The Elephant to Hollywood

by Michael Caine

  Even with the best script, the best co-star and a fabulous location, movies are never plain sailing. The first problem I encountered was my South African accent. I’d listened to and learnt the way white South Africans spoke on the set of Zulu, all those years ago, so I felt very confident when my language coach asked if I could do a South African accent and proudly showed her that I could. She listened for a moment and then looked at me. ‘That’s an English South African accent,’ she said. ‘De Klerk is a Boer.’ I struggled for weeks trying to identify the tiny differences between the two and in doing so made my second mistake. To help capture the nuances of his speech I studied every piece of film and newsreel in which de Klerk had ever appeared. In the end I thought I had captured him quite well, but after we had been shooting for a couple of weeks I finally met the man I had been impersonating and realised at once that I had missed a trick: De Klerk was a chain smoker. He lit cigarette after cigarette and smoked them incessantly – except when the cameras were pointing at him when he would drop the cigarette instantly and anywhere. It was his proud boast that he had never been photographed smoking.

  I had dinner with de Klerk one evening at his home, which was a very grand official residence. I asked him where President Mandela lived and he said that he lived round the corner in a smaller house. ‘But he’s the President,’ I said. ‘I know,’ de Klerk said, ‘but he didn’t want to live here because of its connections to apartheid and so I stayed on.’ I asked de Klerk how he got on with Mandela and his reply was a guarded one. They got on fine, he said, except for one moment at the ceremony in Sweden when they were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace prize. De Klerk told me that he was surprised and upset when, during his acceptance speech, Mandela made a personal attack on him. He looked at me in a rather sad and disillusioned way. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘I was the reason he was there in the first place.’ De Klerk reminded me a little of President Gorbachev of Russia: both were key players in the dismantling of ruthless and terrifying regimes and yet both were eventually sidelined by the onward march of the progress they had helped initiate.

  I never had the privilege of meeting Mandela – a man I greatly admire – but Sidney was lucky enough to. Unlike Sidney’s meeting with Jomo Kenyatta all those years ago when we were filming The Wilby Conspiracy in Kenya, President Mandela did know who he was and paid tribute to his contribution to the struggle for freedom. He even joked after they had shaken hands that he wouldn’t be washing his!

  It was to take another year for something else to attract my attention, but I spent the time happily involved in my restaurant business, working on the first draft of a novel (still not finished . . .), spending time with the family, cooking and gardening. Life was slower than it had been, but it was great – and I was biding my time. My patience paid off in the end and although it seemed that I still wasn’t flavour of the month in the movie business, eventually an interesting script did come along. It was another made-for-TV film, a remake of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. I was to play Captain Nemo and what really appealed about it was that the sea it was going to be twenty thousand leagues under, was off the Gold Coast of Australia.

  My whirlwind tour of Australia for What’s It All About? had really whetted my appetite for the country and this was a fantastic opportunity to go back and see what all the fuss was about. I wasn’t disappointed. The crew on the film, the people I met and the landscape were all wonderful and we had a great time shooting the movie. Among many highlights of my time there was the food. It was the best movie catering I’ve ever known – and I’m fussy about what I eat! They served a different menu every day for two months, which is almost unknown in an industry where the meals sometimes resemble British Army rations.

  We had a great place to stay, too; we rented a house right on the beach. I’ve lived in hot climates and I’ve lived by the sea and so I thought, lovely though it was, that I’d seen it all before. And I was right: the weather was amazing, the sea was as blue as any I’ve ever seen. But the people swimming in it were very different. Long before those of us who live in the northern hemisphere realised the danger of the sun’s rays, the Australians were being careful. The first time Shakira and I went for a stroll on the beach we stopped and stared in amazement: it was like a seaside painting from Victorian England. Everybody had covered as much of themselves as they possibly could and still walk and swim. And what little exposed flesh there was left was slathered in gallons of sun tan lotion. We did spot several bright red sunbathers in bikinis and Speedos, but of course these turned out to be recent British immigrants who weren’t having any truck with this nonsense about global warming and skin cancer. Even after my own experiences with sunburn in the army on the trip out to Korea, I was a bit sceptical about such extreme measures – well, I would be learning a lesson about that in due course . . .

  The next day we went for another walk and were confronted by an even more unexpected sight: a Japanese wedding party with the men in full morning dress – tails and top hats – and the bride and bridesmaids in all their regalia, being photographed on the beach. It looked most incongruous, but it was only the first of many as one wedding party after another posed on the sands. A local told me later that the reason so many Japanese come to Australia to get married is so that they can escape the huge expense of a full ceremony at home to which they would need to invite everyone in the community to avoid losing face.

  I was beginning to enjoy the straightforward attitude of the Australians I met. I’d decided to stop drinking for a few weeks – something I do occasionally – and went into a liquor store, or ‘grog shop’ as it was described on a sign outside. ‘Can I have some alcohol-free beer?’ I asked the assistant inside. He looked at me rather puzzled. ‘What for?’ he asked. A perfectly reasonable question, I thought, so I said, ‘I’m going on the wagon.’ ‘OK, mate,’ he said helpfully. ‘What you need to do is go next door to the supermarket and look under ‘lemonade’.’ Very sensible advice: I did, and there it was.

  This straightforward attitude carries over to food. It wasn’t only the movie catering that was excellent. We had some fantastic meals out while we were there, and I particularly enjoyed the Morton Bay Bugs – a delicious shellfish. I asked the waiter why something as good as that had such a basic name and – like my friend in the grog shop – he looked a bit puzzled for a minute and then said, ‘It’s because that’s what they are and that’s where they come from.’ Fair enough – you can’t argue with that! In fact, I was surprised by the quality and variety of Australian cuisine (I think I had been expecting some sort of old-fashioned duff English food), and I mentioned it to an Aussie restaurant owner I got talking to. ‘You Pommie bastards are all the same,’ he said. ‘You always underestimate us!’ I agreed with him and in return he assured me that ‘Pommie bastard’ was an affectionate description of the English (hmmm . . .). I told him I quite understood and we parted on excellent terms.

  For years after making Twenty Thousand Leagues I was puzzled as to why the young American actor who played the romantic lead – who was wonderful and very talented – hadn’t made it big. I was sure he would become a star as soon as the film was out, but nothing happened. I had forgotten all about him until I was in America a couple of years ago and suddenly he was everywhere: Grey’s Anatomy had become one of the most popular shows on TV and Patrick Dempsey one of its biggest stars. It proves again just how fluid the worlds of film and TV are – and I like to think it proves I know a star when I see one!

  After my travels to South Africa for the Mandela film and our trip to Australia for Twenty Thousand Leagues, plus a couple of trips to Miami, it was quite a relief to be back in England for a while. But I knew I needed a great part in a real movie, not a made-for-TV movie, and I needed it to be set in England because I was fed up with travelling. Actually, from where I was standing, it looked as if what I really needed was a miracle – and to my astonishment I got one.

  The bringer of my miracle was the American pr
oducer Harvey Weinstein who with his brother Bob ran the film company Miramax – charmingly named after their parents, Miriam and Max. Among other great films they had put together were Pulp Fiction and Shakespeare in Love so I was very excited when Harvey sent me the script for a movie called Little Voice.

  The star of Little Voice was a brilliant young actress called Jane Horrocks, who had had great success in the theatre with the same role. Not only was she a great actress, but Jane could also do incredible singing impersonations of stars like Edith Piaf, Marilyn Monroe, Shirley Bassey and Judy Garland – very much my era of music – which is all the more incredible because she is a tiny, slender woman whom you wouldn’t think would have the power. The playwright Jim Cartwright heard her doing these impressions as a warm-up before she went onstage in his play Road and then wrote a play around her talent, which he called The Rise and Fall of Little Voice. It was directed by Sam Mendes and it was such a hit in the West End that Harvey bought the movie rights. The story is about a talented but shy ‘little voice’ who is forced to perform by a sleazy agent, with disastrous consequences. I’d known a few sleazy agents in my time (none of them mine, I hasten to add), so I was very pleased to take the part of Ray Say and join a talented cast that included Brenda Blethyn, Jim Broadbent and Ewan McGregor, all of whom were excellent actors. It was a very different experience from the blockbusting Twenty Thousand Leagues and I sensed we were on to something good from the start.

  Off we went to Scarborough to film. A seaside town, in the north of England, in the winter – I know I’d said I wanted a film in England, but this was pushing things a bit far . . . But the work and the people were so great I put on an extra jumper or two and settled back into the pleasure of making a really good movie and found myself happier than I had been for some time.

  I was a bit taken aback by some of the nightlife in Scarborough, though. I have never thought of myself as someone who is easily shocked, but for the first time in my life I saw hordes of young women drunk out of their minds, stumbling about and spewing up every Saturday night I was there. I wasn’t used to drunken girls. In my day we used to try to ply girls with alcohol so we could have our wicked way with them; here they were doing it for themselves. But as far as I could see none of the men were able to take unfair advantage of the situation: they were so drunk themselves that they wouldn’t have been capable of having their wicked way with anything. I thought it was very sad and very unromantic. I was also astonished at the way, despite it being midwinter and absolutely freezing, none of the girls – drunk or sober – wore a coat. I asked one girl who was more or less upright and coherent why and she said that it was because they couldn’t afford to pay the cloakroom attendants in the clubs. It occurred to me that the girls who didn’t die from alcohol poisoning would probably die from pneumonia. I know public drunkenness is a common sight in towns all over the country now, but I had never seen it before and I was saddened by it.

  Drunk or sober, there’s no mistaking the northern sense of humour. On a rare day off, my little team – Jim, my assistant, Colin, my driver and Dave, my motor home driver, decided to drive to Whitby, where we had been told we could buy the best fish and chips anywhere. We found the shop, bought the fish and chips and ate them in the traditional way from their newspaper wrapping while walking around Whitby harbour. We had just rounded a corner – when we stopped, astonished. There, standing on the quayside and staring out into the harbour, was a crowd of about three hundred men dressed as Dracula. They were all shouting in unison, ‘It’s good to talk!’ at a small boat bobbing about with two people in it who seemed to be being filmed from a second boat off to one side. We couldn’t make head nor tail of it and nor could we see who was in the boat, so we went back to the fish and chip shop owner. He explained everything. Whitby was where Bram Stoker, the Victorian novelist and theatre manager, had written his famous story about Dracula. Unbeknownst to us we had come to the town on Stoker’s birthday and encountered a whole bunch of Dracula fans who had come to celebrate. Well, that seemed reasonable enough – but what were they shouting and why? That turned out to be simple, too. The boat had contained my old friend Bob Hoskins, who was most recently celebrated for his famous TV commercials for British Telecom in which his punchline was, ‘It’s good to talk.’ The Draculas were just taking the piss. You couldn’t make it up, could you?

  Little Voice was a great success both critically and financially – and for me it confirmed the establishment of my new career. I had needed two miracles really, to sort both home and career, and I was very happy and grateful for one – where, I wondered, was the other one going to come from?

  Back from Scarborough, I prowled round my house in Oxfordshire, cooking and gardening and visiting London less and less the further away it got. I scanned every paper looking for my dream house and read the usual bunch of crap scripts and waited for my agent to call. To really consolidate this new phase of my career, I needed a film that would work in America as well as Britain. In 1998 at least one of my prayers was answered with a script for a film version of John Irving’s great American classic The Cider House Rules. That was a strong enough pedigree to hook me in, but the director Lasse Hallstrom was also very talented, and the cast included Charlize Theron, who would go on to win an Oscar for Monster, Tobey Maguire who would become the hugely successful Spiderman, and my two cohort nurses Kathy Baker and Jane Alexander, both great actresses to work with. I play a doctor who runs an orphanage.

  The old adage about not working with animals or children is always trotted out, but I’ve done both and survived. In The Cider House Rules it was children and there were about a hundred of them and they were delightful – except for the babies. In movies there are strict rules for working with small babies: they can never work for more than half an hour and their eyes must be protected from the bright lights at all times so someone has to shade their eyes to prevent them from staring at the lights and burning their corneas. As a grandfather of two tiny babies, I understand all this, but it makes the acting quite hard work. As the acting time is so short companies usually cast identical twins, which sounds sensible but of the twins I worked with on Cider House one never stopped crying and the other never stopped laughing. If that wasn’t bad enough there was a strict lady inspector from the authorities looking over your shoulder the whole time, which could be a bit daunting.

  But I loved the movie – and I loved my part. Given the iconic one-liners from The Italian Job and Get Carter, I’m always on the alert for lines that will stick in people’s minds in the future and in The Cider House Rules I thought I spotted one quite early on in the line I say to the boys every night when I turn out the lights in the orphanage dormitory: ‘Goodnight, you Princes of Maine, you Kings of New England.’ It’s a line I love, and I’ve been proved right: American men often come up to me and say, ‘Do you know what I say to my boys just before they go to sleep?’ And I have to act surprised . . .

  One of the most enjoyable aspects of getting to my age in movies is watching all the young stars come up, and Charlize Theron is one of the most talented – and beautiful – of them all. She was a pleasure to work with on Cider House. We had to play a potentially embarrassing scene together in which my doctor character gives her an obstetric examination with her legs open and up on stirrups. We were all waiting to see how she would handle this and she did it in typical Charlize fashion. When the time came for the shoot, she got up on the stirrups, gave her wickedest smile and opened her legs to reveal the nastiest pair of old man’s underpants I have ever seen – although being Charlize, she still managed to look sexy in them!

  I have a list of younger actresses that I love to work with and Charlize is right at the top of it, along with Nicole Kidman, Beyoncé Knowles and Scarlett Johannson. They are all brilliantly talented, but they are also funny and they have the same kindness that I see and love in Shakira.

  I have always been fascinated by beautiful women. Right from when I was a little boy, long before it could have
been sexual, I was very aware of female beauty. I know that’s true of the majority of blokes, but there’s something else I think I respond to, though. I’ve met a lot of beautiful women who, if their souls were on their face, would be ugly. I always think that even if Shakira had an ugly face she would be beautiful, because her inner beauty shines out. And that’s often the case with female movie stars: some of them are not classically beautiful necessarily, but they have this wonderful quality of luminescence. Of course the reverse is true – I have met beautiful women who have not had that quality and it’s what stops them from making it in the movies. To become a really big female star, every man in the audience has to think: I bet she’d go out with me if I met her. Of course Garbo was a big star and no one would ever have thought she’d go out with them, but that’s unusual. Even Grace Kelly, who looked aloof, seemed approachable – she had a really warm face and you’d think: I bet she’d talk to me if we met. And it’s that warm quality that Charlize has got in spades – although, mind you, she managed to suppress it in her Oscar-winning portrayal of serial killer Aileen Wuornos in Monster. Now that was a truly chilling performance, she was brilliant.

  The Cider House Rules was relatively early on in Charlize’s career and the only chilling aspect to it was the weather. We shot the movie in the town of Northampton in Massachusetts and it was so cold that Shakira stayed in New York and I fled there to join her at every opportunity. There were other challenges, too, as well as keeping my blood temperature above freezing. As I had when I was filming The Mandela Story, I told my dialogue coach confidently that I had no problems with accents. ‘Go ahead,’ he said. So I gave him my vintage American accent and he laughed. ‘It’s great!’ he said. ‘But your accent is pure Californian – and you’re playing a New Englander in this movie.’ So it was back to the grindstone and I spent many hours working with him and listening to tapes and just walking round (shivering) Northampton and overhearing people talk. In fact the New England accent is actually much closer to an English accent than it is to a Californian accent – it’s just a very subtle difference in the vowels. Ironically, while I got a great review for my accent in The New Englander (and they should know), I got poor reviews in the UK papers for sounding ‘too English’. You can’t win, can you?