The Elephant to Hollywood (27 page)

After
Deathtrap
, I went back to Beverly Hills for some time off. Shakira was loving the Hollywood life and with Natasha happy at a wonderful school, Marymount, in Westwood nearby, we were delighted to take a break and just enjoy ourselves. I became a sort of unpaid social ambassador and among other events, hosted a dinner for Princess Michael of Kent at Morton’s, the newest, hottest restaurant in LA, as well as being roped in whenever other visiting royalty came to town. My agent, Sue Mengers – who was besotted by the British royal family – was chosen to give a dinner for Princess Margaret and invited me as a ‘safe’ dinner party guest. Sue, truly one of Hollywood’s toughest dealmakers, was so overcome by the proximity of royalty that she nearly collapsed with nerves on the night, but she needn’t have worried. The stars all turned out – for Sue, as much as for Princess Margaret – including Clint Eastwood, Jack Nicholson, Barbra Streisand and (apparently by special request) Barry Manilow, and the evening was a huge success.

I can’t have disgraced myself on that occasion, because I found myself wheeled out when the Queen visited LA. It was a very grand affair, held at the Twentieth Century Fox studios, with the British Hollywood contingent lined up on a dais either side of the Queen and the rest of Hollywood on tables below. The evening had been financed by a multi-millionaire car dealer who, as a reward, got to sit on one side of the Queen, while the director, ex-husband of Vanessa Redgrave and father of Natasha and Joely Richardson, Tony Richardson, sat on the other. The Queen seemed happy enough chatting to Tony, who always had a great fund of stories, but she was obviously finding it harder going with the car-dealer. I was sitting on his other side and I sympathised . . . It was not long before I heard an unmistakeable voice. ‘Mr Caine!’ There, peeping round the side of the tongue-tied car-dealer, was the Queen. ‘Mr Caine!’ she said again. ‘Yes, Your Majesty,’ I replied, hoping that was the right way to address a sovereign. ‘Do you know any good jokes?’ she asked. ‘I do, ma’am,’ I said, ‘but I’m not sure they would be suitable . . .’ ‘Well, why not have a go?’ she suggested with a twinkle. ‘And then I’ll tell you one.’ Not sure whether or not I was risking extradition and a spell in the Tower of London, I embarked on a story about a four-legged chicken, which seemed to go down very well – and we spent the rest of the evening swapping jokes. Of course if I passed on the ones she told me I might very well end up in the Tower, so I won’t, but I can tell you that the Queen has a great sense of humour!

While I might have been enjoying a reputation as a bit of a comedian off-screen in Hollywood, most of the films I had starred in over the previous few years were not at all funny. By the time we’d finished
Deathtrap
I was beginning to long for a really good comedy – and when it came, it was worth the wait.

12

Oscar Nights

I am often asked which of my films has come closest to my own ideal of performance and I always answer,
Educating Rita
. To me,
Educating Rita
is the most perfect performance I could give of a character who was as far away from me as you could possibly get and of all the films I have ever been in, I think it may be the one I am most proud of.

I’m proud of it, too, because taking the part wasn’t immediately the most obvious thing for me to do – for a start it involved turning down a film co-starring Sally Field, who had just won an Oscar for
Norma Rae
, in favour of playing opposite Julie Walters who had never appeared in a film at all. But the director was Lewis Gilbert, director of
Alfie
, and the screenplay was by Willy Russell, who had adapted it from his own novel and play and he had opened the play out so that the back-story of the two characters is played out on screen. The story was also very close to my heart, because although it was a comedy, it was the story of the late flowering of a woman who has had few opportunities in life, and it carries a strong message about class and education. It’s rare, too, to find something in cinema that is deeply written enough for the characters to change each other the way Frank Bryant and Rita do: they have a profound effect on each other. And when I look back at my own films, the ones that stand out for me in terms of character development like this are all films that began in the theatre:
Alfie, Sleuth, California Suite
and
Deathtrap
.

While I could appreciate the strengths of the script, taking on the character of an overweight, alcoholic professor was a real challenge for me. To help get into the role, I grew a shaggy beard and put on about thirty pounds and called on every nuance of alcoholic behaviour I could recall. It would have been easy to play the part the way Rex Harrison played Professor Higgins in
My Fair Lady
– but I saw Dr Frank Bryant as far less attractive and more vulnerable than that and went back to Emil Jannings’s performance as the ugly professor who nurses an unrequited love for Marlene Dietrich in
The Blue Angel
, for inspiration. I became so immersed in the part and what I imagined to be the ‘type’, that I felt as if I had known academics all my life. On our first day’s shooting in the idyllic grounds of Trinity College, Dublin, I found myself hailing a familiar figure, overweight and with a straggly beard, shambling across College Green, convinced he was an old friend. As he got closer, I realised I didn’t know him from Adam, but I reckoned I did know exactly what he did . . . ‘Excuse me,’ I said, when he got near enough, ‘you’re not a professor of English by any chance, are you?’ He stopped, swaying a bit, perhaps from the effects of the previous night or perhaps from the weight of the case of red wine he was carrying, and said, amazed, ‘How on earth did you know that?’ ‘Oh,’ I shrugged. ‘Just a lucky guess.’

Julie Walters was brilliant. Of course she had already done a lot of television and had played Rita in the West End stage play, but it was her first ever movie, although you would never have known it – she was a completely instinctive film actress. Like John Huston, Lewis Gilbert was a hands-off director and believed in letting the actors get on with it. A measured man, he was nevertheless obviously pleased at the way the filming was going and one day he said to me – just as he had fifteen years before with
Alfie
– that he thought both Julie and I would be nominated for an Academy Award for our roles in the movie. And just as he had been fifteen years previously with
Alfie
, he was right.

For
Alfie
, I had had the misfortune to be up against my friend the great actor Paul Scofield who had been nominated in the Best Actor category for his role as Sir Thomas More in
A Man for All Seasons
. I had seen his performance and thought it was brilliant and realised I had no chance of winning with
Alfie
so I didn’t turn up. The next time I was nominated was for
Sleuth
in 1973, again for Best Actor, but my co-star Laurence Olivier was also nominated for his role in
Sleuth
, so we had cut our own chances in half from the start. On that occasion I decided to go to the ceremony anyway because I had never been and I thought it might be fun. Big mistake. For a start, in a moment of madness I’d agreed to host a quarter of the ceremony, with Carol Burnett, Charlton Heston and Rock Hudson doing the other three quarters.

Presenting the Oscars was the most nerve-wracking job I have ever done in show business. It’s very much a live show: they have comedy writers waiting in the wings and as you come off between presentations they hand you an appropriate gag to tell. As if that wasn’t bad enough, it was destined to get even more stressful when it got to the Best Actor nominations. Marlon Brando won it for
The Godfather
, but – as we all knew he would – he refused to accept it and sent a Native American girl called Sacheen Littlefeather on his behalf, to read a fifteen-page speech protesting at the treatment of Native Americans by the film and television industry. The producer of the show had told her beforehand that she would be slung off if she spoke for more than forty-five seconds so she restricted herself to a short speech – which got quite a few boos – and read Brando’s letter to the press afterwards. I think that any gesture in a good cause is admirable, but I would have been more impressed if Marlon had turned down his first Oscar, not his second. It turned out that the young lady’s name was in fact Marie Cruz, that she was an actress whose mother was Caucasian, and that three months after the Oscar ceremony she posed for
Playboy
magazine. Of course it doesn’t invalidate the cause, and Sacheen Littlefeather continues to work as an activist today, but it does show you, yet again, that Hollywood is never quite what you think it is!

Littlefeather’s performance that night certainly caused consternation backstage. I was standing there with everyone else while it was going on, waiting for the finale, which was to be John Wayne leading the entire cast in singing ‘You Oughta Be in Pictures’. By the time we got on, everything was a bit chaotic: no one knew the words and John Wayne couldn’t sing in tune anyway. I was so embarrassed that I started to edge towards the back of the stage. I had been talking to Clint Eastwood, who had just been presenting an award, and he felt the same so he edged back with me. The problem is that we both edged back so far we fell off. It wasn’t far, and neither of us was hurt, but we both became hysterical with laughter and couldn’t finish the song.

As Lewis Gilbert had predicted, I was nominated for Best Actor in
Educating Rita
in 1983 – as was Julie for Best Actress – but once again the odds were stacked against me, this time because, of the five nominees in my category, four were British: Tom Courtenay and Albert Finney in
The Dresser
, Tom Conti in
Reuben, Reuben
and of course me. The only American in the running was Robert Duvall in
Tender Mercies
– he was brilliant as a burnt-out country singer, but I suspect he would still have won even if he hadn’t been.

And I was in for an agonisingly long wait to find out. The Academy Awards ceremony is a tense and very long evening. It starts very early, at around five o’clock in the afternoon so that it makes prime-time TV on the east coast, which means that you have to set off for the venue at about three-thirty because of the appalling traffic. It seems incongruous to have to put on evening dress in the middle of the day and of course you know you’re going to have to wait until nearly midnight for any food, so although it may all look glamorous, the reality is that there’s a great deal of hanging about. And of course as soon as you get inside the theatre you know what the likelihood of winning is: if you are seated on the aisle or near the front, then it’s clear you are in with a chance. If you are on the inside of a row, the chances are you’re not. I had already decided that I wasn’t going to win for
Educating Rita
, but as soon as I was shown to my seat, halfway back, and looked over to see Robert Duvall sitting bang in the front row, I started practising my gallant loser’s smile. I could see that Shirley Maclaine was in pole position for
Terms of Endearment
, too, so it wasn’t a wild guess to make that Julie Walters had also been unlucky for Best Actress.

Tedious though all the hanging about might be, the annual Academy Awards are of course the most important fixtures in the Hollywood calendar and have been since they started, back on 16 May 1929, in the Hotel Roosevelt on Hollywood Boulevard, when they were hosted by Douglas Fairbanks Senior (not Junior) and by William C., rather than Cecil B., (he was his older brother) DeMille.  It has been held in many places over the years – each time I was nominated we seemed to land up at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion – until it was found a permanent home at the Kodak Theatre, on Hollywood Boulevard, back where it started. The theatre was opened on 1 November 2001 and the first Oscar ceremony that took place there was in March 2002 – so although Hollywood itself has lost most of its major studios, it still hosts this iconic Hollywood event.

Perhaps the most iconic event in the Hollywood
social
calendar and certainly the aspect of the whole Academy Award business I enjoyed the most – was for years Swifty Lazar’s Oscar party. Along with the other two top parties, media mogul Barry Diller’s lunch and the late Hollywood agent Ed Limato’s dinner, Swifty’s party ranked as the place to be and to be seen. Swifty’s Oscar parties were real high-octane affairs held first of all at the Bistro restaurant and then at Wolfgang Puck’s Spago. Swifty’s party may have been the hot ticket, but you could find yourself seated at the back of the restaurant in ‘Siberia’ if he didn’t like you or think you mattered, and he had a very keen sense of priority. He once invited me to dinner and I had to turn him down because I was already having dinner with someone else. When I told him who it was he looked at me, rather disappointed. ‘He’s not a dinner, Michael,’ he said, ‘he’s a lunch!’ So sitting at the front of Spago at Swifty’s Oscar parties were the ‘dinners’ – the ‘lunches’ were at the back . . . There’s always been a close connection between the Oscars and restaurants – the Oscar statuette itself was designed by one of MGM’s greatest art directors, Cedric Gibbons, who apparently did the first drawing of it on a tablecloth at one of Hollywood’s most iconic restaurants in the Twenties, the Brown Derby.