She had excellent instincts about people. She knew who was a kind person and who could be trusted. And she knew that that was what was important about a person. I remember one time in the 1970s, at a party at my house that was bursting with glamorous, successful people—Peter Sellers and Liza Minnelli were there, Sean Connery, Nanette Newman, Roger Moore—my mother quietly asked me, “Who’s that over there?”
I glanced across the room, packed with stars, to where she was looking and said, “That’s a very famous actress, Mum. She’s very famous.” And I told my mum the actress’s name. She was as famous as you can get, very beautiful, vivacious, the life and soul of the party.
“I don’t like her,” said Mum, pursing her lips. “I really don’t like her.”
“Why, Mum?” I said.
And my mum said, “She’s spoken to everyone in this room except the old lady: me. She’s not spoken to anyone old.”
It’s easy to get swept off your feet with the glamour of it all, unless you have some sensible people keeping you grounded.
More simply, and more importantly, my mother gave me and both of my brothers (maybe the other two even a little bit more than me because I could usually look after myself) uncomplicated, unconditional, devoted love. So much so that what I remember most clearly about my childhood Christmases is not that my father was away fighting the war, or that there were precious few presents; what I remember is my mother going at a hard-boiled sweet—the last of our Christmas rations—with a carving knife, trying to cut it in half so that neither son should feel favoured over the other. When the knife slipped and she gouged out a piece of her thumb, she disappeared for a minute, came back with it bandaged and went back to sawing away until that sweet finally surrendered to her onslaught. (My father loved me, too, but he wasn’t as good at showing it.)
When you have been shown love, you can show it to others. At the beginning of her life, when I was young and broke and desperate, I wasn’t always the father I wanted to be to my first daughter, Dominique. But what I have done right, as a father to Dominique and later to my second daughter Natasha, and as a grandfather to three wonderful grandchildren, I learnt from Mum and the way she offered all her three sons unconditional, unjudgemental, unfailing love.
I would even say that my mother, in a way, gave me my wife of forty-five years, Shakira. I’ve told the story many times of how I first stumbled across, pursued and fell hopelessly in love with Shakira, and Shakira has begged me not to tell it again here. So if you don’t know this incredible, unlikely story of the greatest run of luck I ever had, I’m very sorry but you’ll have to find it somewhere else. But not so many people know the story of how this stunning, poised, intelligent woman fell for little old me. I had always assumed it was my smooth Cockney charm and suave good looks that had swept Shakira off her feet, until one day I was standing at the door eavesdropping on an interview my wife was doing for a newspaper. “What first attracted you to Michael?” the journalist asked, and I heard her reply, “It was the way he treated his mother.”
Most successful people will have a story to tell about a great teacher, and I am no exception. The headmistress at the village school I attended in Norfolk was an intimidating and fierce-looking woman, about sixty years old, called Miss Linton. She had an unusual haircut for a woman—similar to my father’s, I thought—was unmarried, smoked 100 cigarettes a day and was extremely tough with us children. Except that after a while her attitude towards me softened. She started to take a close interest in me, gave me special lessons, guided my reading, taught me to play poker to improve my maths and eventually got me through the scholarship exam for grammar school. I never saw her happier than the day she came rushing across the village green to tell me I had passed: the first child from the village school ever to do so.
Miss Linton was probably the first person I loved outside my own family. Initially strange and frightening, and ultimately an inspirational figure who changed the course of my life, she was an early study in character for me. Could she have guessed that the most important lesson she taught the boy she treated like a son was that people are not always as they first appear?
I got to grammar school but didn’t make the most of it. I hated the school I was sent to once the war was over (and I’m sure the feeling was mutual) and played truant whenever I could. My main education from that point forward came from two sources: books and the movies. Books like Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, and movies like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Maltese Falcon and The African Queen, directed by John Huston, allowed me to escape from the grim, depressing reality of everyday post-war life, and reassured me that the world was bigger than the few bits I could see over the rubble of the bombsites and through the thick London smog. I can’t recommend bunking off school to anyone who wants to get on in life, but if you are going to do it, you couldn’t find two more richly educational surrogates than the cinema and the public library.
The Elephant (which is what anyone local called the Elephant and Castle, ideally accompanied by a hard, unblinking stare for extra menace) was a tough neighbourhood. I learnt from an early age the importance of having friends who’ve got your back.
Down the Elephant in the 1950s the most dangerous gangs were the spivs, and after that, the Teddy Boys, who were the children of the spivs. These gangs were viciously violent, hot-tempered and dangerous. As a skinny pale fifteen-year-old what could I do? Round my way, if you were on your own you had no chance. I had to join a gang myself. In my gang we were mostly very funny and very calm. We didn’t go out looking for trouble.
I was reminded of this in 2009 when I was back in the Elephant, making a film called Harry Brown and getting to know some of the local young men, who started off hanging around the shoot and ended up actually in the movie, ably directed by talented young first-time director Daniel Barber. I was surprised and gratified that these lads were prepared to talk to an old man like me about their lives, and as they did, it dawned on me how much bleaker life had become on my home patch. Our prefab house had been small but what there was of it was ours: we had a little garden of our own, our own fence, our own front door. Behind it there had been a loving family and a decent education. These kids lived in dilapidated high-rise blocks full of dangerous corners and alleyways, many had difficult family backgrounds and had given up on school, and in place of the alcohol and fist-fights of my youth there were drugs, guns and knives. Worst of all, there was nothing for them to do and nowhere for them to go.
What a lot of people don’t realise is that young lads in gangs, we are not there to attack you. We are there, most of us, so that no one will attack us. Young people who join gangs are not bad lads: they are making a rational choice to protect themselves from harm.
I was also, without really knowing it, gaining some useful skills. I was learning to get along by performing: acting like I was tough and wasn’t afraid, when I was actually always afraid and not tough at all. And I was learning to watch and listen: to observe people carefully for a fast take on their character and mood. Malevolent? Trustworthy? Volatile?
My gang dropped me during my years as an out-of-work actor: I couldn’t afford to get my round in the pub, and if I was an actor I was probably a poof, so I was out. By then I was part of a new gang of other out-of-work actors, writers and musicians. No one was coming at us with knives but we had each other’s backs in different ways. Now, in my ninth decade, my friends are dropping like flies, and having their back more often than not means turning up to their memorial. The point is, whether you call them a gang, your mates or your comrades-in-arms, no one gets very far without friends—people who like you for who you really are, and who have your back. (Or if they do, they don’t have much fun on the way.)
At the age of eighteen, along with all the other kids in my gang, I was called up for two years of National Service. In my case this meant two years as an infantryman in the British Army.
If my mother had start
ed to make me into a man when my father went off to fight in the Second World War, and my teenage years of weaving a safe path through the Elephant had added street smarts, then National Service finished the job when it sent me off to fight in the Korean War. National Service was, at the time, the worst experience of my life. In the warm comfort of hindsight, it was still the worst bloody experience of my life up to that point and at any time since. But I can also see that it was one of the most valuable.
Basic training was an exercise in physical and mental mortification. I don’t remember ever walking anywhere during those first eight weeks: we ran, we hauled ourselves around assault courses, we marched, we drilled, we ran some more. If we were awake and we weren’t doing any of those things, we were cleaning and polishing our ill-fitting uniforms and obsolete bits of kit. They might not fit, they might malfunction, but at least they were spotless and gleaming. We were strongly encouraged to do all of this by the humourless roaring sergeants, whose weary task it was to toughen up this assorted ragbag of Britain’s finest.
As part of the Allied occupation force in post-war Germany, I was on almost continuous punishment duty for the offence of not being illiterate, which rare accomplishment I used to learn the army rules and, more to the point, how far we could push things and still stay within them. My life was made a misery with peeling potatoes, doing guard duty while everyone else went into town, and once being made to scrape clean the floorboards of the guard room using a box of old-fashioned razor blades.
How I yearned for those potatoes and those razor blades as I sat in my First World War–style trench in Korea, accompanied by several hundred of the world’s most confident and ingenious rats, and facing off over the 38th Parallel around two million very pissed-off Chinese.
My fear, when I was sent on active service to Korea, was that I might be a coward. I might run away. I did believe several times that I might be about to die: on guard duty on my first night on the front line; under sniper fire; on encountering a six-foot snake. In those situations I found that I was not a coward. I was scared witless, but I was not a coward. No doubt that was partly my military training. And partly my tough bugger of a father, who, by teaching me boxing down on his knees, and ending every fight by knocking me over and announcing, “You’ve lost,” had always encouraged me to fight my corner. But I think it was something inside me as well. I just hadn’t known it was there.
One black, humid, mosquito-infested night, it was my turn to go out on patrol in no man’s land, with two mates and an officer. Halfway across the unoccupied territory, we smelt garlic, which struck terror into our hearts. The Chinese soldiers chewed garlic like the Americans chewed gum, and the smell was always the first sign you were in trouble. It took quite a lot of effort years later to eat food with garlic in it. It was the same with olive oil, which my mother used to put in our ears to get rid of wax. The idea of putting it on a salad and eating it was disgusting to me then, but not now. I’ve become civilised, and deaf.
Anyway, back to certain death. When my four-man patrol was ambushed in no man’s land that night, I experienced not fear but anger, white-hot anger, at the thought that I was going to be killed in this terrible stinking place for no good reason, before I’d even had the chance to live, before I had realised even one of my dreams. I decided that if I was going to die, I was going to take as many people as possible with me. I was going to fight my way out. The others agreed. We charged towards the enemy.
The enemy, it turned out, wasn’t there. We and they charged around each other all night, and eventually the four of us in my patrol found a safe route back to our line. Our faces were unrecognisable, puffed up with mosquito bites. We were ugly and exhausted. But that night has always been important to me. I had faced what I thought was certain death and not been a coward. And I had learnt something else about myself that would stay with me for the rest of my life: if anyone wants to come for me, they had better be prepared to pay the price, because I’ll be fighting as I go down. I don’t wish anyone any harm. But if you’re going to try to frighten me or threaten me—if you want to come for me—be ready to pay, because I’ll make it costly for you.
When our year in Korea was up, we marched out as our replacements were being marched in. They were nineteen years old—only a year younger than us—but as we marched past them, I looked into their faces, and I looked into my mates’ faces. We looked five years, maybe ten years older. We’d grown up. We’d been tested. We knew now what life was about. And me, I had faced death and I felt lucky to be alive, and more determined than ever to make something of my life.
What I learnt from National Service was: do anything to avoid being an infantry soldier in a war. Even if you’re lucky enough to survive unscathed it will be absolutely, unimaginably terrible. On the other hand, I have found it pretty easy to be happy since then: once you’ve been on manoeuvres in Korea, everything else seems like quite a lot of fun. The rest of my life, I’ve lived every bloody moment from the moment I open my eyes until the time my head hits the pillow.
War is terrible and disgusting, and I wouldn’t wish any young person to have to experience it. I wouldn’t ask anyone to go anywhere or do anything that would get them killed or wounded. But I do believe in the value of peacetime National Service. Six months of hard work and discipline—running miles in the pouring rain, assaulting assault courses, polishing filthy equipment to maniacal standards, following orders and learning how to defend your country—instil values and a sense of belonging that stay with you for the rest of your life. I know that makes me sound old-fashioned. But for young people now, with most decent jobs needing a good level of education, and with phones and iPads there to distract them all the time, I think discipline and a sense of purpose are more important than they have ever been.
Forget rich and famous: find what you love
This might sound funny coming from me. But to anyone who’s trying to become rich and famous, my advice is: don’t.
When I was a young lad that was never my goal. The screen idols I worshipped at the cinema every Saturday morning—Marlon Brando, Spencer Tracy, Cary Grant, Clark Gable and my biggest hero Humphrey Bogart—were handsome and beautiful with broad shoulders, sun tans and gleaming white teeth, the sophisticated movie-god occupants of a glamorous heaven called Hollywood, and I was a gangly working-class boy with a big nose.
With my appearance and my accent, I knew for sure I would never be a star. That world was distant, unreachable. In those days, in the 1940s and 1950s, your accent didn’t just tell where you came from, it told where you were going to, and if you had a Cockney accent like mine, that was nowhere.
I didn’t dream of becoming rich and famous. That wasn’t my goal. But I did, at a young age, find something I loved to do: acting. In a life full of good fortune this was the biggest piece of good luck I ever had.
I found acting through my other great love. Aged fourteen, spotty, skinny and horny, I saw a group of beautiful unattainable girls through a window at my youth club, Clubland, an incredible all-mod-cons facility in the Walworth Road built out of nothing and run by the Reverend Jimmy Butterworth. As I was gazing, rapt, at this gaggle of lovelies, the door I was leaning on fell open and I found myself making a perfect (and perfectly humiliating) pratfall entrance into the drama club. Once I’d pulled myself together it came to me in a flash. I had stumbled into a two-birds-with-one-stone situation. I could learn to act so that I could get to Hollywood, and in the meantime, perhaps if I played enough love scenes I might somehow get my first kiss. So I came to acting for all the wrong reasons, but once I’d found it, I never looked back.
Trying to describe why you love doing what you love doing is a bit like trying to describe why you love who you love, or why your favourite colour is blue. It feels obvious but also inexpressible why aquamarine is the most pleasing shade, and that your beloved is the most amazing person you have ever been lucky enough to meet. In the same way, to me it feels both unquestionably true and also inexplicable how
acting is the most fun you can have without breaking any laws.
In my very first role for the Clubland youth club, I played a robot who had one line. It was a modest role and one that the sarcastic and rather cruel reviewer noted I was well suited for. But I still remember the excitement of putting on the show, and the tremendous sense of achievement when it was all over. I got the same feelings in every show I put on, every movie I made. It’s about working together to create something. And it’s about communication and control. If I can say something and make an audience laugh, say something else and make them cry, it’s just a stunning sensation. If I can make an audience know about, or worry about, or love things they didn’t know about, or worry about, or love before—help them to discover life—that’s stunning to me too.
Plus, I couldn’t ever bleeding think of anything else I could do.
But I never set out to be rich and famous. Quite the opposite. Knowing I would never be a star, I just set out to enjoy myself and be the best actor I could possibly become in my own small world. Not a star, not richer or more famous than anyone else, just the best I could be. If rewards came, that would be wonderful, but I wasn’t doing it for that. I loved it, it was fun and it was better than working in a factory.
Forget rich and famous. It’s not a career. It is—for the tiny number of people who ever achieve it—the miraculous result of a lot of hard work combined with tremendous good luck. For very many people, it doesn’t even turn out to be all it’s cracked up to be. It’s not something to aim for.
Instead, my biggest piece of advice to anyone just starting out—or to anyone who feels like they’ve taken a wrong turn along the way—is this: find something you want to do and learn how to do it really well. Take what you’ve got and make the most of it. Learn how to do something. Whatever it is you would choose to do for nothing. Whatever it is that, when you’re doing it, makes you feel amazing and most yourself. Throw yourself into it. Challenge yourself to be the best you can be. We can’t all be famous actors. But if you can find something you love, and if that something will also pay the bills, you will be on your way to your own personal paradise.
Blowing the Bloody Doors Off Page 2
