michael,’ he said when I first visited him in his grand offices on Regent Street. ‘For the life of me I can’t see what it is, and I haven’t a clue how to sell it, but I’ll take you on for a bit and see if it becomes a bit clearer.’ Well, things did seem to have become clearer. If I didn’t dye my fair eyelashes and eyebrows, he said, I’d never get anywhere. He wasn’t right about that, as it turned out, but he was right about my performance in A Hill in Korea. In the few scenes of mine that had survived the cutting room, I was terrible. Not that anyone much ever got to see it: with superb timing it was released the night we invaded Suez.

After Jimmy dumped me I found another agent, Josephine Burton, but the jobs didn’t exactly come thick and fast and I had to go back to living with Mum and Stanley. There was no film work on the horizon but I did get a part in one of the legendary Joan Littlewood’s shows with Theatre Workshop in the East End. All the other members of the company were committed Communists. I’d propped up capitalism in Korea; now I had a chance to see how the other side worked. I wasn’t very impressed: the wages were less than I’d been earning at Horsham, and the dialogue struck me as very unnatural. But then I didn’t have a clue who the proletariat were – and was very surprised to find out I was one of them.

It soon became clear that Joan did not believe I was suited to Method Acting, the form pioneered by the Russian Konstantin Stanislavsky to which she had dedicated her life. In fact I later based all my acting on it and its basic principle that the rehearsal is the ‘work’ and the performance is the relaxtion – which is ideal for the movies. But at the time, Joan was blunt about my shortcomings. ‘Get off!’ she said to me as soon as I appeared on stage for the first rehearsal. ‘And come on again.’ I did as I was asked. ‘No!’ she said when I reappeared. ‘I’m not having it.’ I had no idea what she was talking about. ‘Not having what?’ I asked. ‘That star nonsense!’ she said. ‘This is group theatre.’ I tried my best to blend in with the rest of the cast, but Joan was never convinced. When the production ended she sacked me with what, when I look back on it, was an unintended compliment, ‘Piss off to Shaftesbury Avenue,’ she said with contempt. ‘You’ll only ever be a star.’

Joan may have thought I was destined for stardom, but no one else seemed to agree. The next few months and years were very hard. I used to hang about a casting agency just off Trafalgar Square run by a man called Ronnie Curtis, waiting to see if I could get the odd walk-on part – play, TV, film, I didn’t care. On one occasion I got a job just because I happened to fit the policeman’s uniform the film company had already got in their wardrobe. When I wasn’t in work (which was most of the time) and couldn’t stand sitting around in Ronnie’s office any longer, I’d go to the places where all the other young, unemployed actors used to hang out – the café under the Arts Theatre in Sackville Street, the Salisbury pub in St Martin’s Lane, the Legrain coffee shop in Soho, or Raj’s (illegal) afternoon drinking club. There was great comfort in knowing it was just as tough for everyone else but it was a soul-destroying time. And it wasn’t just the lack of jobs – every time I was rejected at an audition I had to pick myself back up and start again. Occasionally people have criticised the sums of money I’ve made from movies – well, I always think back to the ten years of hard work, of misery, of poverty and uncertainty I had to go through to get started. As an out-of-work actor I couldn’t rent a room, borrow money from the bank or get insurance. It’s not surprising so many eventually decide they can’t take it any more.

I was nearly one of them. One night, when I really was on the verge of finally giving up the struggle, I placed my regular phone call to Josephine. Every evening at six o’clock, all of us young hopefuls would rush to the phone boxes in Leicester Square to call our agents to see if any jobs had come in that day. Usually there was nothing going, but this time Josephine had some good news: she’d managed to get me a small part in a TV play of The Lark by Jean Anouilh – courtesy of Julian Aymes, the director of A Hill in Korea, who had asked for me. There was one problem – I’d have to become a member of the actors’ trades union Equity and there was already an actor on their books with my stage name, Michael Scott. Josephine said I’d have to change my name in the next half hour so she could send the contract back. I put down the phone and went and sat down on a bench in the middle of Leicester Square. It was – as now – the venue for all the premiere movie releases. I looked around at all the cinemas, at all the stars up there with their names in lights, and tried to imagine myself alongside them. Michael—? And then I saw it. Humphrey Bogart, my favourite actor, my hero, was starring in The Caine Mutiny. Caine – because it was short, because it was easy to spell, because I was feeling very mutinous at the time – and because, like Cain in the Old Testament, I, too, was outside Paradise. Michael Caine I would be.