The Elephant to Hollywood (3 page)

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.