The Elephant to Hollywood (33 page)

Although
Blood and Wine
was never a big hit with the public, it was a big hit with me. Filming was suddenly fun again and there was a whole new bunch of talented young actors to get to know – Jennifer Lopez, Heath Ledger, Sandra Bullock, Christian Bale, Charlize Theron, Scarlett Johansson to name but a few . . . It was the beginning of an exciting new phase of my life – slower to take off than I’d have liked, but I was definitely on my way back!

16

Back in the Game

Back in England, the weather was terrible and I found that my house had moved even further away from London over the previous few years. It had taken us fifty minutes to get from London when we first moved there, but now the traffic was so bad it was taking me an hour and a half. I was starting a new professional life – maybe, I thought, it was also time to start a new home life? And so I began looking for a new house and a new movie at the same time.

It would take a while to find the new house, but the movie came quite quickly. I had sifted through the pile of post when I got home to find the usual bundle of crap scripts with fingerprints and coffee stains all over them from the other actors who had turned them down – but among them was a small gem. It wasn’t a big movie – it wasn’t even really a movie as I would have defined one – it was a made-for-TV film called
The Mandela Story
, which told the story of the collapse of apartheid in South Africa and the election of Mandela as President. And my old friend Sidney Poitier was, as they say in Hollywood, already ‘attached’ to play Nelson Mandela. I read the script with great excitement. I would be playing South Africa’s last president under the apartheid system, President de Klerk. It would be a challenge – it always is, playing a real person – but I felt it would be a worthwhile one and we packed our bags for Cape Town.

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 producer 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.