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Auditioning for Life
“All I ever wanted for you was to go out in the world and chase your dreams. Find adventure, fall in love, take risks. That’s all I wanted for you.”
Mr. Morgan’s Last Love, 2013
FOR THE FIRST NINE years of my professional acting career, it felt more like purgatory than paradise. I never fell out of love with acting—and I never have. But I struggled to make what I loved pay the bills. Every small success seemed to be followed by two desperately disappointing failures (a pattern that some might argue I continued to follow through my whole career).
By the time I was thirty years old, I must have done seven or eight hundred auditions, and played more than a hundred different parts in repertory theatre, another hundred small parts on TV, thirty one-line movie roles and a couple of walk-on parts in the West End.
Did I get good at auditioning? Or did I just do so much of it that I was bound to catch a break? I don’t know. Here’s what I do know about auditions, though. And don’t take it too literally. If you’re an actor and you really do have an audition, then great. But what goes for an audition goes for any area of life you want to impress in. There are a lot of situations in life where you have to put yourself out there to get something you want.
You are always auditioning
If you only think you’re auditioning when you’re in the room with the casting director, you’re missing half of it. You’re auditioning when you’re checking in with the receptionist, when you’re sitting in the waiting area, when you’re grabbing a cup of coffee.
In fact, whenever you’re in any public space, you’re auditioning. You never know who’s watching your performance. At the gym? You’re being auditioned by your instructor. He knows that the guy sweating away on the next bike has a flat share with an up-and-coming script writer. Walking your dog? That woman with the out-of-control Border Collie is checking you out. She’s an associate producer for a major production company. Trying to decide whether to intervene in a worrying altercation on the top deck of the bus? The frightened young bus driver, whose career is about to take a sharp turn upwards, will always remember that day.
This may all sound far-fetched but I can assure you it’s not. My friend Sean Connery had never acted a day in his life until he got discovered lifting weights in a gym by a casting director looking for some slightly more convincing sailors than the usual chorus line for South Pacific. When I was shooting the comedy-heist Gambit with Shirley MacLaine, Universal had just started its famous studio tours, and in those days the tourists were allowed onto the actual sets. Every day a tour bus would pull up, tourists would pile out and the driver would try to convince any actors who hadn’t scurried out of sight, like gazelles on a safari, to sign autographs.
One driver was particularly clever at timing his stops. It was annoying, but I also admired his initiative. I knew he had a job to do and my better nature prevailed. I decided to make him look good and, instead of trying to avoid his tour party, I signed every autograph and posed for every picture, and got to know him a little. And who did the bus driver turn out to be? Mike Ovitz, then a student but later the founder, then chairman, of CAA, the world’s leading talent agency and one of the most powerful people in Hollywood. And when, working as a doorman at a dodgy hotel in Victoria, I rescued a frightened prostitute from the attentions of a drunk and violent punter (I knocked him out but forgot about his five friends, who proceeded to return the favour), who could have known that the hotel owner’s son, Barry Krost, would become a Hollywood agent and a great friend, who would, years later, put together the deal to make Get Carter?
Not an actor? Doesn’t matter. Whatever your role is, perform it as though the girl on the checkout, the young woman making your coffee, or, yes, even the guy at the other end of the line trying to fix your computer, is your dream boss, dream date, dream client. It will make you a better person. And sometimes, just sometimes, they really are.
Know what you convey
If you are always putting yourself out there, always alert to a possible opening, always focused on your goal, always performing, that’s a start. But do you know what other people are seeing when they watch your performance? Do you have a good sense of what you convey? Do you know your strengths, and play them up?
I was a Cockney lad and I knew nobody was going to look at me and see an actor, so I decided to invent myself and create a readily recognisable image. It started with the glasses. No aspiring actors wore glasses back then, but I actually needed them to see, so I decided I would be the actor who wore glasses. Great big black ones so you couldn’t miss them. Then David Bailey took a brilliant photo of me, with my big black glasses on and a cigarette dangling from my mouth. It wouldn’t be now, but in those days that was considered the height of cool. I became the cool working-class actor who wore glasses. Most importantly though, word got around that I was hard-working and reliable. I was that easy-to-work-with cool working-class guy in glasses. It was the truth but I tended it and played up to it, so nobody could miss it.
Later on, I wanted people to see beyond the Cockney (though I tried to hang on to the cool). I kept reinventing myself, kept reassessing my strengths. Maybe you’re trying to get noticed at work. Maybe you’re trying to get noticed by a special someone. Whatever your walk of life, at work or in your personal life, don’t let your image imprison you. Don’t let how others see you decide what you can be. But be realistic: know what you convey, and use that to your advantage.
You never know where your break will come from
There is no one sure route to success. No single rule to follow, no single book to read, no one bus stop to get spotted at. Instead success comes, for the lucky few it comes to, from a magical mix of talent, hard work, determination and sheer dumb luck. You never know where your break will come from so you have to be on high alert for it all the time. And don’t expect it to look like a bolt from the blue. Big breaks are rare. Much more common is a series of little breaks, each one a small step on the staircase to success.
My first crucial break came from a little old man in a butter factory. When I came out of the army I was more determined than ever to follow my dream of being an actor, but I had no idea how to go about it. I sat around my parents’ prefab, getting underfoot and trying to work out how to get onto the first rung of a non-existent ladder. After a while I realised I had to get a job and, since opportunities were few and far between, I accepted that my first step to stardom would have to be a job mixing butter.
One day I was heaving crates of butter into the vat, thinking this wasn’t much improvement on heaving crates of cold fish, like my father, and the old man working alongside me said, “What the hell are you doing here? A young lad like you. What is it you want to be?”
And I told him. “Well,” I said, “I want to be an actor.” I braced myself for the usual response but instead of cracking up he just nodded, like this was a normal thing for someone like me to want. “But I don’t know how,” I said. I had never even heard of RADA (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) or the Actors Studio, never mind knowing anything about how to get there.
“Well,” the old man said, “I’m going to tell you.” I looked at him in astonishment.
“You want to get the Stage,” he said. “Go down to Solosy’s, the newsagent on the Charing Cross Road. They stock it. Look at the back page. That’s where they advertise for actors.” He told me that his daughter was a semi-professional singer and got a lot of work that way.
That Saturday I was outside Solosy’s when it opened. I bought the Stage and there on the back page was an advert for an assistant stage manager (plus minor acting roles) with a small repertory theatre company in Horsham, Sussex. Applicants should send a photo.
The old man in the butter factory was probably just passing the time of day but he had given me a piece of advice I desperately needed and set me on my way. It was my first big break and it led me to my first and perhaps my easiest ever audition, down i
n Horsham, one week later.
I was a twenty-year-old strapping ex-soldier, six foot two with curly blond hair and a tan I had acquired on the boat back from Korea; in the photo I’d hastily had taken, I appeared to be wearing lipstick. The owner of the company, Mr. Alwyn D. Fox, was about fifty years old, small and camp. He stood with one hand on his hip and the other on his face, looked me over in the way I was used to looking over girls and screamed, “Edgar!” In came Edgar, a smaller, camper, more delicate version of Mr. Fox. Edgar stood next to Mr. Fox and adopted an identical pose. “Will he do, do you think?”
“Mm,” said Edgar finally. “He’ll do.”
My worst audition? From a large and strong field of competitors I would have to pick my audition for the theatre play of Alfie in 1963. I wanted it too much and I got very nervous because of that and because I was overawed by being in the West End. I completely screwed up the line. So that was it. I was distraught. The man they cast was a wonderful classical actor called John Neville, a lovely guy with the most beautiful classical voice. He sounded like John Gielgud.
Instead my incomparable agent Dennis Selinger persuaded me to take a much less sought-after part as the lead in a cheap but very good theatre production of a Theatre of the Absurd play called Next Time I’ll Sing to You, about a man who didn’t speak for forty-two years. It wasn’t Alfie and the pay was terrible, but Dennis’s calculation was that this play would attract critical attention and get me noticed. As usual he was absolutely right.
One night the film star and movie producer Stanley Baker was in the audience. He knew me a little from when I had played a bit part with eight lines to say in a movie called A Hill in Korea in 1956. Stanley came to see me backstage after the show and asked me whether I would like to screen test for the part of an insubordinate but heroic Cockney, Private Henry Hook, in his movie Zulu, about the 1879 battle of Rorke’s Drift between the British Army and the Zulu nation. I had only played one-day parts in movies before: this was an enormous opportunity for me.
But when I turned up at the Prince of Wales Theatre the next morning, the director, Cy Endfield, was apologetic. He had already given the part to my friend James Booth, who, I had to admit, was an excellent choice. It was a punch to the gut but by now I had pretty strong gut muscles from all the previous punches I’d taken. I held myself together and walked away. And that was when I got my break.
The bar at the Prince of Wales Theatre is very long, which is fortunate for me because that’s how I became a movie star. Just as I had reached the end of it and was about to get out of there, and go away to curl up and quietly die, Cy called me back.
Until that point in my career, everybody in the business used to say, “Oh, Michael Caine. He’s no leading man, of course, he’s a Cockney, but if you have a juicy little Cockney role he’ll do you a lovely job with it.” I’d cultivated the image and it had its uses, but it was holding me back.
But Cy said, “Michael, you don’t look like a Cockney, you look like an officer. Can you do a posh British accent?” I told him I’d been in rep, doing fifty plays a year and every accent from peasant to baronet. “That’s the easiest one of all,” I said, fingers crossed behind my back.
“Will you come and do a screen test with Stanley on Friday?” asked Cy.
“Yes,” I said, to the most unnecessary question I had ever been asked.
A screen test is the movie industry’s own special and terrifying way of assessing your on-camera potential because it’s impossible to judge just by looking at someone. You have to put them to work in front of a camera and see whether the magic happens: whether millions of people are going to want to spend their time and their money listening to that voice, watching that face. They put the camera in your face and do a close-up. They make you turn sideways for a profile. They give you a key scene of tricky dialogue and have you play it with another actor reading in the other parts. It all comes down to what you look like on camera, how your voice sounds, how relaxed and natural you seem and whether you have that indescribable, unlearnable, instantly recognisable thing we call star quality. And if you’ve got it, you’ve got it.
Beyond chasing Chinese soldiers through no man’s land, my screen test for the part of the aristocratic and effete Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead in Zulu was the single most nerve-racking thing I’ve ever done. Stanley and Cy could not have been kinder or more patient but it was a complete disaster. I did not ooze star quality. I oozed sweat, panic and abject terror.
That weekend Cy came up to me at a party. “I’ve seen the test,” he told me. “And it’s the worst I’ve ever seen.” Time to tense those stomach muscles again. “But I don’t know, Michael, I think there’s something there. You’ve got the part.” He walked away and, before I could instruct my stomach muscles to stand down, I had thrown up all over my shoes.
I felt like a champion, despite my ruined shoes. Somehow, I had kept riding the punches. It’s the same in any enterprise, whatever you’re trying to accomplish. You never know when your moment will arrive, and you don’t want to be on the floor and out for the count when it does.
Things were finally looking up. I’d done a starring role in a TV play, a starring theatre role, and now I had a big movie role. But it took another year, and the release of Zulu, for me to catch my next break.
It was 1964 and London was in full swing. Stars were falling from the skies like rain. I was having dinner with my friend Terence Stamp in the Pickwick, a club-cum-restaurant on Great Newport Street that always seemed to be full of beautiful and talented people, and was the “in” place at the time, when a waiter came over and gave me a piece of paper. It was a note from the Bond film producer Harry Saltzman, asking me to go and have coffee with him and his family when I’d finished my meal. My friend Sean Connery was playing Bond by this time: he was the only Brit of my generation to have made it in Hollywood. I thought I was going to get a part in a James Bond film.
I joined Harry at his table, my heart beating wildly. His wife told me that they had just come from seeing Zulu, then Harry announced, “We all agreed you could be a big star.”
I blushed and my heart beat even faster. I maybe managed to blurt out, “Thank you.”
Harry abruptly changed topic. Had I read a book by Len Deighton called The Ipcress File?
“Yes,” I said, which was true—I was in the middle of reading it right then. It was about a spy, but the spy was the opposite of James Bond. He was ordinary and unglamorous. I was made for the part.
“I’ve just bought the movie rights to it and I’d like you to play the lead.”
“Yes,” I managed, trying to look as though I got offers like that every day.
“And would you like a seven-year contract?”
“Yes,” I managed again. In a daze I stumbled back to my table and tried to explain what had happened to an astonished Terry. In the ten minutes I had been gone I had scored my first lead role in a movie and, not that I knew it then, it was the role that made me into a British—though not yet a Hollywood—star.
Life offers you breaks all the time. Occasionally they’re big movie-mogul-in-a-restaurant–style breaks. More often they are lower-key, more subtle. Be ready. Recognise them. Grab them. Use them.
Be lucky: be prepared
Admittedly, my timing could not have been better. The late 1950s and early 1960s were a vibrant, exciting time to be young and working-class in Britain. My generation was inventing a whole new technicolour world, overturning the dull and dreary post-war status quo, and there were opportunities for people like me—not just in theatre and film, but in fashion, music, art, food, literature, politics—that there had never been before.
Young people, whose childhoods had been the depression, the Blitz, conscription and rationing, were listening to Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union, telling them that he had an atomic bomb and we could all be dead in four minutes, and deciding they might as well have a good time. The working class was standing up and saying, “We are here, this is ou
r society, and we’re not going away.” And that’s how and why the sixties were born. Everyone I knew seemed to become a household name.
If you danced at the Ad Lib club just behind the Empire Cinema on Leicester Square, as I did, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles might be grooving around next to you. David Bailey would be in the corner, romancing Jean Shrimpton. In another corner Roman Polanski was with Sharon Tate.
My flatmate was Terence Stamp. My barber was Vidal Sassoon. My tailor was Douglas Hayward, the tailor to the 1960s and such a star in his field that he ended up making Ralph Lauren’s suits. When I played a bit part in Dixon of Dock Green I was paired with an unknown actor called Donald Sutherland. When I understudied another unknown actor making his West End debut in one of the first British plays about ordinary soldiers, Willis Hall’s The Long and the Short and the Tall, it was Peter O’Toole. The play made him a star and I took it on tour while he went off to become T. E. Lawrence in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, the start of a towering theatrical and movie-making career.
Even the failed actors became household names. When the rest of us were still out of work and broke, we used to pass the time in the basement café of the Arts Theatre, just off Leicester Square. They would let you sit there all day over one cup of tea. One afternoon I was sitting in this warm haven for the destitute with two other broke actor friends. One of them, John, was particularly down. He had just been fired from a very low-standard repertory theatre and was humiliated and unhappy. He announced that he was going to give it all up and had already written a play instead. “What’s it called?” I asked.
Blowing the Bloody Doors Off Page 3
