The Elephant to Hollywood (34 page)

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?

Actually, sometimes you can – because I was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award in 1999 for my role in
Cider House
. So – great work with great people during the week, one of my favourite cities, New York, with my wife at the weekends, and an Oscar nomination! I had learnt my lesson with my previous Oscar and this time I did turn up for the Awards. And just as well I did – because I got a long, standing ovation when I won. Time is always the big issue at the Academy Awards and the winner’s acceptance speech is always under threat from the music . . . When the producer thinks you have gone on long enough he starts the music softly and gradually increases the volume until the audience can hardly hear you say goodnight. I had picked out the other nominees in my category for a remark – Tom Cruise, Jude Law, Michael Clarke Duncan and Haley Joel Osment – and I was aware I was going on a bit long. I needed another minute, so I looked over at the wings to check with Dick Zanuck who was producing that year. He gave me a smile and a thumbs-up and I got that extra minute – which is gold dust in an Academy speech.

So there I was, a second Academy Award, another role in a great movie – life, I felt, was great again.

17

Home

There’s a line in
The Man Who Would Be King
that I’ve always thought sums up my view of life. I have to ask Daniel Dravitt (Sean Connery) to tell someone that ‘Peachy’s gone south for the winter.’ And that’s always been my creed – Peachy’s gone south for the bloody winter . . . It’s always worked perfectly for us, so, once again, after the Oscars we went back to our idyllic winter sojourn in Miami. As Shakira and I strolled down Lincoln Road to visit our restaurant the South Beach Brasserie, we became aware of a different atmosphere around the place and it gradually dawned on us that the vast majority of people who were walking round and sitting outside the cafés enjoying the sunshine like us, were gay men. There had always been gay men in South Beach, but it looked as if the closets were all empty and there was nobody left in South Beach to come out! After a lifetime in theatre and movies I was hardly unused to this – and two of my closest friends are gay – but I had never encountered so many gay men en masse and we came to the conclusion that we were living in a gay ghetto. As I have said, I am completely comfortable with anyone’s sexuality, gay or straight, but I don’t think living in any kind of ghetto is a good idea – even for the people who created it – and for an outsider it’s impossible. I invited my two gay friends down for the weekend to stay and even they hated it.

I was conscious, too, of the vicious swathe the HIV virus had cut through the gay community elsewhere, and was surprised to see such a fit – and promiscuous – group in Miami. Fit, bronzed men, their bodies tuned like bodybuilders, were everywhere – and they seemed to be oblivious to the dangers of the virus. One of my friends there, a photographer who was gay, was also HIV positive and had looked very ill when I had seen him last . . . I barely recognised him when I bumped into him on our next visit: he was tanned, fit and muscular. He explained the mystery to me over dinner. Whether or not it was true, he and many of his friends believed that steroids held back the effects of the virus, so they were all pumped and ready to go. Their attitude, he explained, was that they had HIV – and full-blown AIDS in many cases – and they were going to die young, so they were making the best of it. As we left the restaurant he smiled and shook my hand. ‘It’s fun in the sun ’til you’re done, hun,’ he said as he walked away. I knew I would never see him again.

Lincoln Road became a flamboyant nightly parade of happy people either flaunting their love or looking for it. Those on steroids looked a bit like Arnold Schwarzenegger balloons waiting for the pin prick of AIDS to blow them back to reality: I have never seen so many sick people so happy. Eventually, though, the sadness of it all got to us and we decided to sell up, pack up and go home. As we drove back once again over the MacArthur Causeway, what we saw as we looked back seemed like the most glamorous hospice in the world.

Back home in England, miracles were on their way – although, of course, life never goes quite to plan . . . we’d managed to sell our house in Oxfordshire before we had found another one we wanted to live in, so we stored our furniture and moved into the flat in Chelsea Harbour. After the space of Rectory Farm it felt very cramped and, Shakira informed me, I paced round the flat like a caged animal. She was right; that was just what I felt like. In the meantime I looked at every estate agent’s brochure in the country, including one for a two-hundred-year-old barn in Surrey, which wouldn’t be ready for another year, so I threw that one away.

I continued my search in vain for another couple of weeks until my secretary Tricia turned up one day with a cutting from
The Times
. ‘Here’s one you might like,’ she said, and handed it to me. It was an advert for the barn conversion job I had already discarded. ‘I’ve seen it,’ I told her and threw it in the wastepaper basket again. She was used to me, so she shrugged and we got on with some other work.