Michael Caine: The Elephant to Hollywood

If Chasen’s symbolised my Hollywood life and was the meeting place for so many of my LA friends, then Elaine’s was its New York equivalent. Elaine’s is more than a restaurant: it’s a New York institution, almost a salon. It was the perfect place to hold a book launch because it’s always been a place where writers, actors and directors gather, from Woody Allen to the people from Saturday Night Live . Elaine herself would flit from table to table making sure all her guests were all right. One night there was a guy bothering me and she came over and grabbed him by the collar and threw him out on the pavement – all on her own. I protested, ‘That’s a bit drastic – we could have got rid of him.’ And she said, ‘Nah – I don’t like those sons of bitches!’ Elaine is a close friend and I have lunch with her on a Saturday when we’re in New York. It’s always caviar, which she pays for in cash that she keeps in her bra. She says, ‘I’ll get this,’ and she dives in and pulls out this wad of cash!

The party at Elaine’s was the last of the tour and from New York I went back home to England. I was absolutely shattered but scripts had arrived while I was away, it was time to get on with the day job. Eventually I picked myself up and sat down to read one. I was appalled. The part was very small, hardly worth doing at all. I sent it straight back to the producer, telling him what I thought of it. A couple of days later the man phoned me. ‘No, no – you’re not the lover , I want you to read the part of the father!’ I put the phone down and just stood there, shocked. The father ? Me? I headed into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. Yes, staring back at me was, indeed, the father – and so was someone else. In the mirror was a leading movie actor, not a movie star. I realised the only girl I’d ever get to kiss in a film again would be my daughter.

The difference between a leading movie actor and a movie star (apart from the money and the dressing room) is that when movie stars get a script they want to do, they change it to suit them. A movie star says, ‘I would never do that’ or ‘I would never say that’ and their own writers will add what they would do or say. When leading movie actors get a script they want to do, they change themselves to suit the script. But there’s another difference, and this was a difference I knew I could work with. A lot of movie stars can’t act and so when the big roles dry up they disappear, insisting they won’t play supporting parts. All leading movie actors have to act or they would vanish completely.

I had always known that this time would come. I was fifty-eight years old. Should I give up or keep going? Decision time. The question stayed with me for months. It stayed with me every morning as I opened the packets of crap, coffee-stained scripts with the pencil markings that other, younger actors had made before they turned the parts down. I could see that things were going to be different now, more difficult.

I had reached the period of my life I called the twilight zone. The spotlight of movie stardom was fading and although the slightly dimmer light of the leading movie actor was beginning to flicker into life, it all seemed very gloomy. There were some bright spots. Out of the blue I was made CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List – a great honour and a beautiful medal. I was now a Commander of the British Empire and very proud of it, although an unkind journalist pointed out that I’d been made a commander of something that no longer existed. So even the stuff that was going right for me wasn’t perfect…

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!’